Trash Traders

Trash Traders is a game from Hong Kong. You are raccoons. Now this is not a game about raccoons’ natural habitat or ecology or saving the planet. Instead it is about speculating in cryptocurrency and losing all your money. Raccoons love digging through trash so in this game you trade trash stocks. You win by having as little money left as possible. 

This is a take that type card game. You start with some money. Many of the cards in the game let you manipulate the crypto price. On your turn you may play a card to use its power. There are all sorts of powers. Changing the crypto price is just one of them. You then must buy or sell crypto. Everybody knows crypto is trash and normally they will be worth nothing when the market crashes and the game ends. So you want to waste all your money on crypto. Two things make this a little challenging. If you have spent all your money buying crypto and can’t buy any more, you will be forced to sell. The golden rule is every turn you must either buy or sell. You can’t do nothing. You might end up selling at a high price and making a profit, which is bad in this game. 

The other complication is some crypto are protected from the crash. They are still worth something at game end and not zero. When you buy crypto, you buy from a face down deck, so you don’t know whether the card you draw is a real trash crypto. If you get a “good” crypto, you will want to try to sell it and then use the money to buy hopefully real trash crypto. That takes two more turns which you might not have. The game ends immediately when a market crash card is drawn. Maybe you only have time to reduce the value of those “good” crypto. 

This is a silly party game that is good for casual players. There is some market manipulation and tactics. This is not just dumb attacking. I probably shouldn’t call it a take that game. It is more than that. It is still a simple game. It funded successfully on Kickstarter, and it has several expansions that offer different ways of playing. 

Expansions

Too Many Exits

Too Many Exits is a game from Korea. It is based on the horror movie trope of a bunch of teenagers being hunted down by a mad killer. Like the story about friends running away from a bear, you don't need to outrun the bear. You just need to outrun your friends. This is a single loser game. When one player gets killed, everyone else survives and wins. 

Characters you get to play

The game is set up with a corridor and five locked doors. The corridor is an infinite one. You are all in the corridor and the killer is coming after you. You keep running away, but the killer also keeps coming after you, until he catches at least one of you. The five doors represent doors you might try to escape from. Every door needs a different key. When you find a key, you can try to unlock a door. You get to escape only if the key matches. Otherwise in your haste you drop the key (i.e. you discard the card). Escaping is not permanent. You only get temporarily respite for the current round. Once the killer catches someone, that person takes injury, and you start a new round. You go back to the starting line. The game ends only when a player takes the third injury. 

You have one hand card. On your turn you draw a card then play a card. Super simple. Cards have all sorts of abilities, e.g. slowing down an opponent, or picking a card from the discard pile. Some cards are Keeper cards. Keeper refers to the killer. When you draw a Keeper card you must play it and bad things happen. Once everyone takes a turn, it is the killer's turn to move. 

The premise is fun, but I find the game draggy and the novelty wears off quickly. This is mostly a casual party game. It'll work well with non gamers but I think gamers will not find this interesting. 

Normal side of a character

Panic side means you miss a turn

Roti Canai

Roti Canai is from Faculty of Fun, the makers of Nasi Lemak. Nasi Lemak has been highly successful in Malaysia. It is simple and accessible. It has reached many people. I often hear people tell me they've played this fun game, and they sound like they want to say Uno or Monopoly, but the game they want to tell me about is Nasi Lemak. 

Roti Canai, like Nasi Lemak, is a light card game designed for casual players. It is the kind of game you can teach in less that two minutes. Everyone starts with a hand of cards, and your goal is to get rid of all your cards. 

Every round, the lead player rolls two dice. The dice indicate which type of roti your customer is ordering. In the photo above, that would be roti sardine and roti bomb. Everyone must play two or three cards face down to fulfil the customer's order. 

If you don't have the right cards, you can choose to draw cards before you play them. You can draw as many as you want. You don't necessarily stop when you have enough of the required cards. Since the cards are played face down, you can lie about your cards, putting down roti which don't match the customer's order. This helps you get rid of your cards, but there is risk of getting caught. 

Once everyone has played cards, beginning from the lead player, everyone has the option of challenging one card belonging to another player. If anyone is caught lying, all his cards go back to his hand, and he must draw two more cards. However if the challenging player is wrong, he must draw two cards as a penalty. This is a game of bluffing. Sometimes you play a mix of right and wrong cards hoping to get away with it, and using up your cards as quickly as you can. Sometimes you play the right cards and try to trick your opponent into challenging you. 

Most cards in the game are different types of roti, but there are also rat cards and broom cards. Rat cards are traps. If anyone challenges your card and it is a rat card, he will be the one being penalised and he draws as many cards as there are rats on the card. However if he happens to have a broom ready, he can give the rat card to someone else, who will take the penalty instead. 

This is a very simple game. In both cases of Nasi Lemak and Roti Canai, I know I am not the intended audience. I will pick these games if I am playing with a group of non gamers or casual gamers. However in Roti Canai there is one element which gamers will find interesting. It is the bluffing and psychological play. This part is about gaming your opponents and not the game system. How well do you read your opponents? How well can you bluff and get away with playing the wrong cards? 

Shady Lady

Shady Lady is yet another game by Kaya Miyano I have played this year. This is a very Japanese style game - minimalistic but clever. It has a juicy element of trying to read your opponents and sometimes cunningly misleading them. 

You have a hand of three cards. There are only two types of sets in this game, three cards of the same value, or three cards in sequence. Cards are numbered 1 to 4, then 6 to 9. There are no 5's. On your turn, you have three options. You can draw a card then discard a card. One thing interesting is everyone has his own discard pile, and you can draw from the draw deck or from anyone’s discard pile, even your own. That means you have many options, especially when there are more players. The next thing you can do is to "Try". That means showing a set that you have made, and betting yours is the strongest. If it indeed is, you score a point. However if someone else shows a stronger set, then he scores the point instead. You need to go around the table once. It is possible that one other player shows a stronger set, and then that in turn gets beaten by yet another player. After all is done, everyone who has shown his set must discard the whole set then draw three new random cards. Only one person will score. 

The third option is to "Jack". This simply means making a bet that someone has a valid set. You point at that person, and he must show his hand. If he does indeed have a set, then you score a point. He discards his hand and draws three new cards from the draw deck. If you are wrong, he also discards his cards and redraws, but he scores the point. Because of this "Jack" mechanism, if you are very unlucky in getting sets, you can pretend to have made them and trick someone else into catching you, only to end up giving you a point. Or you can spend your effort catching others. You'll score points as long as you read them correctly, even if your hand is horrible. 

The cards are glow-in-the-dark. I don't know why. Marketing gimmick?

To win the game you need to get to three points. The rules are very simple so this is easy to teach. The game creates many opportunities for fun player interaction. Making sets is simple and everyone understands it immediately. But the game is not only about making sets. It is very much about observing and reading your opponents. Being able to make a strong set doesn't guarantee you will score. If someone else catches you before you declare "Try", he gets the point and you discard your set and start all over. You want to watch which face-up cards others are taking. If you think they have a set, catch them. It might be an easy point for you. But of course there is risk too. Do you keep taking face-up cards to give the impression you have found a good card for your set? When you take two 9's one after the other, everyone will be wondering whether you already have three 9's, the strongest set in the game. The only way they can stop you from scoring is to catch you by declaring "Jack". 

The art is by Sai Beppu, possibly the most popular boardgame artist in Japan. This is a bold design that's very different. I enjoy how she surprises us and offers new experiences. 

Shady Lady is easy for casual players to pick up and have fun with. It is also something gamers can enjoy because of the psychological play. I suspect this works better when you have a bigger group. 

LOOP

LOOP is designed by Takashi Saito, who is from Nagasaki, Japan. I bought this game when I was traveling in Nagasaki. Because of this the game will have a special place in my collection.

This is a climbing card game, like Tichu and Big 2. You play different combinations of cards and your goal is to play all your cards. The most important twist in this game is you don’t play independent rounds. Every second round that you play, you use the exact same hands from the previous round. However every hand will be played by a different player. So if you have friends who like to complain about bad hands, tell them to play this game. If you think I won just because I had a lucky hand, let’s see what you can do with this exact same hand.

Cards come in three suits, and they are numbered 1 to 15. There are only a few combos you can play. You can play single cards, pairs, triplets, and straight flushes of two or more cards. Just like in Big 2, you must follow the combo type played by the lead player. A round doesn’t end when one player goes out. You need to determine the ranking of all players, so you need to play until all but one go out. This way you have the positions of all players. Everyone scores points based on his position. Now this is for the first of two rounds. In the second round scoring works differently. Cards are not reshuffled. You keep all the hands that have been dealt in the first round. Beginning with the last placed player, you pick a different seat to sit in. So you will play with somebody else’s hand in the second round. This means in the second round you know what kind of hands everybody has, and you can plan accordingly. This is an interesting twist to the genre. The scoring in this second round is different too. It is not just based on your ranking. It is based on whether you have improved the ranking of the hand you have, compared to the previous round. If you can make the lowest ranked card take the top spot, you will earn many points. If you are playing the top ranked hand and you are just maintaining the top spot, you don't gain much. If you do worse, you will lose points! 

Another interesting twist is the number 8. In some ways, it is a trump card. If anyone plays a combo that includes an 8, or if he plays a single 8, he wins the run and nobody else can play any more. He becomes the lead player for the next run. 8 is in the middle. If someone has played a 9, you can’t play your 8 to win the run. The 8 is strong, but not always.

The 8 can be used in another way. At the start of a round you must remove two cards from your hand. Usually you remove weak cards. However if you remove an 8, during the round, you may perform a special action by revealing that 8. You flip the strength tile to the other side. From that point onwards, 1 is the strongest, while 15 is the weakest. If you have a hand of low cards, and you have an 8, you can choose to use the 8 this way. Now there is a risk that someone else might also have an 8. He can use his 8 to flip the strength tile back to the original side. 

The game comes with fancy score trackers

LOOP introduces several twists to the climbing game genre, and they work well together. Most people are familiar with climbing games, so this is something you can more easily convince non gamer friends to try. I would say the play experience is still mostly that of a climbing game. If this is not your thing, the game probably won't change your mind. I find it novel that you get to play while knowing almost perfectly everyone's hands in the game (I say almost because there are two cards discarded). I have seen one round when the lead player was able to play in such a way that he went out without anyone else being able to play a single card! Information is power! I have also experienced myself that due to knowing the hands in the game I played my new hand in a different way, allowing me to do much better than the player who had it in the first round. 

The artwork is a little weird. I don't really understand what it is trying to say. Maybe it's trying to say deja vu. What if you get to live your life all over again, while knowing what has happened the first time you lived it. What would you do differently? Even the inside of the box cover has some art, which I also do not understand. But I like it. Maybe I'm just pretending to be sophisticated. 

There is an international edition of LOOP now, from iello, and the rules are a little different. This is good news for gamers outside of Japan. I'm happy I got myself this weird art version. 

Dog Poker

Dog Poker is first in a series of animal poker games from Japan by Kaya Miyano. I bought both Dog Poker and Cat Poker when traveling, and only later realised I already own Cat Poker. Cat Poker is the original Japanese version of Panda Panda. Although named poker, neither game is similar to poker. Or maybe animals play poker differently. 

In Dog Poker every card is a dog. There are seven species, and the number of cards is different for the species. Some are common, some are rare. You collect cards using a draft and pass mechanism much like 7 Wonders. All cards are dealt out to the players at the start of a game. Every round you must pass some cards to your neighbour. In the first round you pass four cards, and every round this reduces. By the fourth and last round, you only pass one card. Then you do scoring based on the cards you have. 

I need to turn back the clock and talk about what happens before you start passing cards. Every card in the game, in addition to being a dog, also has two scoring criteria. One specifies the point value of a single dog. The other specifies the point value of a specific combination of dogs. At the start of the game, everyone chooses one card from their hand to be used for scoring at the end. That means everyone knows one specific scoring card and can prepare accordingly. At the start of every round, one scoring card is revealed. As the game progresses, players will have more and more information about which dogs and which combinations will score.

You will play several games in succession, until someone reaches 100 points. The player with the highest total score is the ultimate winner.

Playing this game is about deciding which cards and combinations to go for. You start with limited information so you can only make guesses. Combinations are attractive. When you try to make a combination, you are taking a gamble that your neighbour will pass you the cards you need. The cards your neighbour passes to you can be important information to help you guess what kind of combinations he is trying to make, and this which cards he will or will not pass to you. Choosing which cards to pass to your other neighbour can be quite a dilemma. You don’t want to unwittingly give him cards which help him score big, but if you keep a card which you think is critical, you might be forced to pass a card which is also useful to you. 

One funny situation we had was Chen Rui managing a huge combo at the end of the third round. That combo needed all seven cards. We still had a fourth round to play, which meant she must pass one of her cards. Her only hope was to get back the same card from her other neighbour. Unfortunately for her, that did not happen. She would’ve won the game if she received the right card.

I think this game should be played with exactly four. With fewer players, you need to create dumb bots to play for the missing players. They are just stacks of cards sitting between human players which you randomly draw cards from or insert cards into. When playing with bots you lose some player interaction. 

Similo

Similo is a cooperative card game that is doing well. There are many different decks with different themes and characters. So far I have played three of them. In this game one player is the clue giver and the rest are guessers. A grid of 4x3 is laid out. One of these cards is a secret goal which only the clue giver knows. The clue giver needs to provide information to the rest so that they can eventually identify the secret goal. 

Let’s take the historical figures deck as an example. All the cards in the deck are historical figures. The clue giver has a hand of cards. He has to play a card in order to give hints to the others. If a card is played normally, then it shares something in common with the secret goal. However if it is played sideways, then there’s something about it that’s different from the secret goal. Let’s say I’m the clue giver and the secret goal is Napoleon. I can play a female character sideways. I can play a military leader upright. I can play an Asian leader sideways. There are many aspects to every character. The hint I intend to give may not be interpreted correctly by the guessers. In the first round they must remove one character. In the second round two, then three, then four. By then they will have more clues. You can cross check the hints. Some will make you realise an earlier interpretation was incorrect. Every time you remove a character, if it is the secret goal, you lose immediately. 

There is a nice build-up. You must remove more and more characters. It is challenging for the clue giver to give hints well. The guessers need to discuss and debate ideas. The finale is always exciting. There will be only two cards left, and you must pick one. You may have many clues by then, but this last character likely has many similarities to the secret goal. That is why it has not been removed up to that point. 

This is the animal version

Ghosts and ghouls

All our clues were "not similar to"

It is satisfying to win. It is also fun when you lose. You will be asking the clue giver what his clues mean. This is the kind of game through which you get to know your friends better. You get to know how they think. 

The Kejap Food Game

The Kejap Food Game is not available for sale. You can get this as a free gift if you visit Kejap Food (a Malaysian fast food chain) and buy MYR 30 or more of food. While stocks last, of course. This is a simple, real-time game that is played in five minutes. It is a cooperative game. You work together to serve as many customers as you can within the time limit. 

Before a game starts, everyone gets a character card. Your card tells you which dice you manage and what role or roles you play. Depending on the number of players, you may need to manage up to three dice colours and you may have up to two roles. Let’s talk about how you serve a customer. 

The first step is taking an order. That just means revealing a card from the deck. You can have at most four active orders. You can’t reveal a new order until an existing one is fully served. An order consists of several spaces for dice in different colours. Everyone prepares food in this game. You are in charge of rolling and placing dice assigned to you. On each order card, all dice placed must add up to 10. This is why you need to keep rolling dice. You will need dice is specific values. When all the food is ready for an order, your next step is to serve the food. Someone is in charge of moving the order card to the next column. This frees up space for that player in charge of orders to reveal a new order card. 

Next, you need someone to clean up. That means returning all the dice on a served order to their respective owners, then flipping the card and placing it in the score pile. 

Everyone has specific tasks to do, and you cannot do others’ work for them. You can scream at them to hurry up but please don’t do that. Just ask nicely. You run a timer before you start the game, and you try to serve as many customers as you can within five minutes. 

I must declare I have not visited Kejap Food before. I received this copy as a gift from the designer Qing Ye. This is a casual game and I would even call it a children’s game. However I played this with a bunch of seasoned hardcore gamers. Well, it was a good filler in between heavy games. The moment we finished, Julian asked me where he could get one. Now this is definitely not a gamer game. It is not designed or balanced for gamers. We finished the order deck in 4.5 minutes. For gamers, this is not about how many orders we can complete in five minutes. It is about how much time we need to complete all orders. We had fun with it. It’s simple and hectic, and it’s perfect for playing with our families and non gamer friends. 

Designer Qing Ye in white

Qing Ye has been more and more active in designing games, and I find that I really like many of his designs. There is one card game originally about Penang shophouses then rethemed to political ideologies which I find very clever. It’s still work in progress. I like the difficulty of needing to collect both item cards and scoring condition cards at the same time to maximise your points. And your cards are also your money to spend on bidding. I’m looking forward to more of his games from Specky Studio. 

Diced Veggies

I must say this game is gimmicky, but it does work and it's certainly eye-catching. Talk about creative use of dice! 

Dice in the game represent different cooking ingredients. They come in five colours, representing five different ingredients. At the start of the game, you roll them all and randomly organise them into a slab like this. Players then take turns using that cardboard cleaver to cut sections of dice off the slab. This is how you collect ingredients to cook various dishes. Actually it's a little troublesome using the cleaver, we ended up mostly using our fingers.

When you carve sections off the slab, you can take as many dice as you want as long as the total is not more than 10. For example in this photo above, you can take the three dice at the bottom right - green 5, beige 3 and green 2. When you cleave a piece off, you cannot break the slab into two. It must be a proper straight cut and not a jagged line. Most of the time you are cutting one of the corners off. 

As more and more dice are cut off, eventually the slab will run out of one of the ingredient types. This is when the next player will have the option to reroll all dice, adding those which have been used and discarded, to create a new slab. 

You use dice to cook dishes. This is standard contract fulfilment. You have a special power token which lets you change one die to a different value or different colour. This power is refreshed every time the central slab is reset. 

In addition to the dishes you can cook, you have optional special missions that can be attached to each dish. If you can fulfil these additional conditions, you score extra points. 

This particular special mission works perfectly with this dish. It requires discarding an extra mushroom (beige die), but it scores 3 points per mushroom in the recipe. 

This is a pretty simple game and it's something for the casual audience. A bit too simple for gamers, but it'll work as a family game.