The Thailand Board Game Show in Bangkok was 7 - 9 Nov 2025. This was my second time attending the show. I was an exhibitor last year too. The show was three days - Friday to Sunday. My Malaysian friends and I landed in Bangkok on Thursday. The show organiser BGN (Board Game Night) had a gathering for exhibitors on Thursday. We were able to showcase our games and get to know one another. I happily checked out the many games at the gathering, asking the designers or their teams to explain how the games worked. I didn't play all, only a few. Most were Thai designed and a few were localised titles.
Dishcraft is a push-your-luck game. If you are familiar with Japanese anime you will recognise the parodies. In this game you roleplay as fantasy characters, and you are all chefs going deep into a cave to collect cooking ingredients.
That menu at the top lists the dishes you can cook. The ingredient combinations required are all based on poker hands. Naturally the harder the combo, the more points it will score for you. On your turn, you reveal cards from the deck one by one, until you decide to stop, or you reach your limit, or something bad happens. How many cards you can draw, and how many cards you can hold on to at any time, are all dependent on your character's skill levels. After every card you reveal, you need to think whether you are happy with what you have so far and leave with these, or you want to gamble and draw one more card, hoping to gain even more, at the risk of drawing something bad, like traps and monsters.
Some of the bad cards
This is a character board. You have various tracks for your different skills. This character board is very well produced. I asked the designer where this was manufactured. It was China. He had considered doing manufacturing in Thailand, but for this kind of quality, the cost is double that of China. Dishcraft retails at THB1400, which is about MYR180. With this kind of production quality, this is a great deal!
Another character in the game
Characters can be upgraded. This is the other side of the tile.
Synchro Horizon is a JRPG-style cooperative game. The box is very thick, which is not immediately obvious in this photo. This is a game for 1 to 4 players. There is a countdown mechanism. You need to equip yourself and level up, and at the same time you must push forward to defeat monsters and complete missions so that you can reach and beat the final boss before time runs out.
Those books on the board are the missions. They have different combinations of monsters depending on the mission difficulty level. You don't need to complete every mission, only one mission per difficulty level. You start at the top left corner and need to get the bottom right corner to find and defeat the boss.
This is the player board. Look closely and you'll notice it is 3D. You have slots for your character card, skill tiles and equipment cards.
This is a Level 4 mission. You will face two Level 3 monsters and two Level 4 monsters.
The game comes with a ton of these acrylic standees. They have spent a lot of effort to create so much art for the game.
One of the bosses
The standard edition of Synchro Horizon retails at THB 3500, which is about MYR 450. There is a deluxe edition which comes with 3D printed miniatures.
Tech Runner was launched on Day 1 of the Thailand Board Game Show. So I was there to witness it. This is a two-player fighting game. Each player has his own team of 2 or 3 fighters, depending on the game mode you choose. You can customise your card deck. The game mode determines how many cards you must have in your deck.
This box cover shows two characters, but it does not mean they are opponents. They will probably turn out to be partners more often than not. The game system currently includes 8 characters, and they come in four different boxes. To play a game you need at least two boxes, i.e. 4 characters.
There is a cooperative mode in which you work together to defeat a common enemy (that guy partially visible at the bottom left corner).
At the moment the game is only available in Thai
This is another box, with two other characters. The fighter on the right was inspired by guardians you see at the gates of Thai temples.
Sorry about the poor focus
Takoyaki is not a Thai design but a localisation. It is a simple real-time dexterity game. It works well as a children's game and a family game. A game takes maybe 15 minutes. Probably less.
You compete to be fastest to make takoyaki (squid balls) in a specific pattern. Every round you reveal one mission card like this. Whoever is first to make this arrangement on his personal pan wins the card and scores 1 point. Score 5 points to win the game.
The squid balls are ping pong balls. Every squid ball has a coloured patch. On the mission cards some squid balls are blank, and that means you need to turn the ball so that the colour does not show. You use two long thin sticks to manipulate the squid balls. The sticks are tipped with tiny hands. I'm not sure what the official rule is. The demo guy taught us that when we completed the mission, we had to use our tiny hands to grab and pull the card towards us. I find that hilarious. Imagine two grown men completing the mission and the same time and then using the tiny hands to fight over a card.
Arbolito is not a Thai design either. This too is a dexterity game, and tests how stable your hands are. There is some strategy to this too.
The cards are round, and have various colours. For each coloured section of a card, there is at least one notch. You add cards to the tree by using these notches. When you connect two cards, the colour where they connect must be the same. The whole idea is to rid your hand of cards by adding them to the tree. On your turn in case any cards fall off, you will be forced to take some back into your hand.
This is a game from Thai designer Kampoong. His publishes his games under the Mii2 Games brand. He has 6 titles released by now, about one per year. Most of his games have naughty themes. This one is Kuangpriw. At first I thought this character on the cover is a fan, or a boomerang, or maybe some kind of bacteria. It turned out to be something I didn't expect at all. Take at look at the photo below and you'll understand what is spinning.
The box comes with an outer sleeve which looks exactly like a male underwear. This game is about what juvenile boys play - pulling down one another's pants.
You will hold a stack of cards in hand, with the highest number on top and the smallest at the bottom. Players attack one another. On a count to three, you point at your target. If two persons attack each other, they both fail to do anything. However if the person you attack is attacking someone else, you get to pull his outermost pants down, i.e. you remove the top card from his deck. Whoever is stripped of his last piece of clothing is out of the game.
Unfortunately the game is only available in Thai now. The English version has sold out. I am not sure whether it will be reprinted. One more recent game by Kampoong is called Hot Sperm. It is a sperm racing game. Thai culture is open-minded and accommodating. Kampoong's choice of themes would certainly be taboo in Malaysia, and probably in many western countries too.
This latest game from Kampoong does not have a naughty theme. I think the name of the game is Q.IL. This is a 2-player game about two nations preparing for war. You have a hand of 5 cards. On your turn you draw two cards, play one, then discard one. You can play up to four sets of cards before you. These are your armies. The first card you play to start a set is the army number, the fighting order, and also the army size limit. In the best case you will have army numbers 1 to 4. From the second card in a set onwards, you play cards face down. These add to the strengths of your armies. You can play a card in your opponent's army, placing it horizontally. In such cases the horizontal cards reduce strength instead of increasing it. However there is a card power which turns such cards vertical.
Instead of adding a card to an army, you can play it for its special ability. The card on the right lists the special abilities in the game. Some cards are played like a normal number card, but their abilities resolve during battle, after their numbers are considered for the battle.
One player is blue, and the other is orange. You can only use the half in your colour. This is a short and clever game.
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