Thailand Board Game Show 2025: Quick Takes Part 2

These are some more games I saw at the Thailand Board Game Show 2025. 

Barbaric is a Thai design, a tactical battle game. 

It has a ton of pretty miniatures.

Those at the centre are the monsters. Those near the edges are playable characters. You goal is to go to the centre to take a treasure and then bring it out to the edge. You don't necessarily have to defeat the monsters. You don't even need to be first to grab the treasure. If someone takes it and then drops it due to being smacked by a monster. You can conveniently swoop in to pick it up and bring it to the edge yourself to win. 

You get to choose a combination of character and mount. Every character and every mount is different. 

This is another character / mount combination.

This is a player board, with character info on the left, and mount on the right

This is actually made of two pieces. This allows you to make different combinations.

The character board of the boss monster

Many Thai games have impressive production quality. This is certainly international standard. One thing I learned this trip is that like Malaysia, Kickstarter does not support Thailand either. We are both blacklisted. For Thai designers to go Kickstarter, they need to partner with someone from another country. Probably most often Singapore. 

This is a game about pottery, and it is still at the prototype stage. This is designed by one of my assistants from last year, Tree (Surakit Joradol). He designed this for the pottery school where he works. This cover certainly caught my attention. 

This is a worker placement and resource collection game. When you compete for turn order, the earlier you want to go, the more you will have to pay to buy stuff. 

This part is contract fulfilment. There are different types of pottery you can make. When you complete certain sets, you will score bonus points. 

Viking See-Saw is a dexterity game from Reiner Knizia. 

Everyone starts with the same number of pieces. These are goods you need to load onto the ship. The ship starts with some wooden blocks. On your turn, you must place one of your pieces onto the higher half of the ship. 

If you manage to place your piece without causing the ship to tilt the other way, you're safe. If the ship tilts, you will be penalised. You must take one wooden piece from the ship. If goods fall off when you attempt to add a piece, you have to take them all, in addition to taking one wooden piece. 

The game ends when all the wooden blocks on the ship have been taken. The player with the fewest pieces remaining wins. Those wooden blocks count too. At first I thought that blue hair band was one of the pieces to be placed too. It was just to stop the ball from rolling all over the place. 

Little Dot Garden has the kind of cover which is love at first sight. 

You have your own player board and you will plant flowers on it. You claim tiles from the centre of the table to place on your player board. These tiles have flowers in four different types. At the end of the game, for each flower type you check which connected region on your board is the largest. You will score each of these largest regions. The value of each flower type increases throughout the game depending on player actions. So this is a market value manipulation game. You collect flowers and increase their values at the same time. You want to collect the most valuable flowers. You also want to increase the value of the flower type you have the most of.

These lovely ladybirds are the currency in the game. When you place a tile, if you need to cover an object, you must pay a ladybird. After I listened to the rules explanation, the game did not excite me as much. It was Jon who was accompanying me who found it intriguing. I told him - buy buy buy! Too bad the game wasn't available yet. It was still in pre-order stage. 

Tanbo is a brain-burning abstract game from Japan. It is an award winner. 

This is a 2-player game. You have your own set of components. During setup you create five rice fields divided by the dikes. Each field starts with two snakes. You have one farmer pawn. On your turn, you pick up all the pieces in the field where the farmer is and then redistribute them one by one in clockwise order from the next field onwards. In other words, congkak / mancala style. Once this is done, you examine the field where the farmer is now located, and perform actions according to the number of snakes and rice. 

This reference sheet lists all possible situations at a field and what you must do.

The game was a little hard to grasp initially. I think it was due to the way it was taught to us. Before being explained the five different scenarios, I had to start playing. The goal of the game is to harvest rice of a total value of 25. The rice pieces have values ranging from 3 to 5. Whenever you get to grow rice in your play area, you draw pieces randomly from a bag.

In this game snakes are not pests. They help with the rice growing. When you have more snakes than rice, you get to add rice pieces until they equal the number of snakes. When you have more rice than snakes, you get to harvest the difference. There are several other possible situations and required actions. You must plan your moves to maximise the opportunities for harvesting rice. 

This is a perfect information abstract game, and both players start with the exact same setup. There is no randomness other than the value of rice you draw from the bag. This is mostly a solo game, since you don't interact with your opponent.