12 - 14 December 2025 was the BGC boardgame retreat organised by Jeff and Wai Yan of boardgamecafe.net. This is already their 13th year doing this. Although I have known Jeff and Wai Yan for many years, this was the first time I participated in their annual retreat. I did participate in a mini retreat some years ago, but this was not the main annual event. So I consider myself a newbie.
The venue was Klana Beach Resort in Teluk Kemang, near Port Dickson. It's about 1.5 hours drive from KL. I carpooled with Xiu Yi, who has been to the retreat before.
We played basically 9am - 11pm Friday and Saturday, and 9am - 6pm Sunday. We did break for lunch and dinner, and we did get some sleep, but this really was nothing else but boardgames for three whole days. I am a little surprised I didn't get sick of it and I didn't feel tired. Three days just passed too quickly. Time flies when you are having fun. The format of the event was mostly free-and-easy. There was a spreadsheet set up so that people could schedule specific games to be played and invite others to join. This was mainly for the longer and more complex games, sometimes looking for a specific player count. We were not 100% strict about following the schedule. We did sometimes change or cancel plans. However having such a schedule did help with coordination. I managed to play all four of the older and slightly longer games I brought.
Wine Cellar is a beautiful game. This was the first game I played at the retreat with those who arrived a little early. We were all waiting for the official announcement of the start of event, and being gamers, of course we would pull out a short game.
These were some of the games I brought. The four medium-to-long games which I scheduled were Tribune, Beowulf: The Legend, The Great Zimbabwe and Taj Mahal. I brought 19 different games (not counting my prototypes), and managed to play 10 of them.
I brought five games still under development for playtesting. I managed to get three of them playtested, and I received good feedback from the players. I also gained several insights from observing the games being played. Dith, being the gamer, immediately understood the intricacies of Rebels of the Three Kingdoms. It's always a joy to see the light bulb turn on. Xiu Yi said Bet West (Journey to the West themed gambling game) will be great for Chinese New Year season. I still need to adjust the action mechanism. In this version I tested, a player may either claim an action card to perform the corresponding action, or they may increase the bet amount. I think I should streamline this by making increasing the bet one of the action cards too. This limits the number of times the bet can be increased.
I saw several problems with Apa You Cakap (a game about multilingual Malaysia). Han suggested I should let players start with three cards instead of one, since most people tend to just draw cards in the first two rounds. I think he's right. In this game everyone has a secret goal. If the person or persons specified by your secret goal card wins, you also win. One problem I see is people don't share this information much. There are few mechanisms which expose this information. I need to find a way to make such information known, because this information affects the interactions among players. Generally I need players to be able to gain more information more quickly. The pace feels a little slow now. One element I plan to bring in is the secret crush. During the ideation stage I toyed with the idea of everyone having a secret crush. If your crush wins, you win too. This idea did not get into the first version, but now I plan to add it in, and remove the current secret goals.
Naturally I brought all four games I have published under Cili Padi Games, two copies each.
This was our game library. Probably 80% brought by Jeff. The attendees did bring games they wanted to play. Usually longer games or complex games which are hard to arrange the time and people to play.
I hear that every year there will be at least one game from the 18XX series played, usually after dinner.
So it is not hearsay!
This is the observatory building as seen from my hotel room.
Our hall was large and spacious. It was in the observatory building and not the main resort building. We really should have played Galileo Galilei.
Panda Panda is a fun little filler. G is the rarest card, only one copy in the whole deck. It's a gold foil card too.
Han is one of my oldest gaming buddies. We have been gaming for more than 20 years. We took this photo to show to Allen. The three of us used to play together regularly, and we were even called the Midah group, because Allen lives in Taman Midah. Unfortunately Allen couldn't join the retreat because he already had something planned for the weekend. I decided to join quite late. I hadn't originally planned to, but Han said he was going, and since I did not have work or other activities that weekend, I decided to go. Thankfully there were still available slots.
For many years the retreat was conducted in a tournament format. Now it is much more free-and-easy. However there is still a mini competition. We had a 3-round competition, each using a different short game. It started with 4 groups of 4 players each. Every round half were eliminated, so for the finals there were four players. Trio was the first round game.
I have played Trio before. It is simple and a little quirky. There is a fair bit of luck and also a memory element. A lot of fun and it works for non gamers.
Trio is design from Japan
Cat and the Tower is another Japanese design. I did not play this though. It is certainly an eye-catching game, so I took several photos.
I wonder whether it's like Jenga. I did not hear people scream or see the tower collapse though.
Carefully...
Cat meeples!
I saw Forbidden Jungle being played but I did not play. I would have been interested to see how it worked compared to others in the Forbidden series.
Forbidden Jungle
Saw but did not play.
Covenant
I was hoping to get a 19 player game of Snow White and the Eleven Dwarfs. That is the max player count now, with the 2nd edition of the game, instead of 18. There is a new character - the Huntsman. We did not manage 19, but we did have 14. That was enough to have a game which included several variant modules - Prince Charming, Evil Queen and Huntsman.
I was dwarf #7. With the Evil Queen in play, everyone took notes very carefully, because there could be a liar. We also needed to remember the sequence of who looked at whose card, because whenever any dwarf looked at the Queen's card, they would convert to become evil, and they could be lying. That meant they could be honest up to a certain point, and then start lying. At one point, I had a suspicion that Jeff might be the Queen, because there was a third person Jia Yaik wanting to look at his card. This seemed a waste of resources. We said to Jia Yaik that he shouldn't be looking at Jeff's card, and he should look at Han's. No one had seen Han's card yet. Han had looked at and found the Huntsman. So Han hadn't been able to give clues about what his own card was. When Jia Yaik insisted on looking at Jeff's card, I wondered whether he was a dwarf who wanted to turn evil, because he felt the chances of winning were better on the Queen's team.
Piecing together the information we had was challenging. We had to start asking more detailed questions. We were careful and mostly gave clues in the form of the difference between two numbers, without revealing who had the bigger number. Gradually we realised we had to ask about which number was bigger. It would give more information to Snow White, but we needed that information ourselves too.
As I worked out my deductions, I suddenly realised I knew who had all the numbers except for 1 and 10. As a dwarf I knew number 1 was in the hand of one of the players. That meant the missing number at the centre of the table was 10. I hurriedly declared that I wanted to guess, and I got it right! The dwarfs won!
What was funny was after the game, I realised two of my deductions were wrong. Xiang Yang whom I thought was 11 was actually the Queen. And Sam whom I thought was the 4 was actually the 1. Gosh... I was just lucky that 10 turned out to be the correct number. I could have caused my team to lose and the Queen to win. Xiang Yang, being the Queen, lied. When he saw that Sam had a 1, he said their sum was 15. That was impossible. The numbers only went up to 11. I thought at that point Sam should have known that Xiang Yang was the Queen because he lied. However Sam had a different conclusion. Since he held number 1, he thought Xiang Yang lied to protect him. That made sense too. Sam himself lied too, to protect himself. He said he was half of another player, whom I later worked out to be the 8. So I thought he must be the 4.
It was great to see people having fun and much discussion over a game of Snow White.
Younger daughter Chen Rui used to play the computer game Stardew Valley. I saw this but did not play it. It is a cooperative game for up to 4 players.
Stardew Valley
I taught Leaf my game Dancing Queen.
Workers and a tourist from Shackleton Base.
I managed to bring Olenon to the table. A microgame and climbing game from Japan, with an interesting twist.
Coco Boom was a blast. This is a game from Taiwan. Leaf got three of the four bombs, which meant her points were in the negative. This game is so simple yet there is so much fun and excitement.
I saw but did not play.
Babylon looks great!
Sunday late afternoon was the announcement of prize winners and lucky draws. My game Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves was one of the prizes.
Dith taught 1849 to a few players who had not played 18XX games before and were curious to explore. Recruitment drive for 18XX!
I remember Taj Mahal for how brutal it can be. I had not played it for a long time, and wanted to bring it back to the table. This is an older title from Reiner Knizia.
We did a three player game. With three players it is slightly easier. I remember four players is the ideal player count. At five players it would be truly brutal. Since I own the game and I have played it before, I had an advantage over the others. I had a large collection of goods and that advantage snowballed. It was difficult for others to catch up. However they did manage to establish wide networks and scored many points from them.
In Taj Mahal it is important to know how to pick your fights. You must conserve your resources.
Orloj is a game about the astronomical clock in Prague, Czech Republic. I saw this being played but I did not play it myself. The game seems to be quite long. The group started in the morning, paused for lunch, then continued in the afternoon. Han said learning the game took much time, but the game mechanisms themselves were not that complicated.
Orloj
Player board in Orloj. I tend to be wary of heavy Eurogames nowadays. I find many of them tedious and samey. That was why I didn't sign up for Orloj. I hadn't actually read up much about it so I did not know what to expect. It just looked like that kind of game I generally avoid. Maybe I'm judging it too soon.
I brought Beowulf, another Reiner Knizia title. I have not played this all that many times. I remember it as kind of okay but nothing spectacular. However this game we did was a lot of fun. Many of us pushed our luck far, and succeeded. It was hilarious. When everyone gambles, luck becomes a bigger factor. We certainly had some who were more lucky than others. Still, we all had fun.
The Beowulf figure
When Ainul first saw the board, he thought it was modular and could be customised. The game board really looks like this, like it is missing a section. To use the least exciting way to describe the game, this is just a fixed series of auctions and actions where you collect and play cards, and gain gold, wounds, and victory points. We had five players, and I think this is the best player count. Auctions can be unforgiving. Sometimes if you come last you will suffer bad penalties.
At major auctions, players will collect these tokens numbered 1 to 5, depending on how long they can last. The first person not willing to bid will drop off and take the 5 token. The next person to drop off takes the 4, and so on. Once everyone has a token, the player with the number 1 token gets to pick a reward first. The "rewards" are not all good. Some of them are penalties.
When you need to play cards with certain icons, you can choose to take a risk to draw free cards even if you do have the right cards in hand. When you take such a risk, you draw two cards from the deck and see if they have the required icons. If they do, you play these cards for free, conserving your own hand cards. However if there is none, you fail and drop off from the auction, and you also take a scratch (a minor wound).
11 icons is a crazy high number. I'm glad I decided to play Beowulf again, and I'm grateful we had the full 5 players. This was one great experience I had at the retreat.
This was another game I managed to bring to the table.
I don't think I have ever won a game of The Great Zimbabwe. We had a five player game, the max.
I went with a money first approach. I took a god which gave me money every round. I also took a specialist which let me deposit money for a 50% interest rate every round. I was aggressive in taking cards, which increased my victory requirement.
Cindy took the god which let her collect all money spent on using monuments as transportation hubs. This made her a ton of money, and at the same time denied all of us a side income. I think this god is powerful in the late game, and also when there are more players. It is also powerful when there are few rivers or they are not well connected. Han took the god which let him use an exhausted resource a second time. This didn't seem like much in the early game, but this was critical in the late game. It helped him win the game. The late game is often about fighting for turn order. Everyone is fighting for resources in order to be able to upgrade monuments. If you are late in turn order, or sometimes even when you are just not first in turn order, you will lose because the resources your need are depleted by the time it is your turn. Han's pick of his god is a long-term strategy, helping him greatly in the final rounds. He didn't need to worry about resources being depleted.
On the point scoring board, the cubes are the points, and the discs are the victory requirements.
That red Level-1 monument could be squeezed between the green Level-2 and white Level-4 monuments because of a specialist power which let Xiang Yang (red) break the monument placement rules.
Our game took about 3 hours
One thing strange about Tribune is the box is slightly larger than the standard square box. It sits weird on my shelf because of this. My copy is an older edition. The newer edition has a different cover.
You place workers to collect cards and then you use cards to wrest for control of the six factions in the game. There are several objectives in the game, and you must fulfil a certain number to trigger the end of the game. If you are the only player fulfilling the required number, you automatically win. However, if multiple players achieve this, you need to do point calculation to see who wins.
We had a full 5-player game. Xiu Yi was first to get a Tribune, the hardest objective and also a mandatory objective, which meant he was closest to victory. At that point the other four of us immediately united to try to stop him, turning the game into a 4-vs-1. He could have won anyway. We discovered that in a particular round, had he just put all his pawns into the money bowl, he would have collected enough money to fulfil the $30 objective and thus win the game. In the subsequent round, that was what he did. However, in that round, both Dith and I managed to get Tribunes too, and we also achieved the required number of objectives. So it came down to victory points. Dith had the most, and thus he won the game. Tribune does not have any single thing that makes it particularly striking, but it does work very well as a whole. I'm glad I kept it in my collection.
The natural wood pawn is showing obvious signs of age.
Over the three days, I had 25 plays of 24 different games. 14 were new to me: Steam Power, Burst, Blood on the Clocktower, Fishing, Cthulhu Wars, Karakorum, Wine Cellar, 5 Towers, Just One, The Rich and the Good (Hab & Gut), The Gang, Little Fighters 2, Diced Veggies, Shackleton Base. My most memorable experience was Blood on the Clocktower. The simplest way to describe this game is this is an improved and more complex version of Werewolf. This type of game is usually not my thing, but I really enjoyed our session. Now I have a huge to-do list for my blog. So many new games to write about and so many photos to share.
The BGC retreat was a great getaway for me. I enjoyed myself playing so many different games, without any worry on my mind. There were lots of games and lots of fellow gamers to play with. It's a bit weird to refer to The Great Zimbabwe as simple fun. I must say that it is important that despite our busy work and life schedules, we make time for simple fun. We make time for small things we do for pure enjoyment.
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