BGG file uploaders

A blog post on BoardGameGeek.com listed the games with the most files uploaded, and also users who have uploaded the most files. I know I have uploaded many concise reference sheets but I did not realise I am among the top 20 people who have uploaded files to BGG. I'm ranked #17. I just need two more files to go up to #16 ha ha. It feels good to contribute in some small way to this community of ours.  

Coinsides #4

 

The latest version of Coinside is on Kickstarter! This is a luxury accessory which works well with role playing games, because one Coinside works as multiple types of dice, from D2 to D20. And it looks amazing! 

Check it out here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ex1stgames/cosmic-coinsides-14-dice-in-one-luxury-spinner 

boardgaming in photos: Taiwan trip, Elfenland, Pax Renaissance

June this year I visited Taiwan with my family. Taiwan was where I got into the boardgaming hobby. I first learned about the world of German games there. I became a fan. That was in 2003. I worked and lived in Taipei from 2003 to 2004. After falling in love with boardgames, I also introduced them to my colleagues. We used to play over lunch time, hurriedly finishing our meals. I remember once when a public holiday was declared due to a typhoon, we ended up meeting up to play, because that typhoon turned out to be less severe than expected. 

Well before the trip I arranged to meet up with my Taiwanese friends. Unfortunately many of them were not in town when I was there. Only Crystal and Jessy were able to meet up. The last time I visited Taipei was 10 years ago, in 2015. I hope the next time won't take another 10 years. 

We played Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

In 2004 when I visited a night market it Taipei, I bought some cheap plastic chips similar to these above. I sometimes use these when the boardgame I play uses paper money. For example Power Grid. I have been using my cheap poker chips for more than 20 years. In recent years, they play a new role. I use them when designing and playtesting games. By now, a few of the poker chips have gone missing, but most of them are still there and they still work fine. I don't really need to buy more. I bought these two sets above mostly out of nostalgia. These two use a different colour scheme from my old sets. 

During the trip when I have the opportunity to visit bookstores I check out their boardgame sections. I ended up buying these games above. The one at the lower right was bought at a museum in Kaohsiung. I did not research boardgame stores in Taiwan and I did not plan to visit them. I considered visiting Witch House, which was where I learned about German games more than 20 years ago. I used to play games there regularly. However I found out that now they only have boardgame time on weekends. The only day I could visit them was a Wednesday. So eventually I decided not to go. 

Of the four games above, I have played them all by now. They are all in my queue to write about. In the past ten years I have not been buying many games. At least not by gamer standards. However in the most recent few years, I have started buying more again, and the reasons I buy games have changed. I no longer buy just because I think it's a game I'll like. Sometimes I buy a game because I want to see how other people design and produce a game. I buy because I too am a designer and publisher now, and I want to learn. The game is reference material. This time in Taiwan, I bought games not just as games but also as souvenirs. In different places, and with different people, who have different personal experiences and histories, you get different kinds of games. The games are a snapshot and a reflection of a time and place, a culture, a society. I find that uniqueness fascinating. 

Elfenland is an old game by Alan Moon of Ticket to Ride fame. It was the 1998 Spiel des Jahres winner, 6 years before Ticket to Ride won it. I checked my records, and the previous time I played this was 2007. In 1998, there weren't any heavy Eurogames like we do now. When playing games from the late 90's, I find them clean and simple, yet strategic and smart. They feel like a breath of fresh air. You don't get overburdened by too many rules and subsystems. I wonder whether I'm just being the nostalgic old fart. 

Elfenland is played over four rounds. Your goal is to visit as many cities as possible. You place transportation tokens on paths. This opens them up for us, and at the same time also determines the modes of transportation you must use. To travel, you spend cards, which are the various modes of transportation - dragons, clouds, rafts, unicorns, boars and so on. 

I have played a physical copy of Pax Renaissance before. This is a game about the Age of Renaissance in Europe. The board is divided into 10 major kingdoms. You buy cards which allow you to do all sorts of things, like taking control of kingdoms, changing them to republics (or back), creating armies, initiating wars, influencing religions and so on. 

There are four ways to win. As you manipulate the political scene in Europe, you must think carefully which one to go for. While you work towards that, you need to remember to stop your opponents from achieving their goals too. Achieving a winning condition doesn't mean you immediately win. The victory condition needs to be enabled first, by buying a comet card. Comet cards only start appearing in the second half of the game. 

I was pretty extreme in this particular game. All the cards I bought were for the western half of Europe. I had no influence in eastern Europe, but when I had so many cards for the western half, I could do many many things every turn. When you take an action to activate cards, you must choose either east or west. 

At this point 5 of the kingdom cards had been claimed.

This winning condition is globalisation. 

game accessory: Coinsides

Coinsides is a nifty little tool from Japan, designed by EX FIRST GAMES. It is a large metal coin, and it can be used as multiple types of dice. 

The two sides of the coin are different. Using this side, if you only look at the numbers 1 to 4, you use it as a D4 (four-sided die). If you look at numbers 1 to 8, then it is a D8. If you look closely, you can see Roman numerals going up to 20. So this is also a D20. You "roll" the die by spinning the coin and then stopping it with a finger. Once stopped, the first number to the left of your finger is your result. 

Coinsides comes with this little pouch. 

When you rest Coinsides on the pouch, you can use it to track hit points or any other stat. Just like how sometimes dice are used. When rested on the pouch, you can avoid accidentally spinning it. The black mark on the pouch is used to indicate your hit point. When you need to adjust your hit point, just rotate the Coinsides accordingly. 

If you need to track a larger number, you can use this little shuriken. One side shows 0, 10 and 20, and the other side 30, 40 and 50. With this shuriken you can track up to 59. 

This is how you use Coinsides. If I use it as a D8, then I have just rolled a 3, because the first number to the left of my finger is a 3. If I'm using it as a D20, then I've just rolled 15. The XV next to my finger is the Roman numeral for 15. 

RPG players will probably like this. Check out the Coinsides official webpage.

Ready to battle

Do you recognise this game? The answer is...

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This comical drawing is a birthday card from younger daughter Chen Rui. She combined Dancing Queen with the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure internet meme. I found it absolutely hilarious. I showed it to the original artist Edwin, and he had a good laugh too. His pretty girl is now more muscular than The Rock. We both thought maybe we should turn this into a game merchandise. What do you think? 

BoardGameSet upgraded game components - Dungeon Petz

BoardGameSet from Hungary contacted me to introduce their boardgame components upgrade kits. They produce upgraded game components for many games, and they use 3D printing. I normally don't buy such upgrade kits for my games, because I find the standard, basic game components good enough. For example for Agricola, I prefer the cubes in the first edition which represent the various farm animals. In later versions when you get the animeeples in the shapes of sheep, boars and cattle, it feels a little tedious to me to manage them all. I like the simplicity and practicality of the wooden cubes, even if they are not as pretty. BoardGameSet was willing to send me review copies all the way from Europe, and I was about to politely decline, until I saw... the poops!  

I'm referring to the poops at the bottom right. Dungeon Petz is a game about managing a monster pet shop. It is designed by Vlaada Chvatil, and it is a sequel to Dungeon Lords. Poops is a very real and practical aspect of managing pets, and it is well represented in this game. This photo above shows all the upgraded game components that come with the BoardGameSet Dungeon Petz set. From the top left, they are: mutation markers, the start player marker, stress markers, meat-type food, vegetable-type food, gold and of course, poop! 

I like the detail on the components. 

This is a comparison against the original components. The only one in the upgrade set which I don't like is the start player marker, because it's too ugly. I know monsters are supposed to be ugly, but this one is too much for me. 

The components come in a pack like this. 

I had not played Dungeon Petz for quite a long time. Asking for a review copy of the upgraded components gave me a reason to bring it to the table again. I asked younger daughter Chen Rui to play with me. It was her first time. She said it was super stressful. Taking care of pets was a lot of work. We have three cats at home, so my wife and I know well the work that comes with owning pets. Our children mostly just know how to play with them. The last time I played Dungeon Petz was before we had cats.

We did a two player game, so we needed to use neutral player pieces. We used the yellow player pieces - those yellow imps blocking some locations on the board. My reluctance about upgraded components is due to whether they are going to be troublesome to handle. Are they going to be harder to pick up or  stack together? Will they roll all over the table and annoy the hell out of me? Now that I've tried this Dungeon Petz set, I found that I did not have such difficulties. The components certainly looked prettier and enhanced the play experience. 

In Dungeon Petz everyone starts with a free cage which is a little dirty, and this is represented by having one piece of poop in it during game setup. This was my first monster pet in the game we played. By this point it had pooped twice and thus added more "fertilizer" to my pet shop. 

The cards represent the needs of the monster pets. They need to eat, they need to poop, they need to vent their anger, they need to release their magical powers, and sometimes they fall sick. 

This is the player board. In this photo the upgraded component you can see is the gold. Imps and gold are grouped together to form teams of various sizes. These teams go to the main board to perform actions. In the original game gold is represented by wooden coins. The upgraded gold is gold bars. 

Gold bars stacked together look impressive.

Baby monsters on the main board that you can buy. 

I sold the monster which I used to keep in the cage on the left. There was a lot of poop left behind and I could only get my staff to do the cleaning now that the cage was vacated. 

I divided my imps and gold into 6 team, hoping I might be able to perform 6 actions at the main board. This is a worker placement game. These teams are your workers. Each team has the opportunity to do one thing. 

Chen Rui had this monster for a short while only. It got overly stressed and died. The amount of stress a pet can take depends on its size. The larger it is, the more stress it can endure. This one above was still a baby, so two points of stress was enough to get it killed. Stress comes from being sick, going hungry or feeling lonely when nobody is around to play with you.  

These are artifacts. That whip on the right was the best performing artifact in our game. I was the one who bought it, and I benefited greatly from it. The power of the whip is it gives you half a point at pet shows. From the second round onwards there will be pet shows every round, and if your pets do well you will earn points. In a 2-player game, 1st place gets 6pts and 2nd place gets 2pts. 4pts is significant, even more so when this is happening round after round. I did not expect my pets to do well. The judging criteria did not match well with their temperaments. However Chen Rui's pets were not all that great either. Many rounds we fared equally poorly. The half point which the whip gave me pushed me into first place. This happened for many rounds, and I scored many more points that I otherwise would have without the whip. 

These are minions and they are used for pet show scoring. 

After the game ended, we placed all pet buyers in a row, together with the pets they had purchased. It was nice to see our monsters find suitable owners. 

This was Chen Rui's favourite monster. She wanted to take a photo of it with the heart-shaped poop arrangement. 

If you are interested in boardgame upgrade kits like this, go check out BoardGameSet. There are many other games they have created upgrade kits for. They sell some commonly used game components too. https://www.boardgameset.com/ 

The White Box - game design toolkit

The White Box is not a game, but it can potentially be turned into many games. It is a box of components that can be used by game designers to work on their ideas. It also contains a book - a collection of articles about game design and game publishing.  

Upon opening the box you will find three punch boards, two of which are printed with different colours and icons, and the last one being blank. There are round, square and hexagonal counters. The coloured tokens are in 5 of the 6 player colours. Most other components come in 6 colours. I guess if you need tokens for the white player, you can use round tokens from the blank punch board. 

Inside the box you have big and small wooden cubes, plastic dice, wooden Carcassonne-style meeples, and plastic coins. Some additional zip-lock bags are provided too. 

I prefer game components to be grouped by player colour, so I eventually arranged the content of the box this way. I kept the big cubes separate from the others, because they are too big and unwieldy. The coins come in eight different colours. Six of the colours are the player colours, the other two are gold and silver. I guess the gold and silver coins are meant to be used as currency, while the other coins are to be player owned components. 

The book has about 200 pages. The articles cover many topics related to boardgame design and boardgame publishing. Most are written by Jeremy Holcomb, some are by other contributors. My initial thought was this book was probably the most valuable part of the whole package. If you are a game designer and need components to put together a prototype, you can always borrow from your other games, or buy materials from bookstores or handicraft stores. So I felt the knowledge was probably more valuable. I have not read many books and articles on boardgame design, nor have I listened to many podcasts and webinars, but even by now they already sound mostly similar. They seem to talk about the same things, and I don't often hear new thinking or different approaches. I have finished reading the book in The White Box. Most of the content is already familiar to me. I have read them elsewhere. The articles don't go as deep as some other books I have read. For a new designer, they will still be useful. The articles cover a wide range of topics. Those related to game publishing are more useful to me, because I have not read much on this topic. So I did get some value out of the book. 

Component list

These are most of the components in the box. The blue is quite dark, and under low light it is hard to tell apart from the black. The meeples are rather small, much smaller than those in Carcassonne. 

The green components

I now occasionally dabble in game design. I have a few small game design projects running concurrently. I work on them when I have free time and when I feel like it. I don't set any deadline for myself. I don't have expectations that I will finish every project, nor do I expect they will all get published eventually. I just enjoy the process of trying out my ideas, and seeing whether I can make decent games out of them. It is mostly self-entertainment, which in Malaysia is sometimes called "syok sendiri", roughly translated as self-pleasing. 

One such game design project I am working on is Rebels. The backstory is earth has been conquered by aliens, and now mankind is organising a resistance. At major cities around the world, human teams assemble to search for and destroy the alien hive in the city. My game board is a map of Kuala Lumpur. The humans try to find the alien hive. The alien overlords have two drones and two ground squads. Their objective is to hunt down and exterminate all the human teams. 

For my prototype I drew on a piece of manila card, and used small paper cups as buildings. For the rest of the components I borrowed game pieces from Age of Steam. You can see them in the photo above - all those components in the left half. The cubes are the human teams. The black disc is the alien hive. Yellow discs are drones, red discs are ground squads. Now that I have The White Box to play with, I can return all my Age of Steam components, and need not worry about losing them. The blue and black cubes are too similar, so I will need to change one of the colours. The White Box doesn't have purple, so I substitute that with green. 

I have thought about using meeples to represent the human teams, but eventually decided against it. If I use meeples, I will not be able to resist the urge to position all of them as standing upright. I will create unnecessary work for myself. So cubes they shall remain. Cubes are always upright no matter how I knock them over. 

Later I decided not to use the black disc as the alien hive. I used this token with crosshairs. I think this adds to the theme. In this game the hive and the human teams are hidden within the buildings, i.e. under the paper cups. The alien drones and alien ground squads are always visible as they move across the tops of the buildings. This is a 2-player-only game. When the human player moves, the alien player turns around so that he cannot see where the human teams are. He needs to use his drones and ground squads to hunt down the human teams. In this photo above, the green human team has found the alien hive, so the human player wins. 

One problem with this design is it is a lot of hassle. It's hard for the human player to keep track of all his teams. Also the alien player becomes rather bored waiting for the human player to take his turn. A lot of finger twiddling. I still need to solve these problems. Perhaps this game works better as a computer game or mobile game. 

When a human team moves, you pick up one of the cubes, then move it to a location which also has a cube of the same colour, or to a location adjacent to one of the cubes. A human team may not be broken up. The cubes must stay together or adjacent to one another. Let's take the white team as an example. Its starting location was Low Yat, and one team member has moved to Jalan Alor. If the target destination is Maybank, your next move will be to move one of the cubes at Low Yat to KL Tower. In the subsequent turn, you move the last remaining cube from Low Yat to Maybank. Throughout this process, the team has never been broken up.