clearing my game collection

For a long-time gamer, my game collection is not very big. I rarely sell games, because I find that troublesome. You need to take photos, count components, pack and post the games, or arrange to meet for COD. I'm too lazy to go through all that hassle. So my collection only grows and rarely shrinks. In 2020 I did one round of giving away games. I gave some to friends who were interested in the games. For some games, I feel if the chances of me playing them again are low, I'd rather give them to friends who would play them. An unplayed boardgame is a sad boardgame. In 2020 I also gave games away through a Malaysian Facebook community of boardgamers. The games I offered were all quickly claimed. I did have two conditions: you need to pick up the game yourself, and you will play it within a month and take photos of you playing it for me. I later realised that even making all those arrangements for people to come pick up the games was tiring. Many of those who took games did play them and send me photos. What was disappointing was some did not keep their word. I lost faith in humanity a little. So I no longer want to give games away to people I don't know. This time round, I made the first offer to friends, and they have claimed several titles. Of what remains that I want to get rid of, I will sell them as-and-when it's convenient for me, e.g. certain boardgame events when people can inspect and pay on the spot. I set a price not for the sake of making money. I just want people to appreciate the games. People have a bad habit of not valuing what they get for free. 

Many of the games I'm giving away or selling have been in my collection for many years. I feel a little sad to see them go, but I feel happy that they are going to people who will play them. 

 

Sat 16 Aug 2025 the Magic Rain team organised All Aboard Bites at Lalaport in Kuala Lumpur. Their flagship boardgame convention is All Aboard, and All Aboard Bites is a smaller scale public gaming event. It's a much more casual meetup. I went as a participant, just to play games. I brought some of my prototypes to be playtested. Several of the finalists of the Design and Play game design competition were there, and I played Twin Towers, Jam and Teh Tarik Game. I brought my own games (games I bought, not games I designed) - Yspahan and Municipium. I wanted to play them. However during the event whenever I was about to start a game, we usually had five players, but both these games support at most four. So I didn't manage to get them played. 

Of my own designs, I playtested Malaysian Holidays and Rebels of the Three Kingdoms. I continued playtesting the two-player variant of Malaysian Holidays. By now it is pretty stable, and I don't think I will make any more changes. It has remained the same after several playtesting sessions with different players. A slight downside is it is a little different from the 3- to 5-player game in how you choose cards. The holiday cards and taking a trip work the same way. Only the card choosing mechanism is different. 

This playtest session for Rebels of the Three Kingdoms was encouraging. When we were done and I started packing, the group asked to go again. That's a good sign. We had a dramatic end to our first game. In the late game, Kenny was the obvious leader, and no one wanted to team up with him because that would help him score points and reach the winning threshold. We all wanted to force him into the weaker alliance. When it was time to choose an alliance, he was completely isolated. We had a 4 vs 1 situation. Normally under such a situation the smaller team will lose. It's simply too big a gap. However, the four of us were careless and forgot one important detail - Xiahou Dun. This character, when facing an enemy alliance of double the size, helps his alliance win immediately. Kenny revealed his character, and it was Xiahou Dun. We should have been on the alert for this. When 4 of the 5 unused characters were revealed earlier that round, there was no Xiahou Dun, and we should have been wary that it might be in Kenny's hand. 

I received one good feedback from this playtest session of Rebels of the Three Kingdoms. One question raised by the playtesters was why Chen Gong? In history, Chen Gong was a strategist serving under Lu Bu. In the Three Kingdoms novel, he is a secondary character. I picked him to be one of the 10 characters in the game partly because I had Lu Bu, and partly because I was influenced by the Japanese manga Soten Koro / Beyond the Heavens. In the manga, Chen Gong still is a secondary character, but he left a lasting impression on me. Now I have decided to swap out Chen Gong, and swap in Zhou Yu. Chen Gong was character #1. From the gameplay perspective, when character #5 Sun Quan is in the same alliance as character #1, Sun Quan's strength would double to 10. Making Zhou Yu #1 would be perfect, because in Three Kingdoms, Zhou Yu was the genius military strategist who served under Zhou Yu, one of the three kings. Playtesting is super important because it helps you discover your blind spots. 

Sorry, Chen Gong

I made Zhou Yu a moustachioed guy

Recently I have been posting daily at my blog. I have been playing many new games on BoardGameArena.com, so there is a lot I can write about. All my posts are scheduled posts. Lately, at any time I probably have 6 to 10 posts in the queue to be published automatically. This post you are reading today was scheduled maybe a week ago. 

I write about every new game I play on BGA. Sometimes I play games I have played before. I don't write about those in detail, but I sometimes I share my new thoughts on them. 

My first play of Anachrony was with a physical copy. The mechas in the physical version are impressive. When playing on BGA, there is no more such visual impact. I did not find the game particularly interesting when I first played the physical copy. This second play hasn't changed my mind. I feel the game is complicated but I don't get much fun out of this complexity. I just find it tedious. Maybe this is a personal taste thing. 

Anachrony is worker placement game in which you collect resources and spend them to construct buildings and score points. This whole sentence sounds so generic and it can describe like half the heavy Eurogames we see nowadays. That basically sums up what I feel about the game. 

There is a more than 10 year gap since I last played Kingdom Builder. When the game was released, people paid attention because it was a design from Donald X Vaccarino, who designed Dominion, a genre-defining game. Kingdom Builder later won the 2012 Spiel des Jahres. I don't remember much about the game from when I played it many years ago. This probably means I didn't find it particularly interesting. However to my surprise I quite enjoyed my recent play. I had to relearn the game, exploring strategies, making mistakes and getting aha moments all over again. 

Every turn you must place 3 houses, but the terrain you can place on is determine by a card draw. There is randomness in this, and it seems you don't have much control. However you can actually put some thought into how you place your houses, so that no matter what terrain comes up next, you have something useful to do. So placing your houses actually takes some deep thought if you want to do well. This is certainly a much more strategic game than how simple a turn appears to be. 

Every game, out of the four scoring criteria, three are randomly drawn. Only castle scoring is fixed.

During the game, as you connect to towns, you gain special abilities that can be activated every turn. These can be very powerful. Some let you move houses (literally pick them up and put them somewhere else), some let you place extra houses. Now that I have played Kingdom Builder again, I find I really admire it. If you haven't tried this, find a chance to give it a go. 

When I first played 17: Diciassette I played it with two players, and I didn't think it works with two. Now I have played it with five, and it works much better. This should not have been a 2 to 5 player game. It should be 3 to 5. It is understandable that publishers want to put on the box as wide a player range as possible, the most common being 2 to 5. 

I first played Forest Shuffle online. Recently I played the physical version. Playing the physical version did not change my opinion. My opinion of the game started with being so-so. I saw it as just a lot of cards with different scoring conditions, and you are just trying to collect cards which combo well. Then as I played more, I warmed up a little to it because it has nice art, and set collection in itself is an enjoyable thing to do. And then as I played more, I reverted to my initial opinion. It's just lots of cards with different ways to score points. I understand why it is a successful product. I also understand why it's not my thing. Comparing the physical and digital versions, I prefer the digital version because the computer does the scoring for you. It is easy to see why others enjoy it. I witnessed myself first-time players clicking with it. They start deciding which animals and trees to collect, and then they start paying attention to what others are collecting so that they avoid giving away useful cards. They also quickly pick up the tactic of overflowing the board to discard cards which others want. 

PASS

PASS from Taiwan is a climbing game, i.e. like Tichu, Big 2 and Fight the Landlord. One special aspect about it is the cards have two different halves. Well, actually this is no longer that unique by now. Several other popular games have this, for example SCOUT and Panda Spin. 

Like Panda Spin, in PASS, one end of a card is designated the basic side, and the other is the upgraded side. By default you can only use the basic side. So you hold the cards white side up. 

Most of the game is the same as common climbing games, so this is easy to learn. There is no concept of suits, thus there are no suit related combos like flushes or straight flushes. The game has bombs, i.e. four or five of a kind. Bombs can ignore combos. Normally in climbing games everyone may only play the same combo as the lead player. In PASS, if you play a bomb, you are allowed to break this rule. 

The main difference between PASS and other climbing games is the Pass tokens. When you pass, you get a token. You may not re-enter play and you must sit out the rest of the hand, until someone wins and starts a new hand. Pass tokens can be used in two ways. When you play a combo, if you want to rotate some of your cards to the upgraded side, you have to spend a Pass token. 

Referring to the photo above, if I spend a Pass token, I can turn around my Q and A to create a bomb of five 4's. The other way to use a Pass token is to augment a combo you play. Normally if your combo in hand is the same as the currently strongest combo on the table, you can't play it. You need something stronger. What you can do is attach a Pass token to augment your combo. If the combo on the table already has a Pass token, you can still play yours, by adding two Pass tokens. 

The two sides of the Pass tokens are different, to remind you of the two different functions.

Compared to SCOUT and Panda Spin, PASS is a simpler game and it is closer to common climbing games. This means it is easier for non-gamers to pick up. Gameplay is quicker. I am not specifically a climbing game fan, but I like all three games. SCOUT and Panda Spin are more radically unconventional and innovative, and the gamer in me like that. PASS is more in the comfort zone. It is familiar and soothing while offering a little twist. It's the kind of game you can easily teach your old friends who are not gamers, and you can have a relaxing evening playing and catching up at the same time. 

Gatsby

Gatsby is a light 2-player game about trying to gain the favours of the rich and famous. There are 15 characters in the game, three each in five different colours. However each time you play, a few are removed unseen. To win, you need to collect three characters of the same colour, or five characters of different colours. If no one achieves either condition, you compare total point values of characters you manage to collect. 

The fun part of the game is that some characters are face-down. You don’t know which characters are in play. You need to take a specific action to peek at and possibly swap the positions of characters. You play on three different boards, and there are characters on all three. You place or move your markers on these boards in order to win characters. 

There are four action tiles which let you perform different combinations of actions on the three boards. You share a common disc with your opponent. On your turn you move the disc to a new action tile and perform the corresponding actions. What this means is you are also preventing your opponent from performing that action, because he must move the disc when his turn comes. 

The three boards work differently. There are five tracks on the race course board. You fill them from left to right. When a track is full, whoever has more markers wins the character. At the dance floor, which is a square grid, you win characters when your markers connect two edges and when you occupy four specific spaces. At the tower building, you win characters when you reach specific levels. One interesting twist here is whoever is behind moves two steps at a time. 

The general mechanisms of the three boards do not make an interesting enough game. What makes the game fun is the special powers on some of the spaces. Some let you peek at and swap characters. Some let you swap markers with your opponent. Some let you specify which action tile your opponent must use next. Some let you draw a special single-use action tile which is only available to you. These special action tiles can be very powerful. One dilemma you often have is when you place your marker on a space, you are making adjacent spaces accessible to your opponent, and these newly accessible spaces may have useful special powers. 

The game is a tug of war with three arenas you need to compete in. Tension comes from the unknown characters. You need to figure out which are in play because it affects your strategy and you also need to know that to stop your opponent from winning. Due to this hidden information, you can have psychological play, trying to mislead your opponent. There are also clever action combos you can make. These are fun tactical plays which make you feel smart. 

Tales of the Old Fort (勇闯旧城记)

 

This is a game I bought at the Kaohsiung City Museum in Taiwan. Tales of the Old Fort is the name I give it, an approximate translation of the original Chinese name. I bought this game more as a souvenir than as a boardgame. The old fort refers to Zuoying, a district right next to the city of Kaohsiung. This was a military base, from the Ming Dynasty up to the Second World War. Tales of the Old Fort is real history being presented in boardgame form. 

Back of the box

Game board

Action cards

These character cards are used only in the advanced rules. There are two modes of play. In the basic mode, you play a cooperative game. You construct the walls and the buildings together, and do your best to survive the historical incidents. As a team you try to score as many points as possible. The advanced game is competitive. Instead of working together on a team score, you have individual scores. You score points in different ways, and you win by scoring more than everyone else. 

Event cards

There are four types of building materials. They must be built in the right order - green, grey, yellow then red. You can skip some of them, even directly going to red. However there is a game mechanism which discourages you from doing too much skipping. 

These are some of the buildings you need to construct. Grey means not yet built, and orange means completed. The requirements for constructing a building are in the bottom left corners of the building tiles. The requirements are in the form of what the two adjacent wall sections must be made of. The game board is divided into four quadrants, and each quadrant is adjacent to two wall sections. To construct a building, you don't need to pay resources. You just need the two adjacent wall sections to fit the requirements. This is why you will often be constructing walls without skipping colours. 

Here you can see the player pawns, a gate, damage tokens, and an era token. Event cards in the game are generally bad. Usually you get attacked from one or more directions, and the enemies attack at specific strengths. If the walls are not strong enough to repel the attackers, they get damaged, and buildings in the fort may get damaged too. Damaged walls have zero strength, and when a wall piece takes a second damage token, it is destroyed. Damaged buildings score no points. You need to repair them to remove the damage tokens. 

Box front

A game is set up like this. You have the four gates, but no walls yet. All fourteen buildings are placed in their designated quadrants, with their not-yet-built side showing. 

You set up four sets of event cards. The lighter back cards are regular events, and the darker back cards are major events. Each game you will use all the regular events. There are two or three major events for the four eras in the game. You randomly pick one for each era face-down, so you don't know yet which one it will be. 

This is one part of the game I want to complain about. The setup rules say four stacks of regular event cards, but the game comes with regular event cards of only three eras. There are no Era 4 regular event cards. I checked the component count section of the rulebook, and it says 18 cards. There are indeed 18 regular event cards, six each for Eras 1 to 3. So I believe this is an error in game and product design, not in manufacturing or packing. My solution is I divide the regular event cards into four decks as evenly as I can. 

You draw an event card whenever you construct a building. So you should prepare yourselves well before constructing buildings, i.e. get some walls up first. There are four large buildings in the game. When you construct one, you draw a major event card, and you also proceed to the next era. That means the next time you draw a regular event card, it comes from the next deck. These regular event cards will have stronger effects. Brace yourselves! 

Your have a hand size of two action cards. The action card deck is a countdown mechanism. If it runs out, the game ends. This is just one way the game ends, and this is the bad way. It means you run out of time. Normally you want to end the game by constructing the last large building and triggering the final major event. 

Most actions in the game require playing or discarding a card, and then drawing one. You have some time pressure to get as much done as possible before the deck runs out. Player pawns can only stand at the gates. Depending on which of the four gates you are at, you can work on either of the walls next to the gate, or buildings in the two quadrants next to the gate. If you want to move to an adjacent gate, you have to discard a card. Cards are mostly building materials, with a few special action cards which only take effect if you discard them for movement. To use a building material card for building or upgrading a wall, you need one action to place the card next to the wall site, and then another to actually build. Repairing a wall or building costs one card. Ironically constructing a building doesn't cost any card. You just need to make sure the wall type requirements are met. 

When I first read the rules, I did not have high hopes. I had a nagging feeling this was amateur. It didn't seem like a game made by experienced gamers. The rulebook was not clear on several things. Now that I have played the game, it is not a complex game, but when I first read the rules, I felt I kind of know how to play, but I wasn't 100% confident. 

I played with my daughters Shee Yun and Chen Rui. I thought the game was going to be a breeze, but we failed pretty spectacularly. The first building we constructed was a large building, because it had a special ability. This meant triggering a major event, and it also meant progressing to the second era, where the event cards are stronger. Needless to say, constructing that large building was a horrible move. We weren't thinking straight. We were overly keen to construct buildings with powers. We found out the hard way that this is a game about raising walls and preparing yourselves well before you construct buildings and allow events to happen. Events only trigger when you construct buildings, which means you can delay them. 

We had tons of damage tokens on the board. We also found out we played several rules wrong. Perhaps I am partly to blame, because I am not used to reading rules in Chinese. Most of my games are in English. However there are certainly some parts where the rulebook and the components are ambiguous. For example some cards say the attack is from "west / north", and some cards say "west north". Does that mean in the former we get to choose? Or does it mean I must pick whichever is worse? We encountered a few situations where we couldn't find a clear ruling, and we had to decide ourselves how to interpret the rules.  

Since we had a horrible first game, we decided to go again. Now that we had learnt our lesson, we did our planning better. We knew where we could expedite wall construction to skip some levels, and we knew where we should keep some basic walls for a bit longer. We delayed constructing buildings as far as we could, so that our defenses were stronger. The game is not as easy as I had originally expected, but now that we understood it, we were able to do quite well, and with ease. We have kind of solved it now, so it doesn't offer much further replayability. However I have yet to play the advanced rules, so maybe that's worth checking out. It becomes a different game because it will be competitive and not cooperative. 

Some parts of the game are interesting. This is not just a random assortment of common game mechanisms. Buildings being constructed for free, only depending on the adjacent wall type, is certainly something I haven't seen before. There is a spatial challenge in how the quadrants are positioned. Buildings in a quadrant are dependent on two walls, but these two walls are attached to two different gates. If you want to construct these two walls quickly, you need player pawns on both the gates. 

Most buildings have no function other than being worth 1 point. Only large buildings have powers. Two of the large buildings let you build a regular building for free. That's something you can plan around. 

I don't like that it is too easy for players to control the events. You can just hold off constructing buildings. There is no imminent threat. Yes, the dwindling deck is your time pressure, but being able to control when events happen is, in my opinion, too powerful. I'm saying all this from the perspective of an old timer. The game might be too easy for old gamers like me, but I'm probably not the target audience for this game. For normal people, the difficulty is more appropriate, and the game will have better replayability. Well, at least I still got two games out of it. It was still a puzzle I needed some effort to work out. I may still get more plays out of the game by trying the competitive version. Come to think of it, designing a cooperative game is actually very difficult. For experienced gamers, it needs to be pretty hard to ensure replayability. For casual gamers, you can't make it too hard because it would be disheartening. 

Tales of the Old Fort is a nice memento. The game components are atypical. The game mechanisms too. The buildings in the game are all based on real buildings in Kaohsiung and Zouying. The events are historical incidents. I'm grateful it gave me time with my children to explore its mechanisms. That's something worth celebrating. It is like having played an escape room game. You may not be keen to play again, but you've had fun. Next should be the competitive mode. 

There is a Tian Hou Temple in Kuala Lumpur (Temple of the Heavenly Goddess). There is one in Zuoying too. The one in KL was where I did my registration of marriage in 2000. 

BIGF 2025 - Bangkok International Game Festival

The Bangkok International Game Festival (BIGF) is happening in Thailand 29 - 31 Aug 2025! I am not exhibiting there myself, but Pinocchio and Snow White and the Eleven Dwarfs will be there, via my collaboration partner Choon Ean of LUMA. If you are in Bangkok, please visit the fair! This will be the debut public appearance of Pinocchio in Thailand!

Apiary

Apiary is a game with an unusual setting. It is set in a distant future when humankind is extinct. Bees are now the dominant intelligent species, and they are going into interstellar expansion. This is a worker placement game. One interesting part is how your workers will grow, and as they grow bigger, they become stronger. Eventually they will grow old enough to retire, and retirement is mandatory. So during the game you have to remember to birth new bees to replenish the workforce. 

Overall, this is yet another game about collecting resources and then spending them to buy stuff, and stuff you buy score points based on various criteria. The worker placement rule is a little unusual. Each area has limited slots, but they never stop you from placing your worker. You can always place a worker. When you do that, previously placed workers are shifted right or down. If there are not enough seats, the one which has been around the longest will be pushed off the seat, i.e. first in first out. And that's a good thing. If your bee gets expelled this way, it grows, and it returns to your hand. That means you can now deploy it again. 

Storage is a challenge, because there are five types of resources, and your storage slots are for specific resource types. You need to make sure you have enough space for all five types. Also, you may have at most four workers at the same time. 

To claim a yellow tile (which scores points at game end), you can only use a Level-4 worker bee. This action is called Carve. 

This is your hive. Every player has a unique tribe with its own special powers. You start your hive with a large base plate on which you already have some hex tiles. Space on your base plate is limited, and once it is full, you cannot further expand your hive. You need to add base plate extensions before you can add more tiles. 

In some cases the position of a tile has an impact, for example a tile may score points based on how many farm tiles are adjacent to it. So you have some spatial element here. 

The green tiles are the farm tiles. They produce resources and they are also your storage space for these resources. The red tiles have single use powers when placed. The yellow tiles score points at game end. Another type is blue. Blue tiles give you a permanent special ability. 

You get to collect cards. A card can be used in three ways. It can be discarded as a single basic resource (which is not a very efficient way of using the card). It can be played for a one-time ability. It can also be used as a game-end scoring card. Slots are limited to use cards for game-end scoring, so you need to consider carefully which ones to assign to these slots. 

Apiary is a complex and heavy strategy game. There is a lot of text to read, which I find a little tedious. I think it's an interesting concept having workers which grow and become stronger, affecting what they can do and how well them do them. Generally you keep collecting resources and spending them to get stuff. This is the typical Eurogame so there is nothing particular new about the resources and buying stuff with them. During the game you can collect several scoring conditions and you do your best to fulfil them. This is a game with multiple ways to score points. One more thing which is interesting - if you run out of storage space and are forced to discard resources, you earn the queen's favour. If you get a lot of the queen's favour, it can translate to many points at game end. So sometimes it's worthwhile to deliberately plan to waste resources. 

I've never really clicked with games from Stonemaier Games. Their games are hugely popular, and I can appreciate why. It's just that they don't match my personal tastes. Most of their games are heavy Eurogames. Not that I don't like this genre. I do, but I don't find new ideas or mechanisms in their games which excite me. They do know how to pick interesting themes - birds in Wingspan, alternative history mechas in Scythe. Apiary, about bees in space, is certainly something I've never seen before. If you are a fan of Stonemaier Games, chances are you will like Apiary, because this is very much their style of game.