This is the third batch of games I saw at the Thailand Board Game Show 2025. There are several others I played in full, and I will write about those as individual blog posts.
Death Invitation is a hidden identity game. You have a murderer and an accomplice on one team, and the rest are the other team - the innocent. To win, the murderer needs to kill everyone. The innocent have several ways to win. They can try to kill the murderer, but if they kill the wrong guy, they immediately lose. They can find the secret passageway and escape. They can also find fuel for the car and drive away. In order to exchange information, you need to be alone with one other person in the same room. The risk is that person may turn out to be the murderer. The murderer does not lose for getting exposed. It's a little inconvenient to lose your anonymity, but it also means you can now blatantly hunt down your victims. The accomplice can be crucial in creating confusion. The accomplice may murder exactly once. When someone dies, the murderer must be nearby. So the accomplice murdering at the right time and place can effectively mislead the innocent.
Everyone knows what kind of equipment everyone else is carrying. When someone is killed, you can tell from the wound what kind of equipment was used for the murder. This is a clue for you to narrow down who the murderer might be.
Death Invitation is a Thai design
The Yellow House is not a Thai design. It calls itself a two-player trick-taking game, but after reading the rules I still don't quite understand how it is trick-taking. This is a game about Van Gogh and his friend Gauguin debating about what's most important to an artist - inspiration, passion, skill or money. These four topics are just the four suits in the game.
The game board is made of cloth
The cards have suits, but no numbers. I don't fully understand the game mechanism even after reading the rules. I did not sit down to play. The game is played over several rounds. You win the game by winning three debates, or by winning two debates of the same suit. You start a round with 12 cards. You take turns supporting one topic. You need to play cards in that suit to be able to do so. Your opponent must then support a new topic by being able to play enough cards in that new suit. If he can't, you win the round. There are only four topics, so there will be at most four turns in a round. The player who is able to argue for the fourth topic automatically wins the round. Or if you are able to play all 12 cards, you win the round too. The rules look simple, but I still can't fully picture how the game works. I am curious.
Tilt N Shout is a 2-player real-time game which requires speed thinking. It comes with a stack of cards, and every card specifies a category, like vegetables, countries, historical leaders. When you start a game, you reveal such a card, and the players take turns naming something in the category without repeating. You want to do this as quickly as possible.
The main game component is a see-saw with a winding path. At the centre there is a hole where you can drop the metal ball. This is the starting position of the ball. When you name an item, you press your end of the see-saw down, so that the ball starts rolling in your direction. Your opponent now tries to name a new item, so that he can quickly tap his side, and make the ball roll towards him. You are fighting for that ball. When it reaches your end and drops out of the see-saw, you win. If the category is Malaysian food, you'd be saying things like satay, nasi lemak, Hokkien mee, panmee, Ipoh horfun, banana leaf rice.
This is an exciting and nerve-wracking game. Sometimes your mind goes completely blank.
On the verge of winning
Political Mess is published in Thai, but this is a game from Daryl Chow (Singapore). This is a small box card game for 2 to 4 players.
When you play a card, it must overlap at least one other card. There are some rules you must follow. Empty spaces can be covered by monuments (those yellow structures), politicians or other empty spaces. Monuments and politicians can only be covered by matching monuments or politicians. It's not exactly easy to play a card, because overlapping is mandatory, and there are restrictions about what you can cover.
When the game ends, you score every group of monuments. You check who has the most and second most number of politicians next to the group. You decide on your player colour at the start of the game. Whoever has the most politicians next to the group scores as many points as the number of monuments. Whoever has the second most scores half that. In the case of ties, the politicians with plus signs are tiebreakers.
I played this at the airport on the airport bench. This is a microgame but it is pretty thinky.
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