108 Outlaws

108 Outlaws is a game from Daryl Chow of Origame. It is based on the Chinese classic novel Water Margin. I have been designing games based on the four Chinese classics, including Water Margin, so I was certainly interested in seeing Daryl's take on the topic. 

108 Outlaws is a tableau building game. All 108 characters of Water Margin are in the game. They are divided into 36 primary characters and 72 secondary characters. In addition to these characters, you have major and minor campaigns. These are objectives you try to fulfil to score points. During the game, you will draft character cards from a pool of available characters. You will play them into your personal tableau. Characters give you resources and all sorts of abilities. You will be using these resources and abilities to claim those major and minor campaigns. The game is played until someone has 12 characters in their tableau. 

The designer himself taught me the game

Minor and major campaigns

One impressive thing about the game is how all 108 characters are different. The secondary characters are all free to play, but to play a primary character you need to spend resources. Primary characters have scoring conditions. If you fulfil the conditions well by having the right cards in your tableau, they will give you many points. Resources are printed in the top left corner of a character card. When you play a character, the resource on the card becomes available to you. When you spend the resource, you rotate the card to a horizontal position. Some cards allow you to reset other cards. When reset, the resource becomes available again. 

Many characters give you some bonus or ability when they are played. Although many of them can be played for free, you would want to play them only when you can fully utilise their powers. This is a game that requires a fair bit of planning. The core actions may be simple, but the variety of card abilities makes this a mid-weight strategy game that requires meticulous planning. You want to draft the right cards which synergise well. You also want to play them at the right times and in the right order to maximise their potential. For example some cards require that you have certain resources, but you don't need to spend them, while others can be played only when you do spend those resources. You want to play the first type before the second, otherwise you would have already exhausted your resources. 

Claiming a major campaign is not easy at all. You need to have many resources ready. Since these are public objectives, you have to watch out for other players who may be going for the same campaign. Scoring conditions of the primary characters is another aspect you must consider. You want to make good use of these. Timing can be critical. You don't want to be caught still halfway executing your plan when someone else triggers the game end. 

Playing this feels like building a pyramid. To put together the combination of resources for a major campaign, you need several characters in play. If some of these are primary characters, you will need to have some other resources available first to be able to play them. The game feels a little solitaire. You will be busy planning your own tableau. Interaction is in the form of drafting cards from the centre. Sometimes you fight over characters. Sometimes over campaigns. 

Katana Spirits

Katana Spirits is a light strategy game from Singaporean designer Geoffrey Chia. This game uses several characters also found in other titles from Good Spirit Games. Many of Geoffrey's games have a Japanese theme. Katana Spirits is a game about training yourself as a fighter and then going out kick some gangster butt. This is a game which uses polyomino tiles. 

On your turn you must choose to train or to fight. Training means claiming a polyomino tile from the centre of the table. Fighting means spending these polyominoes to defeat gangsters and score points. Six cards are laid out at the centre of the table in a 2x3 grid. On each card there is one type of polyomino you can take. When you train, you move a shared pawn one step and claim a polyomino where it lands. How you move the pawn affects where the next player can move it to, and thus the kind of polyomino they can take. If you are able to perfectly fill your player board, you will score 1 point. You will want to try to do this, while at the same time you want to prevent your opponents from doing the same.

The gangsters are divided into three tiers - minions, lieutenants, and bosses. There are many different types of minions and only three of them are available at any one time. Whenever one gets defeated, a new one will be drawn from the deck. There are exactly three types of lieutenants and two types of bosses. These are fixed, which means you can plan precisely when and how to defeat them, and which one you want to aim for. You cannot do such planning for the minions. If there is a specific minion you want to defeat, you'd better do it before somebody else makes their move. For every lieutenant you want to fight, you must have defeated two minions. For every boss you want to fight, you must have defeated two lieutenants. The game ends when one boss is defeated or when the minion deck is exhausted.

Defeating a gangster is just spending polyominoes. The total value of the polyominoes must match or exceed the strength of the gangster you want to defeat. Ideally you want it to be a perfect match. If you overspend, it means you have overstretched yourself and you will take one injury. When the game ends, if you still have injury, you will lose points. During the game you may skip turns to heal yourself.

Health tracker

All the gangsters you defeat are worth points. They have certain properties, and some of them give you extra points based on these properties. So there is an element of set collection when you defeat gangsters. Some gangsters give you ongoing abilities, for example you can move the shared pawn an additional step, or when you heal you heal an extra step.

Katana Spirits is a light strategy game which will also work as a family game. This will work with a casual crowd as it is not complex. You don't directly fight your opponents, but there is plenty of player interaction. You affect which polyominoes your opponents can take, and you will also compete for certain minions. There are several small things you can do to annoy your opponents, especially the player after you. 

Thailand Board Game Show 2025: Quick Takes Part 3

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. 

Prowl: Clans & Cunning

Prowl: Clans & Cunning is a game from Singapore, designed by Russell Wee and published by Playlogue. It is a card game set in a fantastical Japanese Warring States period. There are four factions in the game and you secretly support one of them. During the game you influence the strengths of the factions. At the end of the game, if the faction you support is the strongest, you win. 

During game setup the relative strengths of the four factions are randomly determined. Everyone draws six cards. The cards come in four suits matching the four factions. Each card is a fighter with its own power. During the game you do not draw cards. These six cards are all you have. 

Of these six cards, you start off picking one of them to become the faction you support. You place that card face-down before you, keeping it secret. Now you only have five cards left. Each turn you must play a card to perform an action. You will only have 5 actions in the whole game. There are three types of action. The basic one is playing a card and using its power. There are two parts to the card power, and you can use them in any order. You get to strengthen the faction of the card, i.e. increasing its rank. You also use the power described by the card text. These powers vary greatly, and there is a theme to each of the four factions. 

The second action type is swapping your faction card. Play your card face-down to become your new faction card, and reveal then discard the old faction card. The third action type is accusing an opponent of supporting a specific faction. When you do this, you discard a card face-up without strengthening the faction or using the card power. The opponent being accused must answer truthfully. If you guess right, you may choose to steal the king token (a tiebreaker token), or you may force your opponent to change his faction card next round. 

Throughout the game you will try to manipulate the relative strengths of the factions, hopefully making your faction the strongest. If you are able to guess your opponents' factions, it can help tremendously. It is possible that multiple players support the same faction. If you see that someone seems to be helping your faction win, chances are he's on the same side. However, there can only be one winner. This is when the competition for the king token (the tiebreaker) becomes important. One twist is, in this situation, if your shared faction is the strongest but neither of you have the king token, both of you will lose, and victory goes to the next strongest faction. If you feel confident about that opponent supporting the same faction as you, you can accuse him and force him to change his faction card. But then if he is smart, maybe he will have a card of that same faction on standby for exactly this play. 

To be honest I didn't have high expectations when I listened to the game overview. Even after reading the rules, I wasn't convinced this would be interesting. Nothing in the rules pops out to say "interesting mechanism". It all seems to be something I've seen somewhere else before. Only by sitting down to play the game I discovered how delicious it is. This is a short game, short enough to feel like a microgame. You only have 5 actions, so every action feels important. This is a compact game, as in you have few decisions to make, but there are many considerations behind each decision. There are multiple possibilities to contemplate. Even that first decision during setup is not easy - which faction to support. When you choose a card to be your faction, you are already sacrificing its strength. That's one card fewer you can use for strengthening the faction. The faction being secret is clever. You do have to be careful not to be too blatantly supporting a specific faction, because there are consequences. Or maybe you are bluffing? Or you pretend to be bluffing?

This is a card with a quirky power. You give it to a target player, and he must then discard a card. If you think deeper about this, this can be a powerful play in the second last round, potentially disrupting someone else's perfect plan. Often players will keep a strong card as the last card, so that they can make a solid final push. If you play this Untrained Acolyte on them, you not only spoil their plans, you now also know exactly what card they have in hand for the final turn. 

The cards are large, showcasing the art

I had thought Prowl would be a simple light game, but it turned out to be a compact, clever and thinky microgame. Few actions, but there are mind games and plenty of tactics to explore. 

Pinocchio at Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore

Pinocchio is one of the Asian games featured at a special exhibition at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore - Let's Play: The Art and Design of Asian Games. This exhibition runs from Sep 2025 to Jun 2026. Big thank you to Casey from To The Table for introducing Pinocchio. 

There is going to be a copy of Pinocchio you can play at the museum. If you are in Singapore, go check out this exhibition. 

Pinocchio has a serial number of 071, which means there are many other games you can check out. 

Asian Games: River Woods, Nightmares of Sushi, TOPPEN, Flow, Wire

This time I'll introduce some games from Singapore and Japan. The Japanese games were actually introduced by Tom from Taiwan. He regularly attends conventions in Taiwan, China and Japan, and he helps promote interesting games he finds. No Taiwanese games in this post, but I will write about some Taiwanese games soon. 

River Woods is a title from Singapore designed by my friend Geoffrey Chia of Good Spirit Games. This is his first time publishing a Euro style game, and this has been a labour of love. 

This is one of the possible game setups called the Flower. You have hex tiles of different terrain types. As you play, you will add terrain tiles and the play area will expand. 

This is your main character. During the game you may recruit up to 2 assistants. The three disks numbered 1 to 3 are your action disks. The numbers mean action points. Every round you will spend them all. There are three action types in the game, as shown at the bottom of your character card. The first icon on the left means adding terrain tiles. You must do this at least once during a round. The second icon means recruiting assistants. The third icon means movement.

In this game you complete missions to score points. There are publicly known missions you compete for. You also have secret missions in hand. When you complete a secret mission you must play the card so that others can also try to complete it. However a mission that has been completed will become harder to complete for the next player. The point value will also degrade.

That mission at the bottom right requires you to have three specific resources in hand. When you move your pieces around the play area you can collect resources. You may keep at most three. If you get a fourth resource, you must discard one of the three in hand.

Another mission type requires your pieces to be standing on specific terrain types of certain sizes. 

Assistants you recruit have various abilities. They also allow you to collect specific resources. Assistants are your only way to collect resources. Expect to fire and recruit new assistants during the game, especially if you intend to complete the missions related to resources. 

This is mostly an open information game. There is no direct attacking, but this is a highly competitive game because space is limited and blocking happens all the time. You need to fight for the terrain tiles you need. 

This is another game from Geoffrey, Nightmares of Sushi.

This is a simultaneous action selection game. Everyone has the same set of sushi cards and also the same set of special ability cards. Every round you must offer a sushi card at your shop face-down, and you may play a special ability card. Before the sushi is revealed, everyone must decide which shop to visit. You may visit anyone else's shop or a neutral shop, but you may not visit your own shop. Only if no one buys your sushi, then you must eat your own sushi.

Some sushi are good and some are bad. The good ones give you points while the bad ones deduct points.

These are some of the special ability cards. Some of these only take effect if you are the only player to play it. If two or more players play the same card, they are wasted. So this is a game about trying to guess your opponents' intentions. You can discuss, negotiate and lie. You can even try to collaborate. However this is not a cooperative game. You try to work out what people are thinking. Sometimes you try to mislead them too. Since this is a simultaneous action selection game, if you can guess your opponents' plans correctly, you will have a huge advantage.

When you eat good sushi, you score points using the board on the left. If you eat bad sushi, you "score points" too but using the board on the right. Your final score is your good sushi score minus your bad sushi score. However if you get so good at eating bad sushi that you reach 10 bad sushi points, you win immediately because you are legend. 

Towards late game you will have more and more information. You would have seen which cards the other players have used, and this helps you in deciding which card to play next and which shop to visit. At the start of the game everyone removes one card from their sushi deck. So even if everyone has perfect memory, when you get to the final round, there are still two possibilities and you cannot be 100% sure what cards your opponents have left.

TOPPEN is a 2-player abstract game from Japan. The theme is mountain-climbing.

At the start of the game you lay out the tiles to form the play area. On your turn you move one of your pieces one step. You can stack it on top of an adjacent piece or stack. You can move it to an empty space. You only move one piece. If it is the top piece of a stack, the rest of the stack stay in place. You must never break the play area into two. The play area will gradually shrink. 

At this point the green/yellow player has only one piece he can move. If you can't make a move, the game still goes on. Your opponent makes multiple moves in a row. The game ends when there is only one stack left. Whoever's piece is on top wins. 

You need a hand in the photo to get a sense of how big the tiles are.

The winner is the green/yellow player

Flow is a game from Japan, by Jun Matsuoka (DICE Board Game Club). This too is a 2-player abstract game. 

You goal is to form a straight line with four of your pieces. It can be vertical, horizontal or diagonal. On your turn you must play a piece, and then you may move any one of your pieces. Moving your piece means pushing it in the direction it is pointing at. If any other pieces are in the way, all of them will be pushed one step away. You may be pushing one whole row of pieces. If any piece you are going to push is blocked by the edge of the board, then you can't push.

When I played, I couldn't get past the instinct of moving the piece I had just placed. The piece you move is not restricted to the one you have just played. There are many possibilities when you consider other existing pieces. You should use both an existing piece and the new piece to help you change the situation on the board and ultimately to win.

Wire is from the same designer and publisher, and it is also a 2-player abstract game. 

Two of the edges of the game board are blue, and the other two are red. One player plays blue, and the other plays red. To win, you must use your pieces to connect the two edges of your colour. On your turn, you either place a piece, or you rotate one of your pieces by 90 degrees.

While you are trying to complete the connection, you must also think about blocking your opponent. The situation you see in the photo above can only happen in beginner games. Blue allowed red to complete the connection too easily. 

I was red and I won, but this was just a demo game and I'm positive the teacher had let me win.