Thailand Board Game Show 2025: Quick Takes Part 1

The Thailand Board Game Show in Bangkok was 7 - 9 Nov 2025. This was my second time attending the show. I was an exhibitor last year too. The show was three days - Friday to Sunday. My Malaysian friends and I landed in Bangkok on Thursday. The show organiser BGN (Board Game Night) had a gathering for exhibitors on Thursday. We were able to showcase our games and get to know one another. I happily checked out the many games at the gathering, asking the designers or their teams to explain how the games worked. I didn't play all, only a few. Most were Thai designed and a few were localised titles. 

 

Dishcraft is a push-your-luck game. If you are familiar with Japanese anime you will recognise the parodies. In this game you roleplay as fantasy characters, and you are all chefs going deep into a cave to collect cooking ingredients. 

 

That menu at the top lists the dishes you can cook. The ingredient combinations required are all based on poker hands. Naturally the harder the combo, the more points it will score for you. On your turn, you reveal cards from the deck one by one, until you decide to stop, or you reach your limit, or something bad happens. How many cards you can draw, and how many cards you can hold on to at any time, are all dependent on your character's skill levels. After every card you reveal, you need to think whether you are happy with what you have so far and leave with these, or you want to gamble and draw one more card, hoping to gain even more, at the risk of drawing something bad, like traps and monsters. 

 

Some of the bad cards

 

This is a character board. You have various tracks for your different skills. This character board is very well produced. I asked the designer where this was manufactured. It was China. He had considered doing manufacturing in Thailand, but for this kind of quality, the cost is double that of China. Dishcraft retails at THB1400, which is about MYR180. With this kind of production quality, this is a great deal! 

 

Another character in the game

 

Characters can be upgraded. This is the other side of the tile.

 

Synchro Horizon is a JRPG-style cooperative game. The box is very thick, which is not immediately obvious in this photo. This is a game for 1 to 4 players. There is a countdown mechanism. You need to equip yourself and level up, and at the same time you must push forward to defeat monsters and complete missions so that you can reach and beat the final boss before time runs out. 

 

Those books on the board are the missions. They have different combinations of monsters depending on the mission difficulty level. You don't need to complete every mission, only one mission per difficulty level. You start at the top left corner and need to get the bottom right corner to find and defeat the boss. 

This is the player board. Look closely and you'll notice it is 3D. You have slots for your character card, skill tiles and equipment cards. 

 

This is a Level 4 mission. You will face two Level 3 monsters and two Level 4 monsters. 

 

The game comes with a ton of these acrylic standees. They have spent a lot of effort to create so much art for the game. 

 

One of the bosses

The standard edition of Synchro Horizon retails at THB 3500, which is about MYR 450. There is a deluxe edition which comes with 3D printed miniatures. 

 

Tech Runner was launched on Day 1 of the Thailand Board Game Show. So I was there to witness it. This is a two-player fighting game. Each player has his own team of 2 or 3 fighters, depending on the game mode you choose. You can customise your card deck. The game mode determines how many cards you must have in your deck. 

This box cover shows two characters, but it does not mean they are opponents. They will probably turn out to be partners more often than not. The game system currently includes 8 characters, and they come in four different boxes. To play a game you need at least two boxes, i.e. 4 characters. 

 

There is a cooperative mode in which you work together to defeat a common enemy (that guy partially visible at the bottom left corner). 

 

At the moment the game is only available in Thai

 

This is another box, with two other characters. The fighter on the right was inspired by guardians you see at the gates of Thai temples. 

Sorry about the poor focus

 

Takoyaki is not a Thai design but a localisation. It is a simple real-time dexterity game. It works well as a children's game and a family game. A game takes maybe 15 minutes. Probably less. 

 

You compete to be fastest to make takoyaki (squid balls) in a specific pattern. Every round you reveal one mission card like this. Whoever is first to make this arrangement on his personal pan wins the card and scores 1 point. Score 5 points to win the game. 

 

The squid balls are ping pong balls. Every squid ball has a coloured patch. On the mission cards some squid balls are blank, and that means you need to turn the ball so that the colour does not show. You use two long thin sticks to manipulate the squid balls. The sticks are tipped with tiny hands. I'm not sure what the official rule is. The demo guy taught us that when we completed the mission, we had to use our tiny hands to grab and pull the card towards us. I find that hilarious. Imagine two grown men completing the mission and the same time and then using the tiny hands to fight over a card. 

 

Arbolito is not a Thai design either. This too is a dexterity game, and tests how stable your hands are. There is some strategy to this too. 

 

The cards are round, and have various colours. For each coloured section of a card, there is at least one notch. You add cards to the tree by using these notches. When you connect two cards, the colour where they connect must be the same. The whole idea is to rid your hand of cards by adding them to the tree. On your turn in case any cards fall off, you will be forced to take some back into your hand. 

 

This is a game from Thai designer Kampoong. His publishes his games under the Mii2 Games brand. He has 6 titles released by now, about one per year. Most of his games have naughty themes. This one is Kuangpriw. At first I thought this character on the cover is a fan, or a boomerang, or maybe some kind of bacteria. It turned out to be something I didn't expect at all. Take at look at the photo below and you'll understand what is spinning. 

 

The box comes with an outer sleeve which looks exactly like a male underwear. This game is about what juvenile boys play - pulling down one another's pants. 

You will hold a stack of cards in hand, with the highest number on top and the smallest at the bottom. Players attack one another. On a count to three, you point at your target. If two persons attack each other, they both fail to do anything. However if the person you attack is attacking someone else, you get to pull his outermost pants down, i.e. you remove the top card from his deck. Whoever is stripped of his last piece of clothing is out of the game. 

Unfortunately the game is only available in Thai now. The English version has sold out. I am not sure whether it will be reprinted. One more recent game by Kampoong is called Hot Sperm. It is a sperm racing game. Thai culture is open-minded and accommodating. Kampoong's choice of themes would certainly be taboo in Malaysia, and probably in many western countries too. 

 

This latest game from Kampoong does not have a naughty theme. I think the name of the game is Q.IL. This is a 2-player game about two nations preparing for war. You have a hand of 5 cards. On your turn you draw two cards, play one, then discard one. You can play up to four sets of cards before you. These are your armies. The first card you play to start a set is the army number, the fighting order, and also the army size limit. In the best case you will have army numbers 1 to 4. From the second card in a set onwards, you play cards face down. These add to the strengths of your armies. You can play a card in your opponent's army, placing it horizontally. In such cases the horizontal cards reduce strength instead of increasing it. However there is a card power which turns such cards vertical. 

 

Instead of adding a card to an army, you can play it for its special ability. The card on the right lists the special abilities in the game. Some cards are played like a normal number card, but their abilities resolve during battle, after their numbers are considered for the battle. 

 

One player is blue, and the other is orange. You can only use the half in your colour. This is a short and clever game. 

Nuts A Gogo

The Game

Nuts A Gogo is a lovely dexterity game from Japan which plays in 15 minutes. The nuts in the game are supposed to be peanuts, but somehow it makes me think of nuts as in nuts and bolts. You don't actually see peanut shaped components in the game. You do see wooden pieces in various shapes and sizes. The core idea in this game is you need to pack as many wooden pieces as possible into a small paper cup. This sounds like the kind of game people come up with at a game jam when the organisers throw a few random ideas together. Crazy! 

A game is played in two stages. The first stage is about claiming wooden pieces, and it is done in real-time. You put all the pieces in the box like in the photo above, and once you say go, everybody grabs pieces from the box to put in their own cup. You want to take as many as possible. The pieces come in five different general shapes. They are not exactly the same, just similar enough that you can tell the type. They also come in different sizes. Smaller is better, because it means you can squeeze more into your cup. 

Once one player decides they have enough, they declare the end of the first half. What you do is you claim the Mr Peanut token from the box, and then count to ten. Once you reach ten, everyone else must also stop taking wooden pieces. Whatever is in your cup is yours now. If anything falls out, sorry, you must return it to the box. This is the first stage. 

The cup is small

At the start of the second stage, you empty your cup and hide all your wooden pieces behind your hand. The player with the Mr Peanut token is the start player, and you take turns playing start player. As start player, you get to issue a challenge. You discard one piece, and everyone else must discard a piece of the same type. If anyone fails to do so, they are eliminated from the game. One by one players will get eliminated, and the last person standing is the winner. 

The Play

Nuts A Gogo is quick an easy. It's the kind of game that you'll pick up by just watching others play. It's an excellent casual game. You barely have to learn. The second stage can be quite funny. There is a little bit of psychology. You try to guess what pieces your opponents do not have. Winning is not necessarily about having the most pieces. Even if you have the most, if you happen to be short of a certain type, you can still get eliminated early. 

The Thoughts

For experienced gamers, this can be a good filler because it's something very different from the typical heavy games we play. It's quick. It's a nice change of pace. It's a good break between heavy games. For casual gamers and non-gamers, this game is painless to learn and engaging. 

Klask

The Game

I want to call Klask a sports game, but that will likely cause misunderstanding. When I say sports game people think of sports themed games. I classify it as a dexterity game, but I know that is problematic too, because people think Jenga and Toc Toc Woodman when we say dexterity game. Or Animal Upon Animal. Technically it is a real-time game too. I'm probably making things worse by throwing all these descriptions about. Klask is a game of skill for two players. I find it best to describe it based on football (soccer). 

The field is surrounded by walls, which means the ball will bounce off these walls. The two players each control just one pawn. You can only move your pawn within your half of the field. You have a goal - the round indent in light blue. Your objective is to score a goal - getting the ball into your opponent's goal. Whoever scores 6 points first wins the game. 

You control your pawn using this rod beneath the board. Both this rod and the pawn have magnets. That's how they are attached to each other. 

The magnets are strong, so when you move the rod below the board, the pawn on the field follows suit quickly. It gives you good control. The pawn is very responsive. However if you move too fast, you can still lose control of your pawn. If this happens your opponent scores 1 point. 

You also give your opponent a point if your pawn falls into your own goal. 

The standard way of scoring points is to score a goal, but there are many fouls which will award points to your opponent. New players will often commit these fouls. When players are new, you will likely score more points from your opponent's mistakes than from actual goals. 

One important element are the three white obstacles in the game. When a round starts (i.e. at the start of the game, or after a player scores and the board is reset) the three obstacles are lined up at specific positions in the middle of the field. These obstacles contain metal. If your pawn gets close, it will attract the obstacle. If you ever get two obstacles attached to your pawn, you concede a point to your opponent. The obstacles can get in your way and also blocks the ball. 

When a pawn catches two obstacles, we call it Mickey Mouse. It looks like it has two huge ears. 

Whenever any player scores a point, the field has to be reset. The obstacles are repositioned. The player who conceded a point gets to serve, and must start the ball in one of his corners. Whoever reaches 6 points first wins. 

The Play

Your first game of Klask will be exciting and funny. Since you are unfamiliar with it, you will be clumsy and you will likely commit many fouls. Scoring a goal will be challenging, but when you manage it, you'll stand up and cheer. Klask is this kind of game. The rules are simple. Any observer standing next to you will be able to pick up the game immediately and be able to play the next game. Learning the game is mostly about getting familiar with controlling the pawn. If you are new and you play against an experienced player, you will be at a disadvantage. There is skill in this game. As you get better at the game, it becomes more challenging and rewarding. Maybe less funny, but more intense. 

The three obstacles are a clever and important element of the game. You can intentionally knock them to your opponent's half and thus hinder his movement. He will need to carefully avoid the obstacles. Although the obstacles contain metal and can be attracted by your pawn when you get too close, if you are fast and hit them hard, you can actually use your pawn to knock them to your opponent's side. It's a little risky, but it's doable. 

If you can get all three obstacles into your opponent's half, you will give him a big headache.

The Thoughts

Klask is a game of wide appeal. It is a mass market game. It is easy to learn and fast to play (probably 5-10 minutes). Once you get better at it, it becomes more and more a game of skill, and that can be satisfying. This is the kind of game which startup companies put at their pantries, so that employees taking a break can play a couple of rounds. It's much smaller and more portable than foosball. 

AIEOU

The Game

AIEOU is a local Malaysian design, by Nicholas Hing. At first I kept thinking the game is called AEIOU (E before I). It took me a while to realise I had it wrong. The name of the game is pronounced as "Aiyo!" and not letter by letter: "A-I-E-O-U". 

AIEOU looks like an educational game, but it isn't really one. There is an educational element, but this is primarily a speed game. It works as a party game, as a casual game, and it works for children too. The game comes with four sets of rules, so it is four games in one box, a little like Spot It. The games are more different than those in Spot It though. 

The top row is the card backs. They come in different colours, with different vowels, and the vowels can be either black or white. There are three card types in the game - bronze, silver and gold - corresponding to different difficulty levels. However you can't tell the type from the card back. You can only tell it by looking at the front. The bottom row are the vowel pieces. 

These are the bronze cards. All of them have simple words missing just one vowel. The pictures on the cards are necessary, so that there is no ambiguity what the missing vowels are. C_P is missing an A and not a U. It's CAP, not CUP. The colour of the card edge indicates that these are the bronze cards. 

The silver cards are missing two or more letters. 

The gold cards are missing even more letters. Some are missing consonants in addition to vowels. TOOTHBRUSH is not only missing O and U, it is also missing B and H. The choice of card type affects the difficulty of the game. Some game modes allow using more than one card type. 

Let's look at the four game modes one by one, starting with Grab It. You set up a game by shuffling the deck and putting it face-down in the middle of the table. Put all five vowel pieces around it, leaving space for a face-up card. Your objective is to claim as many cards as possible. When a round starts, draw one card from the deck and place it face-up next to the deck. Everyone tries to identify the missing letter as quickly as possible, and grab the corresponding vowel piece. Whoever grabs the right vowel piece first wins the card. 

That's the basic idea. Now here are some complications. In the photo above, there are actually two missing letters, A and I. You need to look at the colour of the vowel of the draw deck. If it is white, you refer to the first missing letter of the word. If it is black, the last. So in this example, you should be looking at A, the first missing letter. The next complication is this. You need to consider the vowel on the card deck too, in this case an E. If the missing vowel and the vowel on the draw deck are the same, you don't race to grab the vowel piece. Instead you have to shout AIEOU (Aiyo). 

The next complication is the mistakes. If you make any mistake, i.e. grabbing the wrong vowel piece, grabbing a vowel piece when you should be shouting Aiyo, or shouting Aiyo when you should be grabbing a vowel piece, you will be penalised. You not only don't get to claim the card of the round, you also have to give up one of your cards to the winner of the round. So you have to be careful. 

In this situation above, instead of grabbing the A piece, you have to shout Aiyo to win the card. 

You play until only one card remains in the draw deck. Whoever has the most cards at that point wins the game.  

Let's look at the second game mode - Speed Spells. This is the opposite of Grab It - you want as few cards as possible. Every round one card is revealed, and everyone must identify the missing vowels as quickly as possible. Whoever is slowest is penalised. He must claim the card of the round. 

Before playing this mode, a hand of five cards - A, I, E, O, U - must be prepared for each player, assembled from unused cards. For example if you are playing with gold cards, you can use silver cards for these. The hand cards are turned face-down and shuffled. They will only be turned face-up once a round starts. Once a round concludes, they are turned face-down and shuffled again before the next round starts. 

To set up a game, a number of vowel pieces are placed on the table - one fewer than the number of players. When a round starts, a card is flipped open and placed at the centre of the table. Everyone races to identify the missing vowels. You pick them from your hand, lay them down, then grab a vowel piece (any one will do). Whoever is slowest will not have a vowel piece to grab and will thus be penalised. 

In the photo above, the word WATERMELON is missing A, E, E and O. The word is missing R too, but that's a consonant so you ignore that. E is missing twice so you ignore the second occurrence. The right way to lay out your cards is A-E-O. The player at the top left has the wrong combination and will be penalised. The player at the bottom right has the right combination but the wrong order, and will also be penalised. Here the penalty is taking extra cards, not giving away cards. 

In this photo, the word DUMBBELL is missing U, B, E and L. Ignore the consonants, so the correct combination is U-E. The player at the top left has the wrong order and will be penalised. 

The third game mode is Match'em. As preparation, you deal all cards in play equally to all players to each form a face-down deck. Place one vowel piece at the centre of the table. When a round starts, everyone flips open one card from his deck and places it in front of him, possibly covering any cards left over from previous rounds. Now you try to find a pair of cards among those just flipped over which have the exact same combination of missing vowels. If you can find such a pair, grab the vowel, then point out the pair of cards. If you are right, you claim both cards and any cards stacked below them. If you are wrong, you will be penalised. The game ends when everyone's card deck runs out. The player with the most cards wins. The face-up stacks in front of players sometimes can become quite thick, which makes the game very exciting. Everyone will be eyeing and trying to win the thick stacks. 

The fourth mode is Memory Buzz. This is a memory game instead of a speed game. You need to memorise a sequence of numbers and objects, which keeps growing. Players take turns memorising the sequence and extending the sequence. At any time, anyone may challenge the active player if he believes the active player has made a mistake. The sequence is checked, and if a mistake was indeed made, the active player is penalised and must take all face-up cards. If it turns out to be a false accusation, the challenger is penalised instead. When the deck runs out, whoever has the fewest cards wins. 

For Memory Buzz, the letters A, I, E, O, U represent the numbers 1 to 5 respectively. 

When a round starts, you flip over the top card of the deck. Using the example above, the card being flipped over is the DUMBBELL. At this time the draw deck shows an A, which represents 1. The active player must say, "One dumbbell". 

The next player now flips over another card. It is WATERMELON. The draw deck now shows A. The active player must say, "One dumbbell, one watermelon". The previous card is fully covered and you can no longer see what it is. 

The next player must say, "One dumbbell, one watermelon, four butterflies".  O is 4. 

The following player should say, "One dumbbell, one watermelon, four butterflies, four teapots". Let say he makes a mistake and says something else. Someone else challenges him. Now all the cards in the face-up stack will be examined to see whether a mistake was indeed made. Once confirmed, the active player is forced to take all these cards. 

The Play

I played the first three modes with my family. My children are secondary school students now. When I first saw the game components, I was concerned whether this was a game meant to teach primary school students English words. If so, my children would not be in the right age group. Only after reading the rules I understood that this is not a game to teach English. It is a speed game (and one memory game) and not an educational game.  It is a game of quick thinking and fast reactions, and not a game of English competency. 

Since it is a speed game, it naturally demands full attention and tends to be exciting. The penalty aspect is a key element. That is what makes you hesitate. It torments you. You can't just randomly grab a vowel piece or scream Aiyo. Due to this tension of needing to tread carefully and wanting to be fast, sometimes you hesitate for just one split second and someone else grabs that vowel piece from under your nose. You know you are right. You have the answer in your mind. But you just want to double check to make sure you are not making a mistake. It's quite funny to see people agonise over this. 

The game forces you to consider many things at once - e.g. whether the draw deck is showing a black or a white vowel, whether the missing vowel is the same one as on the draw deck. None of these elements are difficult. It is the concurrent thinking and the race element which make the game exciting. A number of variant rules are provided if you want to adjust the difficulty level.

The Thoughts

AIEOU is the type of game you'll find at boardgame cafes. It is easy to learn. It works for casual players. It is noisy and absorbing. It works well as a family game too. 

The game is easy to expand. There are only 36 each of bronze, silver and gold cards. Play a few games and you will have seen all of them. 36 is not a lot, but due to the combination of factors you need to consider when you play, it is sufficient to keep the game varied. You can't just memorize the missing vowels of each card. Still, I wish there were more. When expanding the game, the trickier aspect to consider is the balance for the Match'em mode. There needs to be a balance in the combinations of missing vowels. E.g. if only one card in the deck has the combination of A-E-U then it becomes a meaningless card because it will never match with any other card. Also there can't be too many combinations, otherwise there will be too few matches when the game is played.