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. 

Trishaw Frenzy

Trishaw Frenzy is a Malaysian design. The designer is Ewe Boon How, and the publisher is LUMA. This is a game about trishaws in Penang. It is a simple game, and I'd even consider it a children's game. 

One easy way to describe the game is modernised Snakes & Ladders. This is a roll-and-move game. The board is made up of nine tiles randomly placed and oriented. The squares on the tiles are not numbered so you don't use such numbers to determine your route. Instead, you use a randomly drawn route card (see below). You roll a die to move your pawn. The first to reach the end wins. 

There are a few location types on the board. Depending on where you land, you perform certain actions. One type of location lets you rotate a tile. You draw a card to see which tiles you are allowed to rotate. Rotating a tile can have huge implications. You might set your opponent back, or you might put yourself ahead. Some locations are portals, and they teleport you to another portal. This is the snakes and ladders part of the game. Sometimes you draw a new route card. This can dramatically change the situation. A leading player might find himself far from the new finish line. A trailing player might find himself only a few steps away from winning. 

It's a simple game, and it is roll-and-move. For seasoned gamers, "snakes-and-ladders" usually means "stay away". In Trishaw Frenzy when you get to rotate a tile, you get to make a meaningful decision. So this is not a passive and 100% luck-based game. There will be dramatic twists of fate. You never know what surprise awaits at the next corner. This is a casual and light game that's easy to learn and relaxing to play. And this is such a pretty game! 

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. 

Schrage Vogel / Odd World / Weird Bird

The Play

Schrage Vogel is German for "weird bird". This game comes in a tiny tin box which looks like it's for mints. The game was first released in 2015, and it was called Odd World then. That edition featured different planets. I much prefer this newer artwork. 

This is a pure card game. Every card is a bird. There are 9 types, and they are numbered 1 to 9. The card backs are different, as you can see from the photo above. There are always two different birds on the card back. This tells you that the bird on the front is one of them. 

During the game you collect birds (cards). Every bird is worth one point. However for any bird type where the number of birds you have is an even number, these birds score nothing. This is a key point. 

During setup, everyone draws 3 cards. You reveal two of them, so that everyone knows what you have so far. The third is kept secret. Your opponents can see the card back so they know the two possibilities, but they don't know exactly which bird it is. There are two draw decks at the centre of the table. On your turn you have to decide two things - which deck to draw from (remember you can see the card back), and who to give the card to - yourself or another player. You must decide before looking at the front of the card. Every card is, by default, one point, so most of the time you want it for yourself. However if this might be the 2nd, 4th, 6th etc of a bird type you already have, maybe you want to give it to someone else. Or maybe this is going to hurt someone else and you want to give it to him even if it can benefit you. 

The game ends when one player has all 9 types of birds, and you compare points to see who wins. In case of a tie, whoever has more bird types wins. This means the person who collects all 9 types has an advantage. If there is still a tie, you check who has the most number of birds in a single type. 

The Play

The game takes about 10 minutes to play, so to gamers this is a filler. The early game seems overly simple. You'll mostly be taking cards for yourself. Only when you approach mid game then you realise there's more than meets the eye. If both the birds on a card back will cause you to have an even number of that bird type, then this is a card that will certainly hurt you. You probably want to give it to someone else, or take the other card. However, the pain might be temporary. Yes, that bird type is worth nothing now, but if you can get another one later, you're back in business! In the mid game, you can probably still gamble. In the late game, things become different again. You don't know your opponents' face-down bird, so you don't know exactly when the game will end. If you still have many bird types where the count is an even number, you'll be biting your nails. Near end game when you screw over an opponent, it will likely be hard for him to recover. So the temptation to sabotage others becomes bigger. It becomes almost irresistible when either bird on the back of a card will hurt an opponent. There is no risk of unintentionally giving him one point. 

I am making the game sound more complicated than it is. This really is a simple game, and even non gamers will quickly grasp these tactics. 

That face-down card at the bottom is my secret bird. It might be a 2, it might be a 6. If it is a 6, then I have two birds which are 6's, and I will score nothing for this bird type. Sometimes you can guess your opponents' secret birds through their actions. If I keep taking cards which are possibly 6's, my opponents will know my secret card is a 6. 

The Thoughts

I admire the mechanism in Schrage Vogel. Simple and clever. Because it's simple, this is a game that will work with non-gamers and children. 

Kariba

The Game

Kariba is a small box game from Reiner Knizia. It is a simple card game about watering holes in Africa. All sorts of animals gather around the watering hole. They all need to drink, from the tiny mouse (numbered 1) to the great elephant (numbered 8). At the watering hole predators and prey can co-exist. However if too many of one animal type come, they scare away another animal type near them. 

This little circle formed using numbered tiles is the watering hole. The numbers indicate where you must play your cards. A turn is simple - play one or more cards of the same animal type, i.e. same number. When you play the animal(s) next to the watering hole, if there are three or more of this animal type, you'll scare away all animals of the next smaller animal type. You claim these cards into your score pile. In the photo above, if you have just played the giraffe (#4), they will chase away the meerkat (#2). If there are animals in both positions 2 and 3, then it is the animal at 3 which will be chased away, because that's nearer. 

There is a special rule for the elephants (#8). They are the largest number and normally no one can scare them away. The exception is the lowly mouse (#1). Three mice is enough to scare any number of elephants away. However the mice are the weakest animal and can be easily chased away by all other animals. 

The Play

One thing I find interesting is sometimes you don't want to play any of the cards you have in hand. Some you hope to play later when a good scoring opportunity comes. Some you are reluctant to play because it might help an opponent. Aaah... tough decisions. Often you don't want to play the second card of an animal, because if anyone else has another card, they will be able to play that and trigger scoring. Since everyone is aware of this, you will start collecting pairs of cards to be played at the same time, which means an animal with just one card may suddenly get to three. There is an ebb and flow in the game. You try to ride the tempo well and score more points (claim more cards) than your opponents. 

When three (or more) cards of one animal type chase away another type, they themselves become a big fat target. One situation that happens is people keep cards to catch these winning sets. There's always a bigger fish. Another situation that comes up is when you are afraid a particularly lucrative set will get taken by an opponent, you intentionally stick a single card just before it to protect it from bigger animals. Let's look at this below. 

There are six giraffes (#4), which is super tempting. Imagine that there are no animals at all from positions 5 to 8. If anyone plays three of any of these numbers, he will win that huge set of giraffes. You can play one single ostrich (#5) to protect the giraffes. Now people will not want to play their trios of 6, 7 or 8, because that will only get them your lousy single 5. Of course, it is entirely possible you end up helping someone else who has exactly two ostriches. 

The Thoughts

This is a lovely little game. Simple and easy to learn, yet having interesting tactics. It's a nice light strategy game. Good for traveling, as it can easily fit into a pocket. It's easy to teach casual gamers and non gamers. I like clever and concise games like this. They get straight to the point with minimal fluff. 

Happy Fox

The Game

Happy Fox is a simple card game from Wolfgang Kramer and Manfred Reindl. Wolfgang Kramer is one of the top boardgame designers in the world, but I had never heard of this game until I saw it on a shelf. Oh no, I'm falling behind boardgame trends. 

In Happy Fox there are only three types of cards - fox, goose and dog. No numbers, no suits. There are more geese than foxes or dogs. Every player has his own deck of cards, and the decks all have the same card distribution. The only difference is the card back colour. You have a hand of five cards. On your turn, you simply play one card. If it is a goose or a dog, you play it face-down before you, without letting anyone know what you have played. If it is a fox, it is played face-up, and you will go goose hunting. Beginning with the player on your left, you may reveal your opponents' cards. You go around the table revealing one card per player, and you can do this for as long as you want, even cycling back to the first player on your left. As long as the card you reveal is a goose, you are good. When you are happy with what you have, you may decide to retire your fox. You then take your fox and all the revealed geese and place them in your personal score pile. Now if at any point you reveal a dog, your fox will be captured by the dog. The dog owner takes your fox card and his dog and places them in his score pile. All geese revealed by your dog go to the score piles of their respective owners. You gain nothing, and even lose your fox. 

You play until everyone exhausts their decks and hand cards. All cards remaining before you go to your score pile. Everyone counts their score piles, and whoever has the most cards wins. 

The Play

This is an amazingly simple game. This is the kind of game which makes people think designing games is easy and they can do it too. Pfff... Despite so few rules, the game is very exciting. Your cards are mostly geese, and there's always some anxiety when you place a goose. Playing a fox and going hunting is exciting, but it is also nerve-wracking. After you catch a goose, you will hesitate about whether to go for the next one. If the next card is a dog, you lose all your geese accumulated so far. This is a painful decision to make. 

If you want to, you can card count. If you know someone has run out of dogs, you'll know his cards are absolutely safe. If you find most players have used up their foxes, you know it's safe to play your geese. Often you want to hold on to a fox until the right moment. Wait for more geese to be out before you play your fox. Hopefully you'll have a bigger catch. 

There is an optional rule where everyone removes a few cards randomly before the game starts. This way you can't card count accurately. 

The Thoughts

I was already impressed with the game after reading the rules. Only three types of cards, and such simple rules, but this is such a fun game. So much emotion in such a spartan game. This works well as a children's game, a family game and a party game. To gamers this is interesting too. If you get serious about the game (like gamers tend to do), you can think about how to bluff and how to trap. You can card count too. There is certainly luck in the game. Sometimes even the first card your fox flips is a dog. This is not at all uncommon. It's always a joy when someone else's fox gets caught. It means the geese you think you have lost come back to you. Everyone (except the fox owner) cheers the dog owner. This is a clever little game with plenty of surprises and excitement. 

Nine Tiles

Nine Tiles is from Japanese publisher Oink Games, but the designer is Jean-Claude Pellin from Luxemburg. The Sanrio characters version I have is not the first edition. The very first edition uses just generic abstract icons. There are six different icons in the game. It is an abstract game, and it is easy to paste any theme on it. There is a Disney version, a Chainsaw Man version, a Pokemon version, and even a Moomin version. It is a real-time game. A speed game. Players race to solve a puzzle and whoever is fastest scores a point. 

Everyone has a set of 9 tiles. The tiles are double sided, and the characters on the two sides of a tile are different. Every character appears exactly three times, on three different tiles. You arrange your tiles in a 3x3 grid. When a round starts, you flip over the top card from the deck, and everyone races to change their own grid to look exactly like what the card specifies. This is all done in real time. You can flip your tiles and swap their positions. Whoever is first to make their grid look exactly like the card claims the card. You keep going until you run out of cards, and whoever has won the most cards wins the game. So the rules are super easy. However making the combination is not always easy. The pattern may require two Hello Kittys, but you are not exactly sure which two. You likely need to do much trial and error to figure out which side of each tile you need to use, to create the required combination. 

I'd say this is mostly a children's game, because of the simplicity. It is easy for non gamers to learn too, and may entertain them for a while. For gamers this would be too simple, and it likely won't have much replayability. It's probably the kind of game you keep for those occasions when you bring games out for casual gamers and non gamers. It can also be a filler or opener for game night. 

Short takes: Duck & Cover, Onix, Kezao

Here are three more games I tried at Essen 2024. 

Duck & Cover

Duck & Cover won much attention at the fair. I had read about it even before the fair started. That's good marketing. The publisher Captain Games had people dressed in me-riding-duck suits. Journalists took photos, thus publicity. They also had cute loud yellow duck shirts for booth staff. You really can't pass their booth without taking a second look. The game itself is good too. They sold out during the fair. The game was on my maybe list, but when I finally decided to buy, they had sold out. Too bad. 

Duck & Cover is a family card game. Every player gets a set of 12 cards, numbered 1 to 12. Each card has a point value. In this game, points are bad. You want to score as few points as possible. The winner is the player with the least points. 

At the start of a round, you shuffle your deck of cards and then lay all your cards out in a 4 x 3 grid. There is a common deck of cards which is shared among all players. It works like a roll-and-write game. You flip over a card, and everyone does what the card says. In Duck & Cover, the card is usually a number between 1 and 12. It tells you which of your cards you may move. There are two days to do this. You may use your card of the specified number to cover an adjacent card. When you do this, you will cover one of your numbers. This means in future if the common deck specifies that number, you won't have a move. Covering a card also means you are now hiding the point value from view, i.e. you are reducing your points (which is good). The other way you can move your card is to move it (together with any cards under it) to any empty space. You may choose to not move your card, if you so desire. Sometimes this is the best move. 

As more and more cards are covered, your play area will have fewer and fewer points, and also fewer and fewer stacks. If you manage to stack all your cards into one, the round immediately ends and you score a bonus. You get to deduct points based on the last visible card you have. Remember losing points is good. Gaining points is bad. The other players will gain points based on all their still visible cards. The game lasts three rounds, and the lowest scorer at the end of the game wins. 

There is another way a round can end. When a common card is revealed and no one has that number anymore, this card is set aside. Once a certain number of cards are set aside this way, the round ends. Everyone scores points based on their remaining visible cards. 

This is a family friendly game, good for young and old. It's short. There are some interesting tactics to ponder. I like that every deck has a different theme, and every duck in the game is different. When I played, my deck was famous historical figures. It had duck versions of Einstein, Caesar, Cleopatra and Napoleon. 

Duck & Cover is essentially a roll-and-write game. It is literally multiplayer solitaire. You are playing a solo game at the same time as your friends. It's just that you are comparing scores at game end. You can't interfere with other players, well except for mocking them for poor plays. 

~~~~~

Onix

Onix is a light family game. It's a simple card game about collecting sets of icons. 

At Essen I had to keep reminding myself to take photos of box covers or at least the names of the games I had seen, so that I could remember them. There were simply too many games to remember the names of. 

Onix is set up like this. Everyone starts with four sets of cards, and each set has just one card. Every set starts with a different icon. There are only four different icons in the game. At the centre of the table, set up a circle of five stacks of face-up cards. 

To score points, you need to collect sets of exactly four different icons. When any of the sets in front of you has exactly four icons and they are all different, you flip the set over and move it to your score pile. At the end of the game, every card in your score pile scores 1 point. Some cards have two different icons. They help you complete a set quicker, but they are still just one card, thus worth 1 point. 

On your turn, you choose a visible icon from the central circle. You will claim at least one card from the centre with that icon. Now if either of the cards next to the card you take also has the same icon, you take that card too. If the subsequent card also has the icon, you take that as well. In the best case, you take the top card of all five stacks. You place the cards you claim into your sets or you create new sets with them. A set must not have duplicate icons. There is no limit to the number of stacks you can have. 

Now here's the additional spice. In addition to collecting cards with a specific icon, you also get to perform an action associated with that icon you chose. So you are not only considering which icon based on how many cards it will help you claim, you are also considering which action you want to perform. One icon lets you claim an additional card. One icon lets you claim a card to directly place face-down in your score pile (that means immediately scoring 1 point, and also maybe you will take a card that an opponent wants). One icon lets you discard one card from an opponent's set, which sets them back. The most brutal icon is the one which lets you steal a card from an opponent. 

The game ends when one of the five stacks at the centre runs out. This is a short and sweet game. There is ample player interaction. It is a decent family game and party game. There is some aggression. The game is easy to learn so it will work for non-gamers and casual gamers. 

~~~~~

Kezao

Kezao is a speed game, a dexterity game. It is a pattern recognition game. The cards are various drawings in different colour combinations. At the start, everyone is dealt a certain number of cards. Your objective is to discard all your cards. 

The game comes with five dice. The basic game uses four. The fifth is for the advanced game. The active player picks two dice to roll. Once rolled, the dice specify the rules for discarding cards. E.g. they may say the card must have green, or the card must not have blue. Something along these lines. Everyone looks through their hand to find valid cards, and discard them as quickly as they can. Every round there is a limit to the number of cards the players may collectively discard. This is first-come-first-served. Once that  number of cards is discarded, no one may further discard cards. The round ends. So this is all about beating your opponents in finding the right cards and discarding them. 

Sometimes the die roll results in a paradox. E.g. one die says no red, the other says you must have red. When this happens, throw the rules out the window (figuratively). You may discard any card. You need to be fast to beat your opponents to discarding cards. Sometimes, you may discard a card by mistake. This is bad. You will be penalised and you will draw cards. This is a big setback. 

The fifth die adds new rules. If you play with it, you roll it every round, together with the two dice chosen by the active player. The fifth die may do things like allowing just one die criteria to be used. 

This is a simple and casual game. It'll work as a children's game. 

Upin & Ipin

The Game

Upin & Ipin is a popular cartoon TV show in Malaysia. It is hot is Indonesia too, and is also aired in several other countries. It was first released in 2007, and now in 2024 it is still going strong. If the twin brothers Upin and Ipin were 5 years old in 2007, they would be 22 now. 

Upin & Ipin: Ke Sana Ke Sini the boardgame is based on the characters in the TV series and their village. The game board (above) shows their village. It is a 8 x 6 grid, basically a chess board. You can see roads, but movement is based on the grid, not these roads. 

Some squares on the board are homes, shops or other buildings. Those with photos are homes and the photos show who live where. For a kid to enter a home, the host must be at home. You can't enter other people's houses when they are not around. That's basic manners. And this is one of the traditional values the game designer Effendy aims to convey. At the homes and buildings you can collect items with various powers. 

These are the item cards. You may carry at most three of them.

Upin & Ipin comes with 10 different scenarios. This means 10 ways to play the game. There are some basic rules which don't change from scenario to scenario. Every scenario has some unique rules or modifications to the basic rules. Your objectives will be different. Some scenarios are cooperative. Some are team-based competitions. Scenarios have different setups and use different combinations of characters. 

On your turn, you have 3 options. First, you may move any one of the characters on the board. You do not play a specific character. Anyone can move any character. This is something a little unusual. Your second option is to choose a character card. The third is to choose a location card. You may have at most one character card and one location card in hand. If you take a new one, you must surrender the old one. 

This is a character card. You may use the card power at any time, after which it is returned to the pool. You can use the card to allow the character one more step. Normally a character only moves one step. You can prevent another player from moving a specific character. You may allow a character to be moved on consecutive turns. Normally after a player has moved a character, the immediate next player may not move that same character. Only the player after that may move this character. Using the character card of the specific character, you can circumvent this restriction.  

This is a location card. There are also three ways you can use it. You can allow a character to enter the specific home when the homeowner is not at home. You can prevent another player from entering a home. When another player claims an item from the location, you may piggyback on that and get one for yourself too. 

Dice in the game are bicycles. When you ride a bike, you move as many spaces as what you roll. This can greatly increase your mobility. However there is a price to pay. If you have items, you must discard one each time you ride a bike. 

Let's talk about the first scenario. It's Operation Rooster. Now this rooster is an important secondary character in the cartoon. It appears all the time. In this scenario, it starts at one corner of the village, and moves about randomly. The children start at the other corner of the village, and want to catch the rooster. You win by getting one child to catch the rooster. Remember, you are not any one specific child. You can move any child. If you help one child get close to the rooster, you may be helping an opponent catch it, not yourself. Character cards can be important in this scenario, because you can use them to prevent specific characters from moving, or have them move an additional step. These can mean winning or losing. 

The rooster moves based on the die roll of an 8-sided die.

It can get quite rowdy, with a whole bunch of kids running after the rooster. 

Victory points are represented by chicken drumsticks, the favourite food of Upin and Ipin. 

This is Scenario 6. The eight kids are divided into Team Blue and Team Yellow. This is a team-vs-team contest. Everyone starts at the playground. Your team objective is to capture 7 locations, including Upin and Ipin's home. You capture a location by simply entering it. However, you can easily lose a location. Once you leave, an opponent can enter and capture it. If an opponent enters an occupied location, a fight ensues (okay, let's be nice and call this a "strength comparison"), and the winner controls the location. The defender wins ties, and thus has a slight advantage in... umm... strength comparisons. 

There are three adults in the game. Any player can move any of them. This works the same way as the kids. In Scenario 1, the rooster is a target everyone chases after and it is not controlled by anyone. In other scenarios, you control the rooster in the same way as the other characters. There is one special rule regarding the rooster. Kids may not enter the rooster's space. So you can use the rooster to block a child's way. For that child to enter the space occupied by the rooster, first the rooster must be moved away. 

Eggs are one of the items. It can be used to increase your defense or attack by 1. Items are single use. Once you use them, they are spent and returned to the pool. 

In Scenario 6, location cards are used for keeping track of locations captured. They cannot be claimed and used in the normal way. Different scenarios have different rule adjustments, but most of the basic rules remain the same. 

The Play

This game is made for people who have watched Upin & Ipin. It is a mass market game, and not a hobbyist game. The game mechanisms are not new to gamers, but to non-gamers, there are some new concepts. The group I played with was mostly non-gamers. They were pleasantly surprised by the idea that players do not control specific characters. This game introduces some fresh ideas to non-gamers. The rules are mostly straight-forward. On your turn you either move a character or pick a card. The different scenarios have different additional rules, but they are manageable for non-gamers. 

I did a 6-player game, and despite the large group, the game moved briskly. Your turn is quick and simple. There is little down time. Although we had a mix of experienced gamers and non-gamers, the game worked fine. This is the kind of game which parents and children can play together. It is not too simple that parents will find it dull. There is enough luck that children have a decent chance of winning. 

The yellow and blue bases indicate the teams the characters belong to. Not all scenarios are team-based. 

I seldom appear in photos in my own blog, because most of the time when I take photos, I shoot game components and games in progress. This time Sufiz took a nice photo with me in it. Just to clarify, I am the one on the right. 

The Thoughts

Upin & Ipin is a mass market game designed for children and families. It is not a gamer's game, but I like that it introduces some modern boardgame concepts. The target audience is people who enjoy the cartoon. Teenagers and young adults may no longer watch Upin & Ipin, but they might have watched it when they were younger. Playing the game will be a trip down memory lane for them. 

Being gamers, we tend to be sceptical about boardgames using well-known intellectual properties. Sometimes they are just money grabs, using the IP to make more money, when the game itself is poorly designed. Upin & Ipin has heart. It was developed with the spirit of the cartoon series in mind. In addition to presenting the characters, stories and values in game form, it also introduces some modern gaming mechanisms to the mass market. I hope it brings more players to the hobby.