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

War of Beauty （美人大战）

War of Beauty is a game from Taiwan, and it is a party game about palace drama, i.e. how the concubines of the emperor fight for power and influence. One of the designers is Kevin Tsai (蔡康永), a popular TV show host. When I saw the components of the game, I was intrigued and very keen to give it a go. If you like this kind of Chinese TV drama about politicking at the palace, you will get a real kick out of this. The historical background is the Qing Dynasty, the last dynasty.  

You start the game as entry level concubines at the imperial palace, called Da Ying. To win the game, you have to climb the "corporate ladder" to become queen. 

Everyone gets a screen like this. This is the front. 

This is the back. This is also a player aid. 

When folded, the player screen looks like a book.

The game has many components, but the core mechanism is very simple. There are two main types of cards, visit cards and character cards. To get a promotion, you need to collect three of the same visit card type. Visit cards in your hand don't count. They need to be played. When you play a visit card, you play it face down and you offer it to another player. Now a visit card can be good or bad. The player you offer it to decides whether to accept it. If she does, she takes the card and places it face up before her. If she politely declines, then you take the card and place it face up before you. This is how visit cards are collected. When you offer a good card, you hope the other player will decline. When you offer a bad card, you hope they will accept, otherwise you must take it. 

Once you have three good cards of the same type, you discard them and gain a promotion. However if you get three bad cards, you will be banished to the cold palace (冷宫). This means the emperor dislikes you and neglects you for a while. You need to get out of the cold palace first before you can continue to be competitive. 

So the core mechanism is super simple. It's just about offering cards to others, and hoping they will decline the good cards, and accept the bad ones. I consider this a party game. It's all about gaming the players and not so much the system. 

Character cards are special power cards. Some help you, some sabotage others. One other funny way to get promoted is to collect cards that make a very specific sentence. Every card has a single Chinese character at the top left. If you make an exact five character sentence “我要做自己” (I want to be myself), you get promoted too. 

I shall call these entanglement cards. You draw two at the start of the game. 

Entanglement cards represent past history with other players in the game. There is someone who has helped you before and you want to repay her. There is also someone who has wronged you, and you want revenge. If you manage to help (or hurt) that person, you will get a promotion. Because of these entanglement cards, you can tell your friend that you want to help her and you are giving her a precious good card, and that she must accept it. But then of course you might not have such an entanglement card, or your entanglement card might actually require you to sabotage her instead. So you are actually offering her a bad card - say some poisoned lychee. When I played this game I kept telling the others, here, have some abortion soup. 

Character cards are long, like bookmarks

This finger ornament is an optional deluxe component

This is the kind of game where you enjoy the setting and the components. The rules are very simple. This is something you can easily play with casual gamers. Those who like this kind of palace drama will get into the spirit immediately. Mink coat from America, my lady? 

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. 

Lifeboats: Plank of Carneades

Lifeboats is a 1993 game. That's more than 30 years old! I am pretty sure I have heard about it before. The version I recently played is a 2024 remake. This is a negotiation game for up to 7 players. This is the kind of game which I would cheekily say can destroy friendships, and I wouldn't be lying. Be prepared for hurt feelings. 

There is a disaster at sea. The ship is sinking, and everyone scrambles onto a lifeboat. You have a group of sailors and you want to get as many of them saved as possible. They don't need to be on the same lifeboat. In fact it's best to diversify. Now these lifeboats have not be well maintained. They are leaky and some might not make it to the nearby islands. 

You have two types of sailors - captains and just regular pirates. For any voting you need to do during the game, captains get 2 votes and pirates only 1. Also when they survive, captains are worth more points. Everyone has the same set of cards. They include cards in every player colour, which is both sailor colour and boat colour. You also have three captain cards (those on the right). 

Here's what happens during a round of play. Some boats will start leaking, or leak more. One boat will move forward one or two steps. Then players can choose to have one of their sailors switch to another boat. Most of this is done using a voting mechanism. Which boat will leak? Everyone votes. If you want the green boat to leak, play your green card face down. You can negotiate. You can lie. You can try to cut deals. When everyone is ready, reveal all the cards. The boat getting the most votes leaks. A leaking boat still moves, but if there are more leaks than sailors, the boat sinks and all the sailors are lost. A leak takes up space. If there is not enough space, the people on the boat vote on who to throw overboard. In this situation, only the players who have sailors on the boat get to vote. This is when having a captain is powerful. The captain has 2 votes. It's not a good idea to totally dominate a boat though. In the leaking stage, your opponents can easily agree to vote to give you the leak, because no one else has a stake in that boat. 

Voting to give the leak is voting who to hurt. Thus hurt feelings. The next important vote is which boat to move. The boats are only 3 steps away from safety. Leaking boats move 2 steps. That means a boat can reach safety in as few as 2 rounds. When voting for boat movement, often the vote will be for an outcome which is the most equal. No one wants to help the leading players more. Everyone prefers to help the trailing players. 

One very important aspect of the game is the three captain cards you start the game with. Instead of voting with a colour card, you can vote with a captain card. If you are the only player who has played a captain card, you get to decide the outcome. You can overrule the vote. This is very powerful. You might send a boat with your people to safety. You might save a boat with your people which everyone else is trying to sink. Captain cards are single-use. Once you play it, it is removed from the game, unlike the regular colour cards which return to your hand. That means you only have three chances to overrule a vote in the whole game. Think carefully when you want to use a captain card. 

If two or more players play a captain card, no one gets to overrule. You play with the regular rules. However if everyone plays a captain card, the start player of the round makes the decision. As you can see, playing a captain card is a very important decision and it can have a huge impact to how the game turns out. The start player role is an important consideration as well. In the case of ties, the start player decides. 

You are going to do a lot of voting in this game. This is the kind of game that triggers lots of discussions. You try to convince others to help you, or to attack someone else. You try to collaborate sometimes. Sometimes you betray your friends. You say you will vote for his boat, but you play a captain card to move your own boat. 

You can doom a boat by jumping to another boat. If a boat has three sailors and three leaks, and one of the sailors go to another boat, and no other sailor joins this boat, the two remaining sailors will be overwhelmed by the leaking, and the boat will sink. 

This is a perfect information game. Everyone knows exactly the board situation. The uncertainty comes from not knowing how your opponents are voting. The game is actually pretty simple. There is some risk that a game can drag. If people want to keep negotiating and can't decide, things can slow to a halt. But you don't want to play this game without negotiations. That would be missing the point. This game is more about gaming the people than solving a logic problem. It is also a lot about trying to read others' intentions. Will anyone play a captain card? Will they vote with the colour they said they would? There will be leader bashing, because everyone can tell who is leading. 

I find the game clever and clean. Negotiation games are a special niche. They offer an experience which is different from most games. Just remember to play it with the right mindset. Don't take attacks too personally. It can feel so, even more than confrontational wargames. In wargames, it is expected that you want to hurt your opponent. In Lifeboats, you are choosing who to hurt. You have options, and when you choose a specific person or persons, that attack feels more personal. There is a certain helplessness when you play this game. Whether you succeed depends a lot of other people's actions. The captain cards are an important tool to help you in critical situations. I find that with gamers, we do a lot of analysis during play, to see who is leading and by how much. We are rational and we argue logically how we should vote, so that no one gets too far ahead and everyone does more or less equally well. This can make things a little boring and work-like. How much fun this game is depends a lot on what your group is like. 

Dirty Work

Dirty Work is a party game from Thailand. This is a simultaneous action selection game, and it is very much about guessing your opponents’ intentions. You are all miners mining gold, contributing to a stash of gold, one nugget at a time. Sooner or later someone will be tempted to steal from the stash. However such thieves can be caught by miners who decide to play guard. So these are the three roles you must choose from every round, miner, thief or guard. 

The game is played over multiple days, until someone has 24 gold and wins. Each day will have multiple rounds, and ends with either the stash getting stolen, or only one miner remains and takes the stash. Each round is just players simultaneously choosing a role and then all roles are revealed at the same time. First, miners work and each adds 1 gold to the stash. Now if there are thieves but no guards, the thieves take and share the stash, and the day ends. If there are thieves and guards, the stash is protected. The guard earn a small wage of 1 gold. Here’s the important rule which I find genius. A thief who is caught surrenders all his money to the guard catching him. That’s including all the money accumulated from previous days. If the game has been going on for a while, this can be a huge sum. It will be painful for the thief, but a boon for the guard. Another important rule is once you play guard, you will stop work for the day. You sit out any remaining rounds. If you play guard when there are no thieves, you earn a measly 1 gold and you’ve just wasted opportunities for the rest of the day. Choosing to guard is not a light decision. 

Being a simple miner doing honest work sounds dull. However it can be lucrative. If everyone else drops out due to playing guard or playing thief and getting caught, you earn the whole stash for yourself. 

There is one special situation. If you steal and get caught, but you have no money to pay the fine, you are temporarily on a watchlist and you cannot steal. That is a bad situation to be in. Your opponents know you only have two options and they don’t need to worry about you stealing. 

This may seem like a complicated version of rock paper scissors. You only have three options, and most of the time each of them can be the right play. Let’s say there are only two players still active for the day. The other guy has much money. You might think he wouldn’t steal because that’s risking his hard earned money, so maybe you should not guard. However he might just do it because it is out of your expectation. People may play safe and keep on mining (working). The risk of stealing is getting caught. The risk of guarding is catching no one and being forced to drop out. Yet as the stash builds up, it becomes harder and harder to resist the temptation to steal, and also to attempt to catch others whom you suspect might steal. That’s tension! I like that you do have much information and basis for deciding which role to play, yet this information does not guarantee you will make the right choice. It still depends on the psychology of your opponents. 

Playing with role cards is optional. They give you slight advantages.

This might be the Thai signature - party games which elicit much laughter. There are many types of games designed by Thai designers and published by Thai publishers, many more than made by Malaysian designers and publishers. Thai designs should not be pigeonholed. However this style of game seems to be the most successful for their market. I find Dirty Work a great design. There is much table talk, sometimes even cooperation, and of course betrayals too. 

This Game is Killer: Frozen Horror

During the lifetime of a game taster, once in a while we stumble upon unheard of games which take us by surprise. This Game is Killer: Frozen Horror is one such game for me. It is not a ground-breaking genre nor is it a highly unusual setting. It is just how well the game is put together in a concise way, plus some genius ideas thrown in. 

First and foremost, this is a one-vs-many secret identity game. One of the players is the horror, and the rest are humans. The game is played until the horror kills all the humans, or the humans manage to kill the horror. You win if you are still alive. The twist in this game is you draw identity cards every round. Every round, the horror might be any of the characters still alive. Imagine a ghost which jumps from body to body to possess them. 

The setting is a research station in the Arctic. You can start in any of the four rooms. They are connected to other rooms via doors in specific colours. The colours are important because movement cards let you move through doors in specific colours, and some cards let you temporarily lock a door in a specific colour. 

Every round you draw two cards and you will play them both. One must be played for movement, and the other for its power text. After all cards are played, you check whether the horror is in the same room as any human. If so, the horror kills some or all of these humans. When you are human, you need to try to guess who the horror is and you want to avoid him. If you are the horror, you normally want to go to where the most people are, or where at least one human is. You want to kill. 

When you are human, the behaviour of the other players will give you some clues on whether they are the horror. The horror will try to be subtle. He may pretend he suspects another player is the horror, and that's why he's coming to your room. He may try to make excuses for questionable actions. By default, the horror kills someone sharing the room. For a human to kill the horror it is much harder. You rely on having drawn certain cards. For example there's a card which lets you shoot a person who enters your room. Now that poor fellow might actually be human. There is a card which lets you shoot someone in your room then leave. If the horror uses this card well, he can kill twice. 

As the number of players dwindle, some rooms will be destroyed. It's hard to run away from sharing a room. 

When you are eliminated as a human, you don't participate anymore, but you can still cheer on the remaining humans. This is a player elimination game, but it is short and entertaining that even watching others play is fun. 

I like that this game distils the genre into something so minimalistic while still retaining the psychological play. In fact, I feel you get extra doses of this excitement because every round the identity of the horror may change. You are constantly wondering who the horror is. You question every action of your fellow players. Are they laying a trap? Are they trying to avoid danger or are they trying to trick you? Who can you trust? 

Just One

Just One is a game from 2018. It was nominated for many awards, and it won many too, the most prestigious one being the Spiel des Jahres (2019). This is a party game and a cooperative game. The idea is simple. Every round one person plays the active player and needs to guess a word. That word is known to everyone else, and everyone must give a one word clue to help the active player guess the word. These clues are written down independently. The twist is before showing the clues to the active player, they are revealed among the other players at the same time, and if any of the clues given are the same, these repeated clues must be hidden. If there are too many clashes, the active player may end up with just one clue or even none at all. As clue givers, your dilemma is you don't want to give clues which are so common that someone else would be giving the same clue. Yet if everyone avoids those obvious clues, then the clues you give might end up to be too obscure to help the active player. A full game is played for 13 rounds, and you try to get any many correct guesses as possible. Each round, the active player can only make one guess. Everyone takes turns being the active player. 

These two words below were the only two clues I had when I was the active player. What would your guess be?  

My guess was "alien", and I was right. That wasn't too hard. 

The words to guess are printed on cards. Each card has five words. The active player draws a card and shows it to everyone else without looking at it himself. He then states a number from 1 to 5. That determines which word on the card needs to be guessed. In one round we had this card below, and the word to guess was the fourth one - "cycle". 

These were the clues we gave - "wheel", "race", "repeat", "life". Would you have guessed it correctly? As you can see, we are making use of the fact that some words have multiple meanings, or are commonly used with some other words. 

Here are some other examples of cards in the game: 

The game is certainly playable as a family game, just that depending on the age of the children playing, you have to adjust how you give clues. 

We prepared a stack of 13 cards when we set up the game, because the game is played over 13 rounds. If we made a correct guess, we placed the card face-up. Otherwise, we placed it face-down. We were not doing so well. 

One of the words we had to guess was "drag". Other players gave clues like "pull" and "movement". I gave the clue "queen", because there is a term "drag queen". Some players did not understand at all why I gave this clue. Thankfully the active player understood and made the correct guess. In this case "queen" was an important clue, because he had to find one word which was associated with every single clue. The other clues were closely related, and many words were related to them. However to find a word which also related to "queen" was not easy, and the active player realised it was "drag". 

As you play, you kind of get a feel for what kind of clues your friends tend to give. I became known as the guy who gave quirky clues. So others would try to avoid giving such clues. Maybe one person will always give the simplest and most straight-forward clue. Others on the team can somewhat collaborate by letting him give such clues and avoiding such clues themselves. 

Try to guess this word. The answer will be shown at the bottom. The clues are "junior", "student", "starting", "school", "foundation", "pupil". 

Here's another one: "vision", "light", "dark", "underground", "car", "drill". 

I keep thinking of Just One as a game from India, because Jaswant is a common Indian name. The concept is very simple. Yet it is captivating. A clever idea implemented well. This is something casual gamers and non-gamers can quickly get into. It's an excellent game for a social setting because all those clues will trigger much discussion. It's a great ice-breaker. 

~~~ Answers ~~~

Clues: "junior", "student", "starting", "school", "foundation", "pupil". Answer: "primary". 

Clues: "vision", "light", "dark", "underground", "car", "drill". Answer: "tunnel".