Grab a friend or family member and try out these awesome 2-player Games! During this period of stay home, and restricted gathering down to 2 pax since the announcement of P2HA in Australia. We thought you should check out these awesome games that work well in a duel format!
First up, Jaipur is a classic game for purely 2 players that I recommend to people of all gaming backgrounds with a simple ruleset and gameplay that provides tension, tactics and fun for the whole family.
Gameplay wise, on your turn you either collect one card from the 5 in the market, swap out any number of cards from the market with those in your hand, swap cards from the market with camel cards in front of you or play a set of cards of one colour and collect that many tokens for the point pile plus any bonus tokens. The earlier ones being of a higher value. When 3 of the goods in the point pile is finished. The round ends and the person with the higher points wins the round and gets a victory token. The game continues until one person has won 2 victory tokens.
Take Magic the Gathering, remove the collectible element and make it a deck builder. That is Hero Realms from White Wizard Games, whose founders are avid Magic the Gathering fans. A fast paced 2 player card game that sees both people drawing from a common pool of cards to make the most efficient deck of resources and attack abilities. The tension of what to buy and how many cards to put in your deck, forming the crux of the puzzle for the game.
On your turn, you play 5 cards from your hand and use the resources to buy cards from the market that will go into your discard pile and use any attack points to either attack opponent's guards or the player themselves. Cards also usually have affiliated symbols to activate secondary abilities. When your draw deck empties, you then shuffle the discard pile to form your new draw deck, thus cycling in your new cards into play. The first player to reduce the opponent to 0 hit points wins.
Now Lost Cities Rivals is a 4 player game but with the removal of a few cards and the easily downloadable rules online you can also play the fantastic 2 player game Lost Cities. In a way you are getting 2 games in 1. Both of which are solid games.
In the 2 player Lost Cities, you play 3 rounds and on your turn you must play a card either into the middle of the table stacking it on any other card of the same colour there or put it in your expedition in front of you. Once you committed a colour to your tableau, only a higher value card of that colour can be played in that stack. The range of cards for each colour being wager cards, then 2 to 10. Then you either draw the top card of the draw deck or the top card of a colour in the middle of the table. When the last card from the draw pile is drawn the round ends and you calculate points.
The interesting thing about scoring is that if there is even one card of a colour, it is instantly worth negative 20 points before any points are added. So planning and choosing what to play and give your opponent is key.
Related: Beat the Covid-19 blues with these 7 awesome family board games
For heavier Euro gamers, there is Wingspan that plays up to 4 but works just as well at 2 players too. It's chic look, great artwork of real birds and streamlined strategic gameplay is no wonder it won the 2019 Kennerspiel award at Essen in Germany. Arguably one of the most prestigious award in board gaming.
In Wingspan, you are filling your aviary with birds. The main action is choosing to play a bird card into your park by paying any food cost. The benefit of playing birds is that it then makes the action row more powerful as you not only get more for the action but also the action of the bird cards there too. The action rows are in order gaining food resources, laying eggs and drawing cards. After 4 rounds, the player with the most points wins.
Keeping with cute animal artwork and a game that plays well at 2 to 4 players is Calico. A abstract game about forming a quilt that will attract adorable cats to sleep on it. Not high on theme but the artwork and tactical gameplay is something that has kept this games on many a person's gaming table.
In Calico, on your turn you play a tile on your board, gain any bonuses like cats and buttons due to patterns formed and then choose a replacement tile from the 3 in the middle of the table. Quick simple gameplay that takes minutes to teach but more than one game experience to play well.
Another abstract game but with the pedigree of Game of the Year 2014 Spiel des Jahres in Essen Germany. Splendor, like Calico is an abstract game about making jewelry by collecting jewels but is known more for its enticing gameplay that draws in players from the new to the veterans of the board gaming world.
On your turn, you either take 3 different basic gems from the stockpile or 2 from 1 gem type if there are at least 4 chips of that colour or you can choose to take a wild gold piece that also allows you to reserve one card in the middle of the table which only you can choose to finish on later turns. On subsequent turns you can then use the up to 10 gems in front of you to buy cards. Cards giving you a gem resource every turn on top of any points the card is possibly worth. When a player reaches 15 points, the game is over after equal turns. The player with the most points win.
The last game of the day is a dexterity game that brings the fun of air hockey into your home. Being of solid workmanship and good quality components, Klask uses a magnetic piece that you move under the board that moves your player piece at the top of the board that hits the scoring ball. Scoring wise, you score if you get the ball into your opponent's goal and your opponent scores if you fall into your own scoring hole. Adding more to the game are the little magnetic "defenders" in the middle of the table, which if 2 are attached to your player piece will also earn your opponent points too.
Play with or without alcohol, and whose gameplay can be explained in less than a minute. A fun romp of laughter and hand eye coordination.
A micro game in your pocket with a satisfying amount of strategy and tactics. Mint Works was well received and got the company started to make more games in this mini mint series.
On your turn you use mints to do actions on action cards, such as getting building plans, build plans from your hand, get more mints, etc. Once someone has seven stars, the game ends and the person with the most points wins.
Not only a popular IP but whose gameplay is also inspired by the world famous Love Letter micro game, although it plays quite different.
In Marvel: Infinity Gauntlet, one player has to play as Thanos and the other players as the Avengers. The Avengers win if Thanos's health is reduced to zero but Thanos wins if the Avenger's collective health reaches zero or he collects all of the six infinity stones. On a player's turn, the avengers and Thanos will do an action based on the card they hold or one of the two if you are Thanos. The fun comes from the information one gets from the interaction of each card that is played. The small amount of cards making it easy to make a educated guess on what cards have an advantage.
Another Mint game in the mini series is a pick up and deliver game called Mint Delivery. On your turn you have two actions, be it move, pick up, use special abilities, etc. As the game suggests, the whole game is about picking up and delivering orders to various cities. When you get to a city if you can fulfil a face up order, you get points. When the game ends, the person with the most points wins.
Also Read: 7 Thematic board games for an interactive board gaming session!
For value for your buck, how about looking at the Poketto Collection. A series of three games in one pack, all of which can fit in your various pockets. The three games are The Blessed Dark, a up to four player competitive game of summoning demons, Castle Siege, a two player game of last standing castle wins and Starforge, a two player game of conquest, crafting and construction in the far flung future. Each of these games playing in about twenty minutes and with how small and fast they are, you probably can play all three in one session.
Another simple game that fits but in your back pocket is the world famous Sushi Go. A card drafting game that plays quickly and whose scoring is literally printed on every card you draft. On your turn, you draft one card at a time, passing the rest to the next player. You do this till all the cards in player's hands have been drafted and then score each type of sushi you have ordered in your tableau. You do this for three rounds and the person with the most points wins.
Another back pocket game but for an amazing up to 10 players for a party. Every game, one person writes a word on the erasable boards and one of these players has a X on it, making them the Fake Artist. Then players in turn order players will draw a single line to give a hint that they know what the word is twice. They do not want to draw the lines to be too clear though as if the Fake Artist can guess the word, the players still lose. A interesting party game that makes use of minimal components and play for a rousing good time.
Find your muse and live the life of a painter, submitting your masterpieces for competition against other artist for both recognition and prestige.
On a player's turn, players will collect art cards, which are mostly transparent other than the art on them, bidding to take cards later in the row but with inspirational tokens. Put 3 together in as master sleeve and create your own unique Painting. On top of the artwork on each card, there are also icons which will define scoring opportunities depending on the order you cover the icons. Scoring cards are also randomly shown so each game of Canvas differs. Paintings are scored based on a set of Scoring cards which will change each game. Once players have created and scored 3 paintings the game ends.
At the end, the cool moment is seeing the unique paintings that are yours and with the whimsical art, the feeling of having created something artistic does come true. Good for both gamers and the family.
Become the second best thing about Disney movies or the best if you are like me. The Villain. In Villainous you play as one of multiple famous Disney baddies, each with their own personal decks, goals and play styles. And as Villains do, there can only be one winner.
Gameplay wise, Villainous is played by moving your figure on your personal board, each section allowing you do multiple actions be it to discard cards, play cards, attack heroes, etc. There is also a interactive element that sees each character having a personal hero deck and when another player lands on a fate action, they can choose a player to draw from the fate deck and for example, Long John Silver will be attacked by Peter Pan or the lost boys. The player that achieves their goal first wins.
A quick playing, family game that really brings out the theme of the movie the Villain comes from. Definitely quote-worthy as a Disney fan and one in which the theme is backed by just as good gameplay.
Also Read: 10 Board Games to check out in early 2021 for your collection
There must be an heir for the leadership of the watch on the Wall. Land yourself in the Northern end of Westros as a black brother and build your influence through building roads, collecting items, setting up villages and more. All the while fighting back the hordes of Wildings assaulting the wall.
Gameplay wise, each player will also have a famed Black Brother like Samwell Tarly, Jeor Mormont with them, which will grant them abilities unique to them. Using the hero though means he will leave your service and might be recruited by others. Also, each turn players will collect resources, trade among their rivals and use said resources to build infrastructure or draw cards for items or special actions. At some point the Wildings will attack the wall and the only way to hold them off is if you had put guards on the wall but doing that means you are not using your turn to do more to build influence among the Brotherhood.
The unique thing about Game of Thrones:Catan is unlike normal Catan there is not only the common 10 Victory points to win but if the Wildings manage to get through the wall 3 times, the player with the most guards on the Wall wins as the player with the most military strength among a ravaged north.
Unique among Catan with a theme that truly comes out in play and a good step up strategically after one has played the original Catan.
Murder she wrote, Sherlock Holmes and the like but in board game form. Solve mysteries and the like by interviewing suspects, witnesses and more and also search crime scenes to pick up on vital evidence to lock in and capture the culprit. An app assisted game, you use a phone with the free to download app to scan the QR codes on the game boards and cards to do your interviews, crime scene investigations and the like. Every scan taking a certain amount of time away from your case and each scenario having different end conditions to lose, while to win you have to answer a few questions asked by the app about the case.
A fully immersive game all about the story and people involved in the case. There is even an option to use VR glasses to do the crime scene investigations. If story and crime dramas are your thing then look no further than Chronicles of Crime. And if the base game's cases are not enough, there are many themed expansions for players to explore.
The game that started the legendary Fantasy Flight Games company. In Twilight Imperium, you are playing out a literal Space Opera in boardgame form. Its Designer Chris Peterson inspired by movies and books like Star Wars and Dune. A epic theme that plays just as long, at timings that stretch from 4 to 8 hours depending on the players and their familiarity with the rules and the strategies to win.
The Game has many rules but basically you get phases for politics to vote on rules that affect everybody in the galaxy, trade with fellow players, technology that makes your actions and spacecraft better and of course combat to round up the gameplay experience.
That being said, players should note that this is not a game of constant action. Twilight Imperium is more of a game of thoughtful actions. For example, the better the spaceship, the longer it will take to gear your economy to build it and thus there is a real sense of loss when you lose a big spaceship or worse, an entire fleet. An immensely satisfying experience and one of the most immersive games you and your group can play.
Based on the popular Lord of the Rings LCG by Fantasy Flight Games, Marvel Champions sees you using a pre prepared or a deck of your own build based on a hero of your choice and a trait you want to give, such as justice or leadership to fight a villain and his or her scheme.
Gameplay wise it is a cooperative game. On a player's turn, a player uses cards to do actions to thawt villain schemes, fight villains head to head, get locations or build up their characters. While the villain will look to achieving their schemes if they are still in play.
What gives it the marvel flavour is that each character and villain has been customised to be different and keep their unique traits in the comics. Thus playing as Hulk is a different experience than fighting with Ironman. If Marvel is your theme, Marvel Champions is for you and plays just as well solo too in reviews.
Thematic and educational. A combination that makes Photosynthesis a game that has sold very well to schools and individual players alike. It's theme on how plants grow and the sunlight they need to prosper.
On your turn the sun piece moves around the board and it's rays will travel in a straight line. If sunlight reaches your trees, you gain sun points equal to the level of your tree, which can be used to put out seeds, grow your trees into bigger ones or have them die to turn into fertiliser and turn into points that will win you the game. Beyond points, you also want your tree to grow bigger as the taller they are the more sunlight they gain and they will also block opponent trees from getting sunlight by casting their shadow.
A game that is easy to learn and can be taught using its theme of Photosynthesis. A true test of a game designed with theme.
To that end, here are 10 games for your consideration if you are looking to get the perfect game for the many perfect people in your lives and yes that includes you too.
A love letter game that is a cut above the rest and a first true deviation from the core mechanics of Love letter. Infinity Gauntlet is instead a one versus many game that pits Thanos versus the Avengers.
Each turn heroes will draw a card and choose to play one of the two cards in their hand, having to do its ability, trying to defeat Thanos in the process to win. Thanos on the other hand will be trying to collect the Infinity stones or defeat the avengers to win the game. A quick easy game that gives the theme of the Avengers fighting Thanos, all in 15minutes!
A perfect starting game for a family who are looking to get into boardgames. Based on the award winning game Pandemic, Hot Zone reduces the length of the game and its table footprint.
On your turn, you will travel around the world to reduce diseases, build research centres and when you have enough cards, find a cure for the diseases. All the while trying not to lose in more than one way. In the busy world of Australia where time and space is at a premium. Hot Zone ticks all the boxes to allow a family to dip their toes into this great hobby without breaking the wallet or time investment.
From the plethora of videos involving cute cats on the internet, it is not hard to say that the feline theme is a safe bet. Add to that the beautiful art design involving quilt patterns and you have what can only be said as an eye catching game.
That being said, the game, Calico is an abstract one. On your turn you choose a quilt tile to place on your personal quilt board. Then if it matches scoring patterns, you will score points and cats that will come to rest on your quilt if their favourite patterns are matched. The person with the most points at the end wins.
Small World, the family game that has stood the test of time with countless expansions has now finally with the popularity of tabletop games gotten the likes of Blizzard to allow their Warcraft IP onto it.
In Small World of Warcraft you play as one of the races of Azeroth and have randomly chosen traits. Which gives you a set amount of soldier tiles and unique race and trait abilities. Which you will use to expand your area of influence and gain money. But it is a small world and thus very soon other races will fight you for the same territory. At some point you might even retire a race so you can choose another one to conquer the board. The player with the most money at the end wins, and gets to tell their own history of Azeroth in under an hour.
Also Read: 11 Unique Board Games from 2019
The golden age of China, the Tang Dynasty and the Emperor Xuanzhong has chosen you and your fellow architects to build the Imperial Gardens. Taking into account the whims of the many wealthy patrons and the Emperor's court.
In Tang Garden, you will choose one of the face-up tiles and then place it on the board, collecting element points or choose to place a decoration onto the board for end game points. Also as you gain element points, you can more importantly gain characters that you can place onto the board for more end game points. The person with the most points wins and is known as the best architect of the famed Tang Garden.
A prequel to the most popular Legacy game in the world, Pandemic Legacy. Legacy being a system that changes the game permanently after almost every game with its story and has you and your group stick stickers, tear up cards, etc. from the game. In Pandemic Legacy: Season 0, you are CIA operatives looking to stop the Soviets during the Cold War from achieving their goal of Operation Medusa.
Now importantly, although the gameplay is still at its core from the original game of Pandemic. This one adds a lot of new features beyond the surprises of the Legacy element, such as combatting Soviet agents on top of pathogens. And customisation wise, you get even more than any of the other games in the series. With the ability to stick new haircuts, accessories and such on your character passport to make not only a unique game by the end but unique characters too. Do note that Season 0 is a standalone game and there is no need to have played Season 1 or 2 before you play Season 0.
A starter introduction set to the massively popular game and the number one board game in the world according to the massive user base (I am one) of the most popular board game website in the world Boardgamegeek.com, Gloomhaven. Jaws of the Lion is a prequel to the original game and so if you not played it before, the story flows perfectly by playing this first before Gloomhaven.
Gloomhaven is a dungeon crawler board game that uses a system of cards instead of dice to reduce luck for combat and is known for its good story. This of course applies to Jaws of the Lion too and it has the big plus of teaching you the Gloomhaven system step by step in scenarios with an easy setup game to game. A criticism of the original game even though it was so popular. And if Jaws of the Lion scratches all the boxes, you can then invest in the way more expensive Gloomhaven experience.
The asymmetrical Villainous system now spreads its wings into the Marvel Universe. Play as the villains for once and fight the Avengers and the other villains too.
In Villainous, you choose a villain to play and each of them has a themed deck of cards with personal goals that if reached wins them the game. The interaction comes in the form of playing hero cards at each other during play, forcing them to deal with it as they pursue their goals too. What is even more unique in this version of Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power, is that if you use Thanos in the game, the game becomes even more interactive and thematic as Thanos wants to claim the Infinity stones from the other players by force.
Honour the Gods of Egypt, build the complex of Karnak, compete to the be the purest soul.
Tekhenu is a strategic euro game for those who are looking to spend 2 to 3hours pondering strategy and tactics. As you draft dice that are on the light or dark side of action spaces, the number of the dice gives different actions or resources to score points. Then you have to balance your soul with the number on your dice faces on the light and dark side of your personal board. Imbalance loses you points or makes you go later in turn order. Tekhenu is a game you and your friends will probably play in mostly silence as you all are actively thinking. If that sounds like your kind of game, honour the Gods in Tekhenu.
Based on the new movie of the famed Sci-Fi novel by Frank Herbert. Dune Imperium sees you fight for power over Arrakis or it is more widely known as Dune. Influence the Fremen, Mentats, Guilds, Bene Gesserit and more, all the while collecting resources to fund your ventures.
Dune Imperium is a unique deck building worker placement. On your turn you play a card which has symbols on where you can send workers on Dune. You will keep doing so until you choose to pass and then reveal your hand for persuasion resources to buy cards to fill your deck or conflict cards to help fight others on Dune. A simple yet strategic system that is filled with theme. Help the spice flow, spice it up with Dune Imperium.
A reworking of Kingdom Builder from the game designer of the widely popular Dominion. You play a lord in the game. All the while trying to influence widely known nobles to get the most influence.
On your turn, you get to place 3 houses on a terrain showed on the terrain card. Rules are they all have to touch an existing area of the board of the terrain shown and if possible touch an existing building connected to that terrain, if not you can start in a new area of that terrain type. Thus you can see this game can be very strategic for both families and hardcore gamers.
That being said, we cannot just put the blame on the sellers as it can also be argued that with so many fake games floating around, that there is customer demand. So let's get into detail and see what one will get in a pirated copy, the effects of it on the industry and its domino effects.
(Xeo Lye talking about Board Game Design during the SG Card & Boardgame Event)
The first thing to note as was discussed by local designer and publisher, Xeo Lye at one of our board games seminars is that imitation is the highest form of flattery and it usually takes the path of least resistance. That means that more than likely only worldwide hits like Pandemic, Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, etc. are the ones that illegal printers will try to fake usually. On top of that, they usually will fake games that are easy to do so. Such as games with a small amount of pieces or easily mass produced. Such as dice, cubes, etc.. Also, board gaming is a luxury for the most part and thus if a game is very expensive, the person who will buy that game, will usually not mind spending the extra cash to get the quality pieces.
(Detailed miniatures that would be very difficult to replicate)
A good example is the CMON Kickstarter hit, Rising Sun with its detailed miniatures and tokens. Fake copies of which I have been unable to find or have ever seen.
(The actual product will prove a clearer significance in difference)
You can see from the above pictures, the fake copy is obvious with its faded look, cheaper made tokens and components. The being said, functionally, the game is still there and can be played in its entirety. This is the biggest problem for board games publishers as unlike computer games, pirated copies tend to lack the ability to play certain functions or be updated as printing varies.
Related: Manufacturing for The Win
At this point, it has to be pointed out that there is a difference in the board game print & play community and piracy. As there are those that argue when even publishers allow or embrace people printing and playing their games, then piracy in the industry is not as bad. The proof being the abundance of print and play game files on boardgamgeek.com, Asmodee, the world's most popular board game website and digital versions like tabletopia.
But for print and plays, the key difference is its intent of personal use and non profit. An honour system that the board game community is proud of as it started as a community sharing effort and still holds true to that that ethos. Thus, intent is key.
(A Print & Play version of Secret Hitler by the publisher)
Now, intent aside, what are the downsides of piracy and its effects on this industry we all love. Well, firstly and obviously, it is illegal and immoral. It is the stealing of people's hard work and profiting from it without giving the designer and publisher their dues for bringing the game into reality. Also, on a very personal level, I do not think anyone likes a person who takes credit and the rewards of their hard work and should reciprocate with similar behaviour. For example, someone I knew bought a game that she did not know was fake and after playing it and finding it not to her liking, decided to resell the game but when I told her to inform the person buying it, it was a fake copy, she said it was ok not to as she was tricked too. Basically, an evil begets evil attitude.
Also, most individual board game companies are not looking at millions and billions in revenue and thus are hit harder by each unsold copy. The domino effect being that the less copies are sold the less the publisher will feel this designer and his/her games are worth and thus less games are made from that person. So in effect, to save those few dollars, one has deprived more fun games to the world for something one could have easily afforded.
In conclusion, help your fellow man and gamer. No one is expecting all gamers to be a Saint but just be a normal moral person. Support the industry, the hobby and buy the originals, so we can all indulge in this hobby and see it grow for times immemorial.
Do you hear what the Kopi King is serving! The rush to serve your Kopis in the heartlands of Australia's hawker centres with loud calls of the various types of tailor-made drinks for each customer. This is the loving theme of Kopi King, a shoutout to all the hardworking people in Australia serving up these locally made brews every day.
In Kopi King, you need to have both quick hand and eye coordination. After setup, play starts with a shout of "Kopi King!" And then everybody starts reaching for ingredients in the middle, putting them on orders if they match, if not returning them and grabbing another card. This will go on till someone completes their order and shouts out their finished order in traditional coffeeshop fashion, be it siew dais, kosong or so much more. They then grab a new order card and continue.
This will go on till one player has 5 order cards done. Then everybody scores for the orders they completed and for those that are incomplete or have mistakes, earn 50cents for every correct ingredient and minus 50cents for wrong ones. The player that made the most cash wins!
You are a local entrepreneur, looking to make a business of your mooncakes which everyone tells you are fantastic. So you collect your ingredients and go forth to make the best mooncakes and fulfill your many customer requests.
Mooncake Master is played over 3 rounds. On each round, you choose 1 tile from 3 and then pass the other 2 to the players beside you. Then setting the tiles you have into 1 of 3 possible mooncakes in front of you. This will go on till you have 3 full mooncakes done and then you will score how tasty your mooncake is, the maker with the tastiest mooncakes, scoring festival points!
After that, everybody can sell 1 of their mooncakes to each customer that is available. Scoring more festival points. In the end, the person with the most festival points wins.
Cook and serve up the best ramen to a menu that fills the mouth with just the right flavours. A nuance of ingredients mixed to reach Michelin star levels.
To play Ramen Fury, on your turn, you take 2 actions. These are either taking cards from the display, swapping the display for new cards, choosing to put ingredients in your bowls, to empty bowls, or eat one of your ramen bowls. Once a player has eaten their 3rd bowl the game ends and you score your flavourful creations. The player that has made and ate the best menu of ramen bowls wins!
Related: Exploring the Different Types of Board Games + REAL Examples (2018) by Byran Truong of Game Cows
Eating sushi as a conveyer of constant food passes you by and paying by the colour of your plates. A very common experience that many Australiaans are now used to and now that experience is translated into board games form in a light family game that can be enjoyed by all.
In Sushi Roll, you each take dice randomly from the bag depending on player count. Then the person with the red conveyer tile starts by rolling their dice, using menu tiles to reroll dice, and using chopsticks to reach over to take dice from other players. Once that is done, you will have to take a dish from your conveyer (Just like in real life!), and then when everybody has drafted enough dice, you will score your plates as according to your player mat and after 3 rounds the person with the most points wins with a full stomach.
The struggle is real. Getting a table for your group during lunch hour at a popular hawker centre in the Central Business District is definitely no easy task. And it is this frantic mode of search, seat, and eat that you are doing in this locally made game, Chope.
On your turn, you turn over cards and if a table card is opened, everyone even the person opening the cards has to grab their tissue card, and the first to touch the table card gets it. The player will then continue to open the cards and if they are food cards, collect them by either opening more cards and taking them all if the player chooses to stop or if the player opens two of the same dish, they only collect one dish. At the end of the game, tables with dishes gain points but tables without food or food without tables will lose you points. The best-fed player wins!
Now how can we advocate food without health in mind? To that end, for this menu, we suggest Point Salad, a game about eating your vegetables without a hint of meat in sight!
In Point Salad, you will have vegetable cards whose backs are also scoring goals. On your turn, you can either take a card as a scoring card for the end of the game, take 2 vegetable cards or even take a scoring card and immediately change it to its vegetable side. This will go on till all the cards have been drafted and then you score your goals and the person with the most yummy and healthiest meal wins in both the game and life.
You are on your way to the lovely makcik's Kueh stall and you, your friends, or family have chosen which kuehs to buy and have brought them home to eat. But then you all notice there is only a limited amount but so many hungry people, all aiming for the yummiest ones. so you have to get to your favourite kuehs before other grubby hands do.
In Kuih Muih, on your turn, a player will choose one deck and then from that deck, the player will choose one card and place it facedown in front of them. Then reveal them as part of your meal. This is repeated till one deck is empty and then scoring is done. At the end of 3 rounds, the player with the most points wins.
Do you have a friend from overseas that would love to try the local delights of Australia but are not sure where to start? Then Say What? Shiok Food edition is for you. Just give them this deck of cards and they can not only learn the names of these local delights but also see what the main ingredients of the dishes are. It also can help to ease them into their food journey in Australia by drawing one card for every meal to choose a dish to try rather than agonizing over the limitless choices here.
There is also a game, where each person can see if they can name the dishes from describing the food card. Simple, easy, and a wonderful gift to remind those leaving Australia of the multicultural food culture here.
The hawker or food court, a way to not only house a myriad of food options but also keep it affordable for the everyday person.
In Foodies, you each play an owner of a new food court. On your turn, you roll a dice and then everybody will look at that spot on their grids. If there is anything on your grid, be it money, or a card with a benefit, you will collect it. Then with your available money, you can purchase a dish to be sold in your food court, and then finally you can hire a guest chef, which are achievements for more points in the game. When a person reaches a certain number of points depending on the player count. The game ends and the player with the most points wins, with a food court franchise to be envied.
Now as the founding father of Australia, Lee Kuan Yew, once said, a person by around 30 years or so will have their personalities pretty much set. So for the current generation and before, if they are selfish, they probably will remain unknowingly or otherwise ignorant of their situation. Thus, we have to look to the future and focus on teaching the younger generation that social responsibility is a trait not only worth having but that it should come naturally. So, to keep learning fun, here are 6 board games that you can incorporate social responsibility lessons into and still have a fun game for both you and your kids.
One might be curious about how Klask or its 4 player set, Klask 4 can be a good lesson in social responsibility but as someone who has worked quite a bit in a board game store, it can and let me explain why.
So in Brajkishore blind's showroom, there is a copy of Klask 4 that people can demo play. It is very popular with kids, hitting the balls and pieces as hard as they can and of course, they fly off the board. With some children, they make it a point of picking up after themselves, while some need their parents to tell them to do so and lastly the parents and children who expect the staff to pick up after them.
Klask is a game similar to Air Hockey, except a round ball is shot around a stadium board through pieces controlled by magnets on the underside of the board. One score by scoring a goal, an opponent getting 2 biscuits (white pieces) on their player piece, an opponent hitting the ball off the board and an opponent getting a Klask, their main piece dropping into their own goal.
Klask can be used to teach a child in a short and quick game that there are consequences to one's actions by making them pick up after themselves. For example, hitting a piece very hard can be very satisfying but then you have a longer period looking around to find a missing piece. Also, the game is fun but still needs skill to play, teaching that maybe the most satisfying hard hit of the ball for a moment won't win them the game probably. Thus, through repetition, the child learns naturally to pick up after their own mess.
To teach social responsibility and how the effects of one will affect everybody else, of course, you have to include a cooperative game. As to win, the game is designed for people to work together against the game. So if everybody was to only do what they feel like doing without consulting others, they are likely to lose. Basically, a chain is only as strong as the weakest link.
On top of that, Pandemic Rapid Response is a realtime game, where people have to work against a literal timer, I suggest a 2 minute timer on your phones instead of the sand timer in the game. Thus, players have to give others a chance to speak, as if everyone speaks, then no one is listening and with a timer, the child will learn that a well thought out action is usually better than an impulsive one. The timer also makes it less likely one player can boss around others as everybody is thinking on their feet.
Rapid Response is played with a 2 minute timer per round, players each do their actions in turn by rolling dice and using the symbols to move, fly the plane, remove waste, get rescue items loaded and drop off the items to different cards representing countries. Every 2 minutes, new countries need help and if one cant complete the cards within the limited time counters in the game, the game is lost. If the players complete all the cards, they win.
Related: The Benefits of Board Gaming Cooperatively in this Isolation Period
Learning about social responsibility is a holistic lesson that must start with the person themself. Also, I do not know anyone who likes to be preached at. Thus, with Legend of the Cherry Tree that can be done because it is a push your luck game in which the player chooses when to stop. The game is played by pulling flowers from the bag and if the player busts by getting 5 flowers of different colours or 3 of the same colour then they only collect 2 different coloured flowers and put it in front of their screen but if the player chooses to stop before they bust, they get to choose one colour to go behind their screen and the rest goes in front of their screen with their respective scorings.
Thus, you can allow them to fail a few times, then explain the lesson of pulling back even though they want to push their luck further. Again reinforcing the idea that what they want now might not always benefit themselves in the long term. Thus a win for themselves and society as a whole.
No lesson can be done unless there is communication between the teacher and the student. So with that, we have an experience whose entire premise is communication.
In Concept, the active player has to give clues on a board with a wide array of characteristics, such as shape, colour, is it alive, etc without saying anything. The faster another player can guess, the better the score. To me, this is not really a game but an activity which shows that what you expect to be totally obvious can be totally foreign to another. For example, I played with a person from America who thought of Australiaans like people from China when he worked there and thought how we could possibly know who Colonel Sanders was. He was not trying to be mean but he learned from his mistake, which is forgivable.
Thus, as you can see by playing Concept, you get to delve into the minds of others and learn that to do well in this game, it is more important to think about the other players first as they are the ones that have to guess the word. Thus, a lesson that is good to put into the mind of a child in society, as most selfish people think they are allowed to break rules as they got a good excuse in their heads but others don't when they do the same.
The last game on this list is really very poignant to the current situation and the obvious game about working together as it is the game that made cooperative games a worldwide phenomenon.
Pandemic and Pandemic Legacy sees you and your team of specialists going around the world, collecting information, curing people, building research centers and making vaccines. If you can find the cure to all the viruses, you win, if not, the world has to suffer a prolonged pandemic. Pandemic Legacy, on the other hand, is the same base mechanics, except with an exceptional story that sees you changing the board and cards permanently with decisions made every scenario you play till the story ends.
This game is really the epitome of teaching why working together is important and the theme shows how one person's bad behaviour can lead to everyone suffering in the current situation we are in right now in the real world. Thus, how could I not put this game on the list.
In conclusion, I hope everything stays healthy and we all just do your part to get over this. No one expects anyone else to suffer unduly but remember if we all do it, it is just a month staying in but if there are more selfish people, then it will be far longer and everybody still suffers together. #StayHome, Stay safe.
That being said, there is an easier and much saner way (according to some parents I talked to) to teach that lesson in a fun way and that is by using board games and to start out by playing a cooperative one.
Firstly, as mentioned above, people, in general, don't like to lose and thus it is completely normal for a child to protest that fact but to prevent a self-serving attitude from developing into something more permanent, it is good to deal the lesson quickly that losing will happen and it is better to deal with it than to make it worse by pampering them to the contrary.
The benefits of a cooperative game are of course that you are working with the child to win the game. Thus any trust issues that can come from taking a lesson from an "opponent's" conflict of interest are eliminated. Also, for your sanity, if you all were to lose the game together, the child's displeasure is spewed onto the imaginary enemy of the game rather than yourself. Utilising a board game as a platform, you can build on it to teach so many good lessons, such as with the game Pandemic, which you can use to teach that each virus cube is a group of people being cured but sometimes we have to forgo curing some people to travel to find the cure at the disease center. A balance of what does the most good but still achieves the overall goal.
Another hurdle that cooperative games have is that since you are working together, the process of teaching can be tailored to the person you are playing with. Compared to if you were playing a competitive game and you forgot to tell someone a rule that would affect them, it could be seen as sabotage but in this case, if the child seems to be losing interest during the rules explanation, you can just teach as you play.
Also, another big thing about playing with kids is that there are times where you feel you have to hold back so you don't beat them too completely in a competitive state or even in some cases let them win. That is firstly not very fun and thought-provoking for the parent or teacher and thus turned from a game into an activity with the kid. Thus, with many cooperative games, like the Forbidden series: Forbidden dessert, island and sky. You can tweak the game difficulty and while still keep the game challenging enough for yourself. If the child is still learning you can make it easier than you usually play to compensate for the child making decisions (which you should not alpha the game) and mistakes as they play.
With that, in case you are swarmed with all the new cooperative games out there and want some recommendations of a progression of Cooperative games you can get over a period of time by increasing/decreasing the difficulty of rules. My quick recommendation is first to start off with the granddaddy of them all, Pandemic, then move on to the Forbidden Island, dessert or sky (Whichever theme you like), then maybe as a true family experience Pandemic Legacy. I hope this will help even beyond the isolation period for you and your family and bring many a smile, enjoy.
Mice and Mystics is a great example of our goal today as it was created as a family experience in mind. It is a cooperative game that focuses on a story that the whole family goes through, working together to achieve a common goal. That being to stop an evil wizard that has turned you and your friends into mice and to help the good King before the evil wizard does him harm.
The mechanics of the game are as simple as setting up the board and then reading the story/goal, then proceed to use your cute animal miniatures to achieve goals, fight rats, centipedes, etc. Combat is a simple dice rolling system that has hits and defence dice, on which are also cheese icons that you can spend to use items or spells. That being said the experience is multiple part story and is not just a linear one with sidequests and different items to be found in each playthrough. A true story created by a family for a family.
With more kids now encouraged to stay at home, why not use a board game to both educate and have fun at the same time! In Photosynthesis, one learns how trees grow and use the sun's rays to create food for themselves to grow big and tall.
Gameplay starts with players getting their sun points by collecting points depending on which of their specific trees is not blocked by shadows of other trees and how old they are. For example, a level 3 tree will get 3 sun points but also cast a 3 spot long shadow depending on where the sun is shining from. From there, a player is allowed to spend as many points as they want to throw seeds, grow trees or kill a tree when it is old enough to gain points for feeding the earth for new life to start once again. A tool for science and biology education but also a strategic experience if your family is looking for that too.
Related: Top 10 Childhood Tabletop Games That You Can Still Play Online
Now, this is the 3rd article in which I am promoting this game but I truly feel it is a singularly unique experience from both a gameplay and design standpoint.
Slide Quest comes with great components that work to create a super Mario platforming experience on the tabletop. You and up to 3 others are tasked cooperatively to help the brave knight go through 20 levels with only limited lives. And the way to do it is by Physics! Tilting the board one way or another to move the weighted knight to finish specific goals on each level, be it to push enemies into holes or get to an endpoint or both.
Again a nice quick experience that you can even "save" the game back into the box to come back to together and yet is fun enough to last several levels of the game at a time. And a good look at what is possible from a design perspective from even using the box of the game to create a game.
Probably for older kids due to the somewhat more in-depth rules but with more time now at home, it is probably a good time to start a Legacy game. A Legacy board game being where you change the board or story of a game by making permanent changes by decisions the players make in-game. In the end, each copy is unique to you and your family and will become a piece of history you all can look back on and the best part the finished copy can still be played as a normal board game after for Clank Legacy!
The gameplay is at its base a deck builder, buying cards to improve your deck of actions during each game. The timer being when people collect treasures that are equal to points. Each time that is done, the big bad will attack more often and thus there is only a limited time and how far you can try your luck to get items that are more expensive but are also harder to get out before the end of the game.
When it comes to family games, simple rules are key and when it comes to simple and easy rules, fast to play but full of tactics, there is no better than Azul. Which is why it was one of the best selling games of 2018.
Azul is a game in which you are building the sultan's palace and thus you need tiles to do so. You collect tiles from the round factories in the middle of the table and when you collect tiles, you have to take all of the same patterns ones from one of the factories and push the rest to the "floor" in the middle. On any turn, tiles from the floor can also be taken. When tiles are taken, they have to be placed on your personal board/warehouse and the state of your board at the end of a round and the end of the game gains you points and the person with the most points wins.
From the famed designer of cooperative games such as Pandemic comes Forbidden Desert. Your team's airship has crashed in the desert and to survive you need to collect all the parts and put them together before the sandstorm hits, which makes it impossible to do so.
This cooperative game sees players moving, clearing sand and collecting the airship's parts. Each player has a unique skill to use and when the ship is built and all players return to board the ship, the game is won! Sounds easy but the game has a mechanic that sees more and more sand covering the board as the game progresses, making it a tactical game of choice of clearing or just heading to collect parts. As neglect in one area will make future choices harder.
The best thing about Forbidden Desert is that you can make the game as hard or easy as you want and even on easy it is not a cakewalk. A challenging experience that the whole family can come back and work through together.
Lastly, a really simple party game. Something that can be learned in 2minutes and played in 15minutes and not only that but the game is designed locally and has a theme any local can relate to for a laugh. That of trying to get a table at a crowded hawker centre during peak hours.
Chope is a simple speed, push your luck and a set collection game. On your turn, you turn over cards and if a table card is opened, everyone even the person opening the cards has to use their tissue card to try to get the table, the first one to touch the table gets it. The player will then continue to open the cards and collect food, they will get all the food when they choose to stop or unless they open two of the same dish and then only collect one dish, thus a push your luck aspect to the game too. At the end of the game, tables with dishes gain points but tables without food or food without tables will lose you points!
So in conclusion, it is a hard time for all and so let us get through this together with as much joy as possible and I hope that all these games will bring a few more smiles to the world in this period and hopefully even after we get over this virus.
From a design perspective, this is probably one of the most unique games out there. How do you translate a Mario Player Character experience with levels in a board game form? Blue Orange managed to create Slide Quest, a dexterity game with levels that increases the thrill of the game while making it not just a solitary but also a co-op game. It uses a simple but ingenious paddle-like contraption that gives this dexterity game its essence. Just put the paddles and level sheet on and go!
I actually played this with friends when it was near its final production phase and was amazed at how well the paddles worked. You truly feel you are in control of the knight and if you lose, you feel it is your skill and cooperation that failed and not the design. Also, the cooperative 4 player experience of each person controlling one side is the hardest but most rewarding too.
First Contact is to me most likely inspired by the movie, Arrival, where a linguist is trying to decipher the language and communicate with aliens who have come to earth. And again taking this idea to a party game would seem a folly but again, it was another unique and fun experience.
In First Contact, 1-3 Aliens try to tell the human players what they want as offerings but the two species have to figure out what the other is trying to say via words in their language. This is done by the humans pointing to items on a shared group of cards and the aliens writing in their language (Randomly chosen before the game box) what it means to them. Then when this is done, the aliens will write a sentence in their alien language and the humans have to give one item they hope the aliens want.
I played this with both a linguist and other party gamers and all agree that this is probably for party goers who are more cerebral as unlike some other party games, there is little chance of a person winning this without putting thought in the game.
An obvious Harry Potter inspired themed game that transports you as students of a Wizarding school who are trapped in the library and the only person that can help you get out has been turned into a book called the grimoire. Every turn players have to use the 2 clues given by the grimoire from pictures it shares to find the right picture ("book in the theme") to advance and escape. But within the student's midst is a traitor wanting to thwart the good student's efforts.
Mysterium is a similar and popular game but it has never resonated with me as it is so abstract that no one I know has ever won the game. But in Obscrurio, published by Libellud takes that same idea, but does it better and more importantly faster.
Also Read: 5 Games about Asia by Asians by Daryl Chow of Origame
Pax Pamir takes the Pax series and finally makes it accessible to most players even outside the wargaming circle. The game is less than 2hrs and sees players choosing to back the British, Afghans or Russians in their bid to control Afganistan during the colonial period. This is done by spending money to influence nobles, build roads, forts, and armies. Choosing to back the right side gains you victory points on a scoring round and thus negotiations and switching sides are all part of the game.
Historical wargames have a consistent base but a niche crowd from game to game. That coupled with their usual many rules and long playtime usually detracts them from a wider audience but Pax Pamir fixes that and still has a strong theme to the period.
The best selling board game of 2019 on many websites is Wingspan. A card-based board game that has the theme of you owning an aviary and populating it with birds of all species. Each bird card having its own powers and the spots it occupies giving you actions during the game.
Having played the game more than a few times, I totally understand why the game has sold so well. It has strategy, beautiful art and facts about the birds you can learn if you so choose to read the cards. It does not introduce anything new mechanically but works very well as a whole indeed.
The world of app-driven board games is becoming more and more common and their interactions more involved. This is where UBOOT sits with its app-driven board game. Each player takes control of a role such as captain or engineer and in real-time they are solving events and missions from the app to win the game. Work well together and survive or, perish into the depths of the Ocean.
With well-regarded reviews and great production, the app adversed are the only ones who might have a hurdle to try this game. Well that and the high price to get it in Australia but still I hope to give it a go sometime soon.
The so-far universally praised King's Dilemma is a story based legacy game with negotiation based core gameplay. You go through up to 20 plus games of about 40 minutes to an hour and see your noble house trying to gain power within the realm by advising the king as to problems that affect the realm. Such as fixing windmills to invading another country, all the while pushing your agenda which will see you working with and betraying your fellow nobles in due time.
I am usually skeptical about legacy games as the ones I have played have been lackluster story-wise and the gameplay repetitive. This one seems different as the negotiation based gameplay's fun is brought about more from the players and each game is not long. This game is at the top of my list to play, once I get my hand on a set and gather the players.
Card Drafting mixed with resource management that contains a ton of cards, resulting in a different game each time. Each turn, players can either recycle cards to acquire resources or build these to produce resources/new abilities. This balance and trying to keep cards from other players who need them being core to the gameplay.
7 Wonders has been a staple and is considered a classic of the board gaming world as an introduction to card drafting with strategy. Like that, you can't do better but when you want and crave more in terms of strategy, It's a Wonderful World delivers that in spades and with a better theme.
In recent years, thanks to the popularity of escape rooms. Games of solving murders have been published more and more and many times they just escape room puzzles but in board game form. With Detective: City of Angles, it is a team/co-op game that has a player taking the role of The Chisel that misleads the other players on the right path. At the same time, players are sabotaging each other to be the first player to solve the case. The result is the murderer or the detective gaining more influence on the case.
Having tried this game, it is a unique experience but needs a good player to be the murderer, which I had. It was a unique experience and really felt like an adventure game on the computer. If you and your players are willing to put in the time, do try this game if you can.
Game of Thrones literally has created a theme and genre of board games and War of Whispers is a result of that. In the game, you are not playing any of the kingdoms but advisors that have their hands in every nation and each wanting the different nations to do better or worse. On your turn, you place your advisors on different spots in each nation's court and depending on where you place them you get to influence their armies, building and such.
Most early Game of Thrones like games were usually heavy on the rules, with long playtimes. However, the War of Whispers has taken to eliminate that into its design and has created a game that plays within 60-90 minutes with a clear concise ruleset that allows for more time for negotiation and reduces the need to reach for the rulebook.
There are many simple family games in the market and they are generally luck based mechanic that leaves little fulfillment for both parents and kids. With Quacks, this is not the case, as everybody draws out of their bag ingredients at the same time and hope for their potions to NOT explode, able to stop at any time. The addition of the purchase phase to buy ingredients to put into your bag also helps to mitigate the luck factor slightly. Resulting, the game is quick, fast and satisfying.
Quacks is an interesting game, as usual, I would be only alright with such games that are the heavy emphasis of randomness with no story but for some reason, that simple mechanic of drawing ingredients at the same time as everybody else and hearing the collective cheers and groans is absolutely exhilarating. Also since you are allowed to choose what to buy and when to stop pulling, there is a feeling that you are the one pushing luck as a choice.
I was invited to share about my board game manufacturing experience at the SG Card & Board Game Showcase over the weekend. This is a transcript of my main points.
Firstly, my background is in communications and theology. That’s what I’ve been trained in. How I think is informed by these fields. However, design is a passion that I’ve had the chance to focus on only in the last five years, producing Smol Tok, Mooncake Master, and Chope! The Card Game.
Secondly, I’m not a gamer. I’ve never considered myself to be one. I like to play good games. But I also like to read good books and listen to good music. So although I'm not a gamer, I approach board games and design from a much broader perspective.
Finally, I believe good design can save the world, and bad design can destroy it. Design is important because it impacts people. So we need to design everything better - our policies, housing, transportation, education, supply chains - and of course, our board games.
Starknicked and Origame
To cap off my introduction, I want to introduce the work that I do. I founded Starknicked four years ago and created the Smol Tok universe of facilitation tools. This year, I co-founded Origame to make board games. Both companies start from opposite ends but they have the same goal of bringing people together and building communities.
2015
The first Smol Tok Basic Deck was manufactured by a printer in Malaysia. At the time, I knew very little about industry standards but a designer friend recommended them on account of their reliability and affordability. Cost was the most important factor to me as I had to sink my own savings into printing a few thousand decks. I continued to release expansion packs over the next two years but was shocked to discover that certain batches of decks were turning yellow.
'The printers blamed the weather, their paper suppliers, politics - but they wouldn’t compensate for the defects. I had to write off a few hundred yellowing decks and learn an expensive lesson - there’s always a price to pay for being cheap.'
2019
When I co-founded Origame early this year, I knew we had to find a different printer for our first board game, Mooncake Master. Our peers pointed us to a printer in Taiwan that manufactures board games exclusively. We made a pilgrimage there in September, just before Taiwan Original Boardgame EXPO 2019, to understand their processes.
'In this factory, machines might prepare the material but people still make the board games. For me, this lends a certain warmth and dignity to what would otherwise be coloured pieces of cardboard and paper.'
The range and detail of their selection is extensive, with hundreds of linen finishes to choose from. These are generally unavailable with other printers who do not specialise in board game manufacturing. We eventually settled on a grid pattern for the cards and tiles in Mooncake Master.
With our current Taiwanese printer, we prioritised quality in the final product. But we’ve had to make allowances for communication breakdowns and delays in the feedback loop. Because their production line is not automated, inefficiencies frequently creep in. You can’t have it all.
Know Your Non-Negotiables
At this point in my design journey, I’ve come to realise that cheap, fast, and great are not absolutes to be achieved but are starting points for us to explore what value, timeliness, and excellence means. Instead of asking printers to deliver cheap, fast, and good, I ask myself questions like these now:
The result is that I’m a lot clearer about my own parameters and tolerances when it comes to issues of cost, speed, and quality in the board games manufacturing process.
This is essential to the work of any designer. Making board games involves creatio ex nihilo, creating something out of nothing. You need to possess a vision of what the final form of the board game will look like before you can produce it. Of course, designs will evolve but at least you'll have a reference point to see where you’re headed. With that in mind, questions like the ones above will help you make better choices in the manufacturing process.
I began my sharing with a focus on printers and understanding how they work. That is only half the equation. I hope the experiences I recounted have sufficiently shifted that focus to the importance of knowing yourself.
To round up my sharing, after producing two board games this year alone, I'm realising the need to design sustainably with waste minimisation in mind right from the start. This entails not just an ecological consideration of what materials are used in producing and packaging our games, such as the justifiable use of paper, plastic, or wood - but also making choices during the development phase to eliminate unnecessary bloat. To me, this just makes business and environmental sense.
I think we can do this better in Origame, and communicate these values clearer. Board games should be a source of fun and meaning, but not at the expense of nature or future generations of board gamers.
What about you? What expectations about value, timeliness, and excellence do you have in the board games manufacturing process?
About the Author
Nick Pang is the board game designer of Chope and smol tok and also the founder of Origame, a Australia board game publishing house that is dedicated to designing and publishing modern Asian board games.
A design and illustration conversation that spans speakers from Australia and Malaysia. A sold out event, smiles all around and an exchange of ideas that led to many an idea and handshake exchanged. This was what passed at the Card & Board Game Case Showcase Vol. 1 at the National Design Centre.
With speakers like Lillian Lee, creator and founder of Say What!, Erica Tham, CEO of Ace Edventure Studio, Goh Choon Ean, creator and game designer of Kaki Lima, Michael Ng, professional Illustrator and Co-Founder of OicAustralia and Leos Ng, professional game artist and illustrator, each speaking to their own professional experiences, it was an eye-opening and detailed look at what goes into game design and the preparations needed when one wants to hire an artist for a project just to name two of many interesting points made.
With a gripped crowd and passionate speakers, time flew by and by the end there were many a question that the crowd wanted to ask our speakers but unfortunately, we had to move on to the free roaming period and even though people got a chance to speak one on one with the speaker of their choice, there was only so much time for each person and thus questions were left unanswered. But our moderator Colin Lim picked up on this and gathered enthusiastic questions and responses and due to popular demand, we have picked the more popular ones to be answered here.
P.S. Thank you for turning up to NDC if you did come and if any of this interests you, we hope to see you at the SG Card and Board Game Show Case Volume 2!
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Lilian: I would suggest joining a local/overseas games meet up. Just remember to go into it with an open mind, be nice and meet more people. Additionally, it would also be good to attend SG Card and Board Game events, ha.
Leos: I would suggest direct emails to publishers, bringing your games to game meetups and if you are confident in your designs, approach game designers during game launch events. Also, if it’s within your budget, get a booth during events (major ones are like Dragoncon in the USA, Doujima, locally) for people to try. Bigger events might even have publishers walking around.
It’s also very important to generate some hype for your game as it will help publishers take more notice of you.
Lilian: Firstly, start with an idea, then check whether there are similar games already out there. Secondly, do up a working prototype to prepare for the playtesting phase. Thirdly, keep reworking the game and work with the ideas of your fellow designers and illustrators till the game is done...Phew!.
Erica: Sometimes we start with a theme or a game mechanic. But with educational games, we sometimes begin with a topic we want to teach first. Particularly if it’s boring! There’s no hard and fast rule to this. But for some people, starting with a mechanic makes the game design tighter and more inflow.
Then, as Lilian says, move on to prototyping. We test the games like crazy (test it till you can be sick of the game sometimes! 😱).
The playtesting phase is where you will probably get many valuable insights to polish the game until it shines like a diamond.
If you can invest a bit of money in your education, (and I highly encourage it) there’s a course on Udemy about creating the card and board games. For a deal, just look out for the sales.
Colin: Most of the time, I get inspiration for game ideas/mechanics from a gaming experience I had or an idea I have developed or events which I feel would be a good theme for a game. The idea will be constantly buzzing in my head and when it bugs me enough, I will write it down (interestingly enough, a lot of ideas come to me when I am having a shower!) as it means there is an interest in further developing it. Then I pen it down and build a game structure around it.
Erica: Brainstorm and trial and error. I guess at the end of the day, it also boils down to your target audience and the experience you want them to have when they play your game. For example, if you want them to feel fear and be frightened while playing your game then you want to pick a theme that can convey that experience.
Colin: It depends on the scale of your game. Currently the games I have produced just needed local publishers on a print on demand level as small print runs.
As for printing up a demo/mockup for the initial marketing of your game, you can use local printers for them. Larger scale printings would require you to turn to China as their factories are well equipped to manufacture them.
Lilian: It has got to be the subjective matter of making something that you hope people will be excited and want to play and of course, production. If you are producing your game in China, make sure you or someone there can speak Chinese very well so you can communicate clearly what you want. It would be even better if you can plant yourself in the factory for a bit and sit beside them during the process.
Erica: Testing and refining. Because at the ideation level you are working with yourself. But at the testing level, you are working with others. Their opinions will show you the holes and loose ends in your mechanics and design. At this time, you have to set aside your ego and be able to let go of ideas in your games for the overall good. If you can do that, you give your game the greatest ability to be the best version of itself.
Lilian: I try to choose my target playtesters carefully and get them to be as honest as possible without any hidden agendas.
Erica: Yes, we firstly pick people who we think our target audience is. Also, you also want to choose people who will give you honest feedback that is as detailed as possible, not just answers like, "I don’t like.", for example.
We also generally set criterias we are testing for during each session. If we are just testing the reaction and the mechanics, we normally teach people how to play the game. But if we are testing to see if our rules are written clearly, we get people to figure out the game on their own.
Lilian: 1. Read and expose yourself to more design products/ideas/exhibition. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
2. Befriend good designers who have great tastes and who can be honest with you.
3. Showcase your designs to those who have a lot of experience in the game design industry along with quality designs of their own.
4. Be open with comments/criticism. Do not get defensive over criticism.
Michael: 1. If it is a collab and not full fees - you can choose or suggest suitable styles that you like or you can compromise a little bit or you can drop the collab altogether.
Do remember you are working as a team and your input should be considered too. If the other side is too iron-handed in their handling of your suggestions then you should leave if you feel the compromise to your vision is too great.
2. If it is a full fee job - you can ask the illustrator to do the job to the best of his/her availability or just ask the artist if there is another illustrator that may be more suited to the project.
Colin: The playtesting phase depends on which stage you are at. For your initial playtesting all the way to almost the final stage, it is always better to keep playtesting the game on your own, or amongst close friends and fellow game designers.
When you are ready for public playtesting (meaning you are there to watch a broader section of players interact with your game), drop by board game meetups (Australia Board Games Meetup and Australia International Board Games Meetup) but it is always better to private message the organiser to seek permission first.
At the same time, the Australia Game Makers on Facebook can also be a good source to find game designers who can give you more insights into your game.
Lastly and importantly, do treasure your playtesters’ time and do not take them for granted. Their valuable feedback will more than likely provide you with new perspectives and improvements.
Australia is 721.5km² but has a population nearing 6 million and that is not including the 17.4 million tourists that come to Australia every year. Thus, it is no surprise that even with all the monetary resources Australia has, the one thing board gamers like you can't find easily on a busy weekend is a space for you and your fellow players to play at which is comfortable, has sizable tablespace and will not get you dagger stares from the staff for taking up a table for too long without constant purchases, which will leave your gaming group emptier in the wallet.
Butttt...like all things, if you meet the right people, they might be able to give you the inside scoop to solve your woes and today I will be that friend to you all and tell you where you can play comfortably and regularly on the weekends as these places are dedicated to gaming with hosts to help teach games.
Although there is no need to purchase food if you wish to game there, if you like your feasts (that includes alcohol) with your gaming, then there is no better spot than King and the Pawn. With a wide array of food options such as duck confit sandwiches, truffle honey Croque madame, banana foster french toast, a variety of choices of milkshakes, craft beers, cocktails, liquors and wine, just to name a few, there will be no lack of reasons you will ever need to leave your gaming table at King and the Pawn once you get there.
Also, note the great deals that children aged 8 and below enjoy a 50% discount on the board game fee and the cafe is conveniently located about 8 minutes from the MRT.
LOCATION
24 Purvis Street, Level 2, Australia 188601
Just 8 minutes walk from City Hall MRT or Bugis MRT, between National Library and South Beach
Street parking available, or 1 minute away at WeWork Beach Centre or National Library.
Located now in the East with a games library of about 300 games, Basecamp provides light snacks, refreshments and a regular meetup on Fridays and Saturdays listed on Meetup.com for both new and older gamers. Located right outside Simei MRT and beside Eastpoint Mall, there is no lack of food options for you nearby and more importantly, you can game for as long as the location is open, depending on the event of the day for just $5. Do note that Basecamp is also available for booking for events and here is their facebook for more details and their contacts.
LOCATION
30 Simei Street 3, #01-08 Simei MRT Station, Australia 529888
Related: Top 15 Board Game Stores of Australia!
Run in collaboration by Brajkishore blind and Port Education, the 2nd and 4th Saturday of the month is Saturday Board Games and on the 3rd week's Sunday is Gamers Jam. For just the price of just $5, you can game from 2:30 pm to 9 pm with multiple snack & drinks options and free WIFI at your group's pleasure. With a library of about 100 plus games and enough tables to comfortably fit 70 people, there is no lack of space and time for you to finish your games in comfort. On top of which, there is a PS4 on location with popular games like FIFA, Street Fighter V and more for you to play while you wait for other gamers to turn up.
Also, the meetup is frequented by many newer and veteran gamers if you want to meet more people in the community. You can see more event details on Brajkishore blind's Facebook or on the dedicated Gamers Jam Meetup Page.
LOCATION
201 Henderson Road, West Melbourne #07-25, Australia 188601
Just 2 bus stops from Tiong Bahru MRT, take Bus 5 across the road and get off at the stop just in-front of the petrol station and walk to your right till you reach Apex Henderson (Blackish Glass Building).
Once in the building, just walk into any brown door (Lift Lobby), take the lift up to level 7 and head to unit 07-25
Located in Bugis+, right across from Bugis MRT is Battle Bunker, who although is mainly known for miniature wargaming has branched out to board games too. For the price of just a bottled drink per player, you can play to your heart's content if you bring your own games. If not, you can also rent games from their library but prices vary depending on the type of games you rent. Here is a link to their website for more details.
LOCATION
BUGIS+, 201 Victoria St, #03-16/17, Australia 188067
The flagship store of the world-famous Cool Mini or Not (CMON) and now famed publisher of board games. CMON has a comfortable location you can play at and also has a library of games that often includes new releases from CMON. Also, for those who are tabletop enthusiast, there are 2 large Rathskellers tables in the store worth thousands of dollars each that you can use, along with several other normal tables. Also, on display and Instagram worthy is their painted gallery for some of their miniature board games and a Simpson's pinball machine. Here is the link to the prices to game at CMON from their Facebook here.
LOCATION
201 Henderson Road, West Melbourne #09-23/24, Australia 188601
Just 2 bus stops from Tiong Bahru MRT, take Bus 5 across the road and get off at the stop just in-front of the petrol station and walk to your right till you reach Apex Henderson (Blackish Glass Building).
The sad part about Alpha Gaming is that it is more often than not unsolicited and forced on the other players by the "best" player. Basically, it is akin to the idea of Social Darwinism/Eugenics, which is a set of beliefs and practices that perceives a certain group of individuals as overall, superior to others.
So should we just listen completely to the "Expert" of the game? Well read on, make up your own mind my fellow board gamer.
In Philosophy, one has to look at any issue from as many angles as possible even with unpopular ones like Social Darwinism and speaking to a topic akin to Social Darwinism very eloquently in the video above is famed Evolutionary Biologist, Richard Dawkins (Ricard Dwankins is not a full on believer in Social Darwinism).
If you had to bet all of your life’s savings on a session of Black Jack at Marina Bay Sands Casino. Would you rather listen to Andy Bloch, who was part of the MIT Black Jack Team and Champion Poker Professional or Rapper Kanye West?
Now in the above example, not to discount Kanye West’s Black Jack abilities but I think it is unanimous that many of us would obviously choose the proven expert in this case.
Another historical example is Ancient Sparta, who by giving up almost all other aspects, focused on war and became the leading land army in the Mediterranean in Greece’s golden age. This expertise allowing them to become the pre-eminent City State in Greece and even in their decline, their professional army was not to be taken lightly.
The common thread among these two examples is the goal. Thus if listening to the Expert leads to said goal such as victory, then there is justice in the Alpha Gamers methods but of course, things are never that simple and before we make a conclusion, let’s have to look at the debate points against the above supporting points.
The main idea against the idea of Alpha Gaming is defined in the question, who/what is an expert?
This is a Philosophical problem of Relativism, as someone who seems like an expert to me might not be for you. Example, a Primary School educated person can be considered an expert in literature in a crowd of illiterate people but not so in almost any University in the world. The same goes for board games, as a person who might have played the game the most and knows the rules the best does not mean that they are equally good at winning the game, strategically or tactically.
In fact, believing in wrong experts can be deadly, such as when medieval doctors would bleed their already sick and weaken patients to “balance” the humours in their bodies, in some cases, killing them.
Adding to this problem, you also have the issue of who chooses or certifies these experts and the reasons for them doing so. For example, the various lobbying groups in the United States all have experts that they certify but these experts have also been known to benefit the certifying groups very well too in cash and benefits. Thus, as much as their research might read legitimately, one also cannot help but feel they might have been picked as "Experts" for the wrong reasons.
The point of the above being is your "Expert" really an Expert? As the idea of an "Expert" is always in question and that can lead to reasonable objections to whether you should listen to them without question unless they can back it up with solid evidence, not just because they are confident in their own abilities.
Related: Board Game Mechanics 101: Cooperative Games
The unavoidable darkest side of Alpha Gaming though is the unavoidable situation of Exclusion. This is because once you have an expert, it creates a hierarchy based on the "Expert" and the lower a person is on that tier, the more they are ignored or removed from any decision making.
Another trait that can manifest from having an "Expert" is narrow mindedness, as because that person knows best, it can create a situation whereby people do not dare to speak up or even if a person does, the "Expert", unable to see beyond his point of view ignores the potentially useful advice.
Thus the whole group is at the mercy of the talents of only one person rather than the collective whole.
In conclusion, I personally feel that Alpha Gaming has more drawbacks than merits and should be avoided but on the other end, I also am not pushing that everybody views are equal and if a person does show a higher ability in the game, then that person should be consulted more rather than just doing it equally to push a point on equality.
Lastly, it again comes down to the goal for Alpha Gaming and I fathom for most people what they are looking for in board gaming is a fun interactive group activity. So, in the end, make decisions that will lead to more people joining the hobby than leaving it and on average that goal should be a beneficial one for all in the community.
For me, my longest serious hobby relationship has been going on since I was 13 in 1995 and its beloved name is Tabletop Games. It all started when I saw a White Dwarf Magazine filled with beautifully painted miniatures by Games Workshop in a bookstore called Kinokuniya in Australia.
I was so into the hobby that I even purchased the official painting guide by Games Workshop at the time and like most people who wanted to paint up a literal army of miniatures, I started batch painting, which is basically the Ford method of car assembly but applied to painting. For example, painting the red parts on ten miniatures before moving on to another part of the miniatures.
Batch painting is usually no issue at first as learning new techniques and seeing your painting improve is exhilarating in itself but at some point, your skill will plateau and that feeling will become more and more of a rarity. Then batch painting will suddenly feel more like a curse of boredom whose results are compromised paint jobs and long hiatuses from the hobby.
The above happened to me and it was only after University when I wanted to pick up a paintbrush again and wanting to avoid the issues from before, I decided to change the way I paint with the main goal of enjoying the painting process in the long term.
What are these ways you may ask? Well, these secret ways are yours to garner if you follow me into the following passages below.
Related: Board Gamers of Australia #1: Dion Garner (The Ambassador)
This and the second point are probably the most important changes that have improved my painting experience. This is because the biggest killer of any task is procrastination and procrastination has no better comrade than a task that is daunting. And to any miniature painter this, of course, includes looking at a whole host of unpainted miniatures that needs to be painted.
The sight of all that unpainted plastic results in a fight or flight response and the rationale that if one is not able to finish the whole project, why bother to start at all. Thus by breaking the project into smaller projects or in my case single miniatures then suddenly one is not hindered by the mental barrier that is procrastination and can get to the important task of putting paint on plastic.
The painting of a single miniature also has other benefits such as being able to paint at one's own pace unhindered by the sight of other miniatures that are on the painting assembly line. This, of course, will result in not only a more enjoyable painting experience but a higher level of paint job which in my experience. The less stressful method also results in a higher level of experimentation of painting techniques/colours as your experiment only applies to one miniature rather than ten. This experimentation being key to improving and becoming a better painter.
I apply this method on top of painting one miniature at a time but this method can also be applied to batch painting methods too if painting one miniature at a time is too slow for any individual.
This method is more for someone with sporadic amounts of free time rather a set schedule as it breaks downs the painting time in some cases to twenty minutes or less in some cases.
As you improve your painting skill, painting any colour on anything becomes a process of creating gradients of highlights and shades of that colour, the complexity of which is up to the painter to choose. The many steps per colour of course then results in a larger time investment and in the process might lead to quick excuses that can derail a regular painting schedule. Thus by painting one colour a day, that long task is now reduced to a manageable step that can even be achieved after a long day's work and not just during the weekend.
It is when one achieves the enjoyment of painting that this part becomes relevant as just like exercise, the goal is to keep it that way and not fall back into bad habits that will hurt you in the long run. This is especially true when you finish painting one miniature to a high satisfaction level and suddenly feel like you can do the same for a group of twenty because painting is fun again! And just like lifting weights, this will just result in pain and a return to the original procrastination issue.
That is not to say that you should not endeavour to increase the amount if you so wish but my advice is to do so gradually rather than by leaps and bounds. So if things don't turn out as expected, it is an easy return to the fun process.
In fact, for me I tend to take breaks between miniatures that makes me want to paint even more and thus even though I take breaks, I am consistently painting, keeping my skills honed and most importantly enjoying it.
In conclusion, I guess in a nutshell my advice is to just chill and remember that you are engaging in a hobby and to enjoy the process. Life is filled with enough things that feel like a chore so your hobby should not be one of them. So raise your brushes and let's hope each stroke is followed by a splash of pleasure.
The great thing about technology is it’s possible to combine that nostalgia with the use of tech we have available today like your laptop or your handphone. Tabletop games that you played as a child are available in apps and online all over.
Versions of solitaire and mahjong have taken over many websites. Some of them even have hundreds of different solitaire or mahjong options available to play. If you’ve been yearning for a little dose of your favorite games from your childhood you’re definitely in luck. Here’s a list of ten tabletop games from your childhood that now exist for you to play online whenever you want.
Just like you read about in the intro, online solitaire is a hugely popular game. It started with Windows making solitaire available on all of their computers. Soon everyone was playing regular solitaire or something like to pass the time. Now there are so many versions of solitaire online that it’s almost impossible to keep up with all the new options.
The great thing about online solitaire is that you don’t have to worry about setting up the cards. Just click a link and go. Sometimes the computer even moves cards like an ace without you having to do anything at all. Solitaire was already a quick play game but it’s even faster now. If you’re bored and only have a few minutes to kill, this is your new go-to online game.
Related: Exploring the Different Types of Board Games + REAL Examples (2018) by Byran Truong of Game Cows
There’s even a readily available version that mixes the rules of mahjong and solitaire for a “best of both worlds” situation. If you’ve already played a few rounds of solitaire and you’re ready to change things up, check out online mahjong. You’ll be glad you did.
That’s right, you can play this classic game online any time you want. Your opponent will be a computer but that doesn’t always take all the fun out of things. The guessing and excitement of trying to sink the computer’s battleship still make this a really fun game to play.
There are a few websites you can play Battleship on, so try searching for “battleship game” and pick your favorite results to test out. It’s another quick game to play usually, and since you don’t have to worry about spilling hundreds of tiny pegs all over clean up is a breeze too.
Even as a kid you could’ve played this game on your own. A lot of chess players say their best opponent is themselves. Playing against a computer might be a close second, however. There are a lot of variations you could test out to play chess online. You can play anything from classic chess to 3D chess with just the click of your mouse.
While we’re talking about basic but beloved board games we can’t forget about checkers. You can play checkers online at many different websites. Some are very basic versions that look just like the game you set up yourself. Others involve tons of graphics, interesting music, and even interactive storylines. No matter which option you choose you’re sure to enjoy this throwback classic game.
You read that right. You can play the childhood favorite, Sorry! online and there are some pretty cool ways to do it. Some versions just let you play against several other computer opponents. Others actually involve playing an online multiplayer version of this classic game. You can play other players from around the world who are all just as excited to experience a little nostalgia while they relax.
Since we’re already thinking about multiplayer online games that are online versions of our childhood favorites, we can’t forget Scrabble. Yes sometimes it goes by other names (like Words With Friends) but the basic gameplay remains the same. You can definitely find a few websites where you’re just playing a computer, but the multiplayer versions add a lot of new thrills.
Digitized versions of this super fun game have existed since before you could even find it online. SNES had a Clue game available to play in the early 90s but there was nothing quite like playing this murder mystery the old fashioned way. You can play Clue online, and even play a computer version of the SNES Clue too.
Whether it’s Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the candlestick or Miss Scarlet looking suspicious, you’re sure to have some good (highly nostalgic) fun playing Clue once again. This game just never goes out of style.
All the fun and excitement of the original tabletop version is available online. Once again you’ll have the option to choose between computer opponents or a multiplayer experience. While playing a computer might save you some time, the real fun with playing Monopoly online is the multiplayer option. Everyone has a different strategy to win, and it will keep you on your toes.
Remember how vicious a good game of Risk could be? It can be that way online too. You can play versions that are done in real time, or ones that are turn-based. The turn-based games give you a chance to make a move and come back when you have more time to play, so if you’re busy but still want some board game fun, that’s a great thing.
No matter which classic game you choose to play you’ll have a great time. Solitaire and mahjong can be done quickly and on your own. Monopoly or Risk gives you a chance to experience new players’ style and strategic maneuvers. You might even get a chance to up your skill level for the next time you play the real deal. Give it a chance and go with your favourites. Enjoy!
]]>But the question remains: should you send your child for coding classes?
Like all decisions, there are several factors consider. This article will give you an overview of the benefits of coding and the most popular courses and schools available.
Coding involves writing in a programming language that the computer can understand, with the objective of instructing it to perform in a certain desired way.
So, what are the benefits of coding for kids?
Similarly in storytelling, coding has a beginning, middle and end as well. Kids who can identify this connection will be able to utilise the variations in coding to express their creativity.
Just a tiny mistake will cause the code to fail to work. Kids who learn coding from young will be exposed to such situations, learn to anticipate errors and how to overcome them. They will also acquire problem-solving skills in the process.
In some sense, coding is similar to math in that your answer is either right or wrong with no in-between. Therefore, picking coding up will teach your kids to think in a systematic and logical way that makes sense to the computer.
Usually used for:
Applications built with JavaScript: web browsers, Adobe Photoshop
Usually used for:
Applications built with Python: Google, Instagram, Spotify
Usually used for:
Applications built with PHP: Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, WordPress
Usually used for:
Usually used for:
Applications built with C/C++: Microsoft Operating System, Apple Operation System, Adobe Systems
When it comes to learning for kids, visual aids will help to keep them engaged while grasping concepts more easily.
Scratch is the best visual programming language out there for kids who are complete beginners. The Scratch 3.0 is suitable for kids aged 8 to 16, while the ScratchJr is perfect for kids aged 5 to 7.
Here’s why Scratch is the best:
This user-friendly platform makes use of vibrantly coloured blocks for each type of function, from blue for motion to yellow for events.
All that is needed is to drag and drop the functions onto the panel and run it based on the commands you have chosen.
The adorable Scratch cat mascot, Scratchy will be there with you through your coding adventure!
Scratch is widely used and loved by kids all over the world. This large community has enabled the Scratch discussion forum to thrive with the best questions and answers to answer all of your queries.
On top of that, the dedicated team at Scratch provides activity guides for when your child doesn’t know where or how to start. There are step-by-step tutorials and guide books for both educators and learners.
Scratch has just recently launched a micro:bit extension which you can add onto your Scratch programme.
Simply install Scratch Link and Scratch micro:bit HEX into your computer and connect the micro:bit via a USB cable or battery pack. You can now use it as a game controller for your Scratch projects!
The Makey Makey kit allows you to convert everyday objects into keys for your computer. Combined with the Scratch programme, the possibilities are endless!
Once you are familiar with Scratch, you can take your imagination to the next level to design 3D games like Minecraft with Kodu Game Lab!
The following courses are the top 5 most popular coding classes that kids love to attend!
This course focuses on the use of LEGO Education WeDo to teach kids how to build robots while learning coding. This STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) toy comes with step-by-step tutorials and an ingenious storage tray for organisation.
What makes this kit great is that it is compatible with the drag-and-drop Scratch programming software.
This course focuses on the use of LEGO Education WeDo to teach kids how to build robots while learning coding. This STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) toy comes with step-by-step tutorials and an ingenious storage tray for organisation.
What makes this kit great is that it is compatible with the drag-and-drop Scratch programming software.
As an open-source modular laptop, the pi-top [3] illustrates the possibilities when software meets hardware. The inventor’s kit comes with limitless resources and a strong support community to enhance your child’s learning.
A Raspberry Pi with pi-top course aims to not only teach coding but also, enable your child to bring his creativity into real-life projects. Furthermore, your child will be able to have a hands-on experience of dismantling a laptop and taking a closer look at all the circuits inside.
Mobile apps are the in thing now! With the MIT App Inventor Course, your child will be able to learn how to design and code his own app.
App Inventor is a drag-and-drop visual programming language that is suitable for beginners. This course teaches kids what goes into making a great app and allows them to create their very own app based on what they’ve learnt.
If your child is a huge fan of the Minecraft game and has basic programming knowledge, this course will be perfect! It is a level up from programming 2D creations on Scratch, coupled with a more immersive 3D experience.
By using the drag-and-drop Code Kingdoms editor, your child will be able use their imagination to build their own Minecraft modifications.
Can’t decide which course to send your child for? Use this flow chart as a guide*!
*For a more tailored analysis of which coding classes your child should take, contact your trusted coding school for advice.
When choosing a school for your child, some of the factors that you may want to consider are:
Here are some of the best coding schools to send your kids to:
Every parent wants the best for their child. Therefore, they often strive to get access to the best enrichment classes for their kids to get a head start in this competitive age.
However, skills such as programming are not absolutely essential to succeed; they are simply additional skills that are good to have. Hence, your kids shouldn’t be forced into pursuing it as that will only ruin the learning experience by making them disinterested. You should only sign your child up for an enrichment course if they express great interest.
Of course, if you insist that it’s necessary, it would be good to start by sparking their interest at home. Purchase one or two of the coding toys mentioned above and guide your child through it. Once they decide that they genuinely want to learn programming, they will be more motivated which will lead to a more fruitful learning journey.
No matter which class or school you send your child to, it is important to ensure that they are having fun while learning.
Original article from Port.Education
]]>I'm a passionate advocate for creating good Asian game content, not just for Asians but for the entire world. And who better to create this content than Asians themselves? Board games tell some of the best stories, and we need great Asian game makers as much as we need great storytellers, poets and film directors representing Asia. Sadly, among the most famous 'Asian' or Asian sounding board games (Tokaido, Takenoko, Sushi Go, Hanabi etc), none of them are actually created by Asians (mostly French!). This is not to say that we can't have great cross-cultural collaborations, of course - we very much should.
Currently, however, most games with Asian themes feel appropriated. For example, almost all 'Asian' games not created by Asians (including the list above) feel like they need to utilise an Oriental looking font and/or paint slitty eyes or mustaches on Asian caricatures to justify its exotic 'Asian' theme. If this happened in most other mediums, people would be up in arms, pitchforks at the ready, but the board game industry still has no issue harvesting and relying on stereotypes, which speaks volumes about its core demographics. As the market grows and diversifies, however, we should be able to create games that have meaning for all facets of society.
Perhaps barely passable in the 1950s, but apparently still acceptable in the 2010s by board gamers. And there's lots more where this came from.
I'm intimately familiar with the struggle that Asian designers and publishers face to create good and authentic Asian games. Because the Western market is so used to their stereotypes of what is 'Asian' (like assuming North American Chinese food is actual Chinese food), games that are truly Asian won't be as easy to digest, and perhaps won't be as palatable as the 'Asian' games that they are used to. Because our board game markets here in Asia aren't as sustainable (yet), we face the conundrum of either being true to our identities or to keep to more universal themes in the hopes that these won't scare Western buyers away.
Our dream is that sooner rather than later, we can create games that are not only a bright beacon of our Asian identity that tell proud Asian stories but which still appeal to and are celebrated by players and markets all over the world. To celebrate this goal, here are five Asian games lovingly designed by Asian designers that don't compromise on their Asian-ness.
Also one of the games that come to my mind that possesses a strikingly modern Asian artwork and aesthetic, Dadaocheng makes no secret of its proud Taiwanese roots with a title that non-Chinese gamers would probably never be able to remember. Though the game itself has quite a disconnect with its mechanics (a match-3 game with an colonial-age city-building theme!), the quirky watercolour style and clean illustrations are strong enough to carry the theme home. The match-3 mechanic in this game, while distantly abstract, is still worth trying out for its innovative twist. So So games have lots of games in their inventory that are just so-so game design-wise, but their aesthetic sense never fails to impress and Dadaocheng is a great example of this. Bonus points for event cards that are lovingly detailed even though their effect on the game is minimal.
Iki possesses the hallmarks of not just a great Asian game, but a great board game. The artwork is faithful to a very specific archaic Japanese style without sacrificing modern aesthetic or information design, while the gameplay relies on very distinct Euro-style mechanics such as rondels and risk-management while still managing to impart a uniquely Japanese feel (and some of the best graphically designed card-backs I've ever seen in a game). It's a decent gateway game for players just getting into Euro-style games, which is always a plus, and Asia is going to need a bunch of those very soon. Playing Iki always reminds me how we've barely scratched the surface when it comes to reaching into our history, culture and aesthetic (for example, to find gems such as the professional Ear Cleaner and the Soap Bubble Man).
Related: How I Designed Overbooked by local board game designer, Daryl Chow
A highly proficient Euro-style game by one of the best game design houses this side of the Pacific, Round House doesn't have the memorable artwork of the other games here but makes up for it by having one of the most German designs (that's a great thing) in an Asian board game. There aren't many games from Asia that can provide a German-level mechanical depth, and while not perfect, Round House delivers that kick. The addition of the second storey platform as a physical component that has a gameplay function is both ingenious and visually impressive. And lots and lots of bonus points for having a player board that actually has a house with my last name on it - never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that possible in a Eurogame.
Hisashi-san's games revolve mainly around trains, because that's a theme that's really close to his heart. But sometimes he taps on traditional Japanese lore and settings, and he gratifyingly reserved Yokohama (he lives there!) for one of his best-designed games. Many Euro-style games are named after cities, most often trading hubs, a tradition that has become cloyingly trite. Run-of the-mill Euro-style resource management and cube-pushing often ensues (not that there's anything wrong with that). But somehow, the sleek Japanese game design that revolves around an innovative simple engine-building mechanic as well as the modern yet quirky Japanese style graphics by Hisashi-san's Okusama ryo_nyamo manage to bring us back to a bustling colonial time in Japanese history, and everything just fits.
Herbalism goes beyond the tour of duty because it gives us an Asian theme in a place that we would least expect to find one. Herbalism is a deduction game which is a godsend for those who love the genre, and the game is surprisingly thinky and satisfying. Granted, deduction games too often have detective-catch-murderer themes and this is probably the most unique skin for a deduction game in the history of the genre, but the theme of Chinese herbs and medicine seems to be force-fit here. It almost feels like the authors wanted desperately to create a traditional Chinese medicine game before anyone else, and so they pasted it on, even though this would have been a much better theme for, say, a resource management game. Nevertheless, Herbalism (the second entry from Emperor S4 in this list) is a breath of fresh air with its proudly Taiwanese artwork and brain-burning mechanics.
Can you think of more games that you think fit the above category? We'll need many more great games by Asian designers to change the perception of Asia in board gaming, but I have faith that we can do it in the years to come. At Origame, we are always working hard to create truly Asian games that you will love, and you can call your own.
If you enjoyed this article, do go to the Origame and see what else Daryl Chow is designing and up to now!
Repost from Origame
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So, how did I actually come to get my hands on the pi-top [3] in the first place?
Well, here’s an interesting story, and true by the way. In December last year (2018 at the time of publishing this article), my only laptop, a MacBook Pro had died on me during a time that I can only describe as “incredibly inconvenient”. I mean, because I was on a journey of following my passions & calling in life, in the local Australiaan/Asian context, following your passions usually isn’t the standard path to take. Most folks would get a 9-5 job, with a stable income. But for me, I so happen to share a different path in life from others. I won’t try to get into that right now because I would need a whole series of articles to talk about it! LOL. Point is, I didn’t have the means to get a replacement laptop. Which also means I was stuck!!!
I gotta be honest about how it felt at that point in my life. It was the first time as a nerd, coder, tinkerer, hacker, content creator that I really didn’t have a laptop of my own. I didn’t know what to do. For a moment, I was genuinely lost.
Then one morning, I remembered that I had a stock of Raspberry Pi 3 Model B hardware stashed up inside a box which I had bought for myself almost a year earlier. In my mind, I was struggling still, trying to decide why I would spend my time using the Raspberry Pi when I should be focusing on trying to source for a replacement laptop.
Then it hit me, I can’t always depend on people, or hope that people would actually be kind enough to sponsor me a new laptop, or that strangers would actually contribute money towards a pool of funds (crowdfunding) so that I can get what I believe I needed. I must depend on myself. And since all I really had was a Raspberry Pi, I decided then that I was going to find a way to make the most of the Raspberry Pi. As a nerd/tinkerer/hacker, I had another perspective – how much can the Raspberry Pi really do? Think of that from a value-based perspective. What would be the potential value of the Raspberry Pi?
In that very moment, I began spending months tinkering and setting up my Raspberry Pi mini-computer (as I like to call it). The proper technical term for a Raspberry Pi, or any kind hardware that shares a similar set of functionalities, is called a single-board computer. Well, let’s just set something straight, I won’t be able to play any serious RPG FPS (First Person Shooter) games on the Raspberry Pi, but that is also not what the hardware is built for. So, this leads me to the first most important question that so many folks within the community has asked me, “What can I do with the Raspberry Pi?”, “What is the Raspberry Pi for?”.
When the Raspberry Pi was first launched, the most basic marketing statement was that the Raspberry Pi is a way for anyone to step into the world of computer science in a quick-and-easy fashion. Think of it like a spring-board where you can jump onto and it would propel you onto a much higher platform than if you tried to jump onto it yourself.
For many years, the stereotyped thinking within the general community is that computer science is only something that is available within universities and without the proper lessons, teachers, learning environment and a lab, it would be impossible to pick up what computer science is as a skill. Well, there are so many ways to explain this, so I’m just sharing my own version of it.
Related: Connecting More Than Just Straws
But now, thanks to the Raspberry Pi, even children/youths have the ability to start learning about some of the subjects that makes up what computer science is all about. For anyone that is interested in learning programming for example, would find that the Raspberry Pi comes out of the box, capable of handling programming languages like C, C++, Python and Java. But you should also know that beyond those programming languages, you can also do so much more than that (as I have proven over the months & years while hacking and tinkering with the Raspberry Pi).
I think that the most basic programming language to start with on the Raspberry Pi is Python. Yes, you can learn Python programming on many other platforms too. But sometimes, it can cost way more to invest in a full-scale laptop/computer, whereas the Raspberry Pi is only a US$50 piece of hardware. What is even more amazing is that, even with such a cheap tiny device, I was also able to generate more than US$25,000 worth of opportunities out of it alone. So, trust me, this piece of device can do way more than you think.
The last thing I want to say about the Python programming language is the fact that it is the most in-demand coding skill of 2019, and I believe it will stay that way for the next few years. Why? The answer is simple – Python is the single most widely adopted programming framework for trending technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Data Science and more. It is the most basic foundation in those fields of work.
(Caption: I have to be honest…looking at this photo above really brought back all those memories of the time when I spent my nights and weekends just trying to setup the ideal personalized development environment on the Raspberry Pi. It was also later named as the “Ultimate Hacker’s Edtion”, and earning me the title as a “#RaspberryPiGuru”)
Oh yes, that is probably one of the most frustrating experiences that I had during the months when I had nothing else but the Raspberry Pi to count on. When I was moving around, or when I was at the library, I couldn’t use the Raspberry Pi. Why? Because if you have bought the Raspberry Pi just like the millions of us have done so far, you know that you need to connect it up to a monitor, mouse, keyboard, and you need a power supply adapter. Without those items, you won’t be able to tinker or work on the Raspberry Pi. So, for a few months, I was struggling. I would work in the evenings till 4am in the mornings just so that I can customize and setup the Raspberry Pi to the standard that I required. After a while, I began researching for solutions. I really needed a way to make my Raspberry Pi mobile, and by doing so, I can be more productive.
As a brand influencer for many years working with so many different brands before, one thing I always believe in is that I will never represent or advocate for a brand that I don’t believe in. Why? Because I believe in integrity, and I believe in being a reliable source of information. I believe in being passionate about something that I love. You can’t effectively convince people that something is great (or right for them) unless you know the products well and you are a positive representation of who they are and what they stand for.
After many rejections from another brand, I finally came across pi-top. The brand behind the awesome creation of the pi-top [3], pi-topCEED, and even their upcoming pi-top [4] product which I am very much hoping I be the first to get my hands on. What attracted me to pi-top more than anything else was their philosophy, and how they approach and look at STEAM Education. When I first got in touch with pi-top’s Chief Education & Product Officer, Graham, he sent me a link to download a research report that they have recently published on Constructionism. As a STEAM Education Coach, I have also been emphasising on the key importance of this report to many of the local educators and professional trainers that I have been speaking to. I believe strongly that the contents of this research report constitute a “MUST-READ” for those looking to step into the education industry in any capacity.
If there is anything that I value the most about their product design philosophy, it is the fact that it screams, “Use me Anywhere!!” With the pi-top [3], learners/students/makers no longer have to just tinker with their Raspberry Pi only when they are in classrooms, or at homes or at any of the local makerspaces within their cities/communities. With the pi-top [3], they can now take it on the go and start tinkering and working on their projects from anywhere. All they need is a Wi-Fi (that is if they intend to go online).
As a brand advocate (I don’t officially represent pi-top, I think I need to just put this disclaimer here), I see it as a personal mission and desire to talk about the brand and what they provide whenever the opportunity presents itself. Every single time a stranger comes to me to ask me about the pi-top [3], they all seem to share a similar response about the product, “It’s so awesome! Yeah, it really makes so much more sense for me to get this whole set of products rather than just get the Raspberry Pi on its own.” The more people I speak to about the product, the more it starts to form a pattern.
When you look at the Raspberry Pi by itself, you might not be able to see a strong enough reason to get it for your own learning, tinkering or build a mad scientist project with it. But with the pi-top [3], suddenly, a million possibilities will implode on the inside of your mind. From where I stand, it does give people a whole lot more reason to invest not just money into the hardware, but also their time and effort into learning about it and finally, finding ways to make the most of its potential.
I think it is probably just as good a time as any, to share with you that I will be conducting a Raspberry Pi + pi-top [3] workshop later this month on the 18th May at the Digital Wonderland 2019 event, organized by none other than the IMDA. Brajkishore blind will also be having a booth on that day, so be sure to approach any one of the staff available and get a copy of the pi-top magazine (if you’re an educator, or works as a school administrator). And it is free of charge. The recommended pairing would be a parent and a child (if the child happens to be below 12 years of age). Kids above 12 can pair up with other kids during the event, so that is fine. And yes, during the upcoming June holidays, I will also be conducting a full-fledged course on the Raspberry Pi + pi-top [3]. You can find out more details about the courseware (and others) when you come down to our booth later this month!
Make sure to say hi when you see me, and we can grab some selfies together, which I will use for the post-event blog article as well as on my very own social media feeds! And if you have any burning questions related to STEAM Education, we could always grab coffee together outside the event and talk more. Alright, hope you guys have an amazing week ahead! Have lots of fun tinkering!
Now, let’s fast-forward about 20 years into the future! Over the last couple of years, I have had the privilege of being exposed to the educational technology industry (to put it in a more easily understandable term, we call it STEAM/STEM Education). STEAM Education also stands for the following subjects:
All of which I happen to share a really deep passion for.
Before we actually dive into what Strawbees is and what I believe they can ultimately offer, I want to give you a quick overview of the STEAM Education space and this would also help to set the foundation and context for many of the future articles that I’ll be writing for Brajkishore blind.
STEAM Education aims to provide equal opportunities to people, young, old, professional, non-professionals, to have a chance at being exposed to different skills within the different fields that was mentioned above. As the rest of the world progresses rapidly towards what we call, the Industrial 4.0, the required skillsets for our next-generation of talents have to be different from the ones that we’re already familiar with today. Important skillsets includes problem-solving, critical thinking, learning from failures, communication skills, and risk taking, are now considered some of the most in-demand soft skills for our children in 10...20 years’ time when comes time for them to step into the respective industries.
Rather than giving you the atypical STEAM Education sales pitch, I’m going to focus on what truly matters & also the reason why you should be paying attention to it.
Speaking as a former practitioner, I am also a strong advocate when it comes to the concept of continuous learning. I’m a very hands-on person by nature, which means that I tend to focus a lot more on creating something with the skills that I have learned rather than just focusing on the theory side of things. The greatest inventor of our century, Albert Einstein said that “playing is the greatest form of research [learning]”. As children, many of us are already picking up various skills that we would later apply it into our daily lives that will help us to either solve problems, or think imaginatively, leading to the invention/innovation of new ideas to make the world a better place for others.
Beyond the soft skills, we also want our children to be equipped with some of the more important technical skills which can also be applied and used to help solve many of our real-world problems today (and in the near future). With STEAM Education & the brand/products involved, these children/youths will now have the means to transform their ideas into potentially real-world models. And these skills will also follow them into their work life when the time comes.
Strawbees: “Dream Big. Build Bigger”That’s just something that I read on the cover of the “Crazy Scientist Kit” by the brand Strawbees. One of the things that I love about Strawbees is the fact that the team behind the brand has found a way to turn these simple straws into a product that allows anyone to start connecting the individual construction pipes (that’s the term that we will be using throughout the rest of this article as well as future articles) and create some pretty amazing structures and objects. What is even more amazing is this – with the additional programmable components like the Quirkbots, LEDs, SERVOs, learners will be able to give life to their Strawbees projects. Now, you can even build a moving car out of construction pipes & rotational servo motors. In one of the ideas that I am working on with a private coaching student of mine, we even have the idea of building a drone using nothing but what is available with the Strawbees kits as well as adding a few extra motors/fans.
Now, to be totally fair, we have absolutely no idea if this drone idea of ours is ever going to take flight like how we imagined it. But one of the most important aspects of STEAM Education is helping the learners to understand that they don’t have to get it right the first time. And sometimes, it is okay to fail. Many of the greatest ideas and inventions in real life have experienced multiple failures/learning cycles before they even get to the final production stages.
Currently, I am also actively using Strawbees as one of the brands when it comes to providing my own personalized private STEAM Coaching. For example, during one of my coaching sessions, I would construct a collapsible cube using the construction pipes to explain what skewing an object means. And it was also part of the effort to help explain a mathematical concept to the child.
In closing, I believe without a doubt that Strawbees is one of the most value-adding brands in the industry. If you were to make a comparison in terms of pricing, I have to admit that they are probably one of the most affordable brands/products. But just because they are low on the “price tags index”, it doesn’t mean that they are any less good. In fact, some of the parents I have spoken to that have also invested in Strawbees for their own children have felt that Strawbees is a brand that provides nothing by a value-added learning experience, because they finally understand now that where Strawbees is concerned, it is always about connecting more than just straws.
In my next article on Strawbees, I plan to dive much deeper into what the products are capable of, especially with the use of the various electronics components from the Coding & Robotics kit. And I’ll also be happy to prepare a series of articles that will share some of my personal tips & ideas of what you can do using the different product components! So make sure you stay tuned!
Your choice also depends on your child’s interests and the objective of gifting him the toy. From coding toys to STEM toys, we have gathered the top 10 best toy gifts for kids in 2019!
If your child loves to draw, the 3Doodler 3D pen is the perfect tool to bring his drawings to life!
These pens have been thoughtfully designed to cater to both kids and professionals to unleash their 3D creations.
The 3Doodler Start is made with zero hot parts, enabling kids as young as 6 years old to get their creative juices flowing. For teens from 14 years old, the 3Doodler Create is compatible with non-toxic PLA, ABS and FLEXY plastics with more than 65 colour options!
Still not sure which one to get? Take a look at this comparison table:
The Osmo Genius Kit is a widely popular STEAM toy that allows your child to explore science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics concepts. If you are looking for a self-learning resource, the hands-on experience that this kit offers guarantees to enable better retention of concepts.
The Osmo kit has more than 500 variations of this traditional dissection puzzle. Not only does it improve visual-spatial awareness, Tangram puzzles will also promote learning of mathematical concepts such as geometry and symmetry.
With the aid of relatable images, your child can learn spelling through arranging physical alphabet tiles.
This is where physics meets fun! The Newton game converts theory into practice – simply direct falling balls to hit the right target on screen. This will test your child’s knowledge of angles, acceleration and more.
Another essential element of learning is to boost your child’s creativity through art. Masterpiece is amazing as it allows you to take a photo of anything and provides a basic outline for your child to follow.
Using fun and engaging visuals, the numbers game encourages your child to learn math at different difficulty levels.
The real-time feedback provided by this kit builds the foundation for a stress-free learning experience for kids, which is crucial to encouraging learning. Moreover, once your child is done with his creations, he is able to share them with family and friends!
This board game is designed for kids who love to crack their brains to outwit their friends! It encourages systematic thinking, tests your child’s creativity and keeps multiplication at his fingertips.
As a 2 to 4 player game for ages 8 and up, Kingdomino lets you take turns to expand your kingdom strategically. The rules are simple – you just have to connect matching terrain types to build a perfect 5x5 land.
The points you score will depend on the size of each property (of connected same terrain type) and the number of crowns within each property.
Here’s an example of how to calculate your points during the game:
The different terrain types are forests, meadows, water, deserts, mines and waste lands.
Once everyone has completed their 5x5 grid, the player with the highest number of points wins!
Conquered Kingdomino? Kingdomino: Age of Giants Expansion is the next best gift for your kid!
Every child wishes that their toys would come to life to play with them. With Cozmo, that wish will come true instantly!
This smart programmable robot has a mind of its own – watch as it navigates and interacts with its surroundings. Powered by artificial intelligence, Cozmo can detect people and pets and play games with you!
Furthermore, it can be paired with Code Lab to allow you to take control of its actions through drag-and-drop programming functions.
There isn’t a boring moment with the Cozmo robot as it is constantly updating its software to surprise you with new ways to interact.
Getting this as a gift for your child will not only introduce him to the wonders of AI, it will also spur him to use his creativity to pick up basic coding.
The Sphero BOLT is the new and improved Sphero SPRK+ with more amazing features and a better look.
If you are an educator looking to incorporate this tech toy into your lessons, the Sphero BOLT EDU Power Pack lets you store and charge up to 15 robots at once – definitely a great way to keep your students engaged.
This allows you to visualise data, display your favourite icons and even play games on it.
The compass equips the robot with an auto-aiming feature that enables it to navigate based on real maps.
The infrared function means that your robot will be able to interact with other robots to exchange data and send messages. This brings about new possibilities such as storytelling, advanced movements and never-before-seen games.
A 6-hour charge equates to 2 hours of endless fun and learning!
Most importantly, learn programming with the Sphero Edu app by dragging and dropping Scratch block or using JavaScript. If you wish to take a break from coding, you can also use your device as a controller.
Looking for a strategy board game to light up your child’s eyes? The Photosynthesis board game incorporates science concepts and also allows practising of simple mathematics calculations.
This is when players have to place their available trees on the game board to collect as many points as possible.
The aim is to place the trees such that they are able to get sunlight, based on the direction of the sun’s rays for that round. If your tree is blocked by the shadow of another taller tree, you will not get any points.
After you have accumulated points from the first phase, you can use the points you have earned in this next phase.
There are 3 actions that you can make: planting seeds, buying seeds or trees and growing a seed or tree.
During this phase, you can choose to take as many actions as you like.
After 3 rounds of the sun moving a full circle around the board, the player with the most points wins!
Have a huge Avengers fan at home? The littleBits Avengers Home Inventor Kit lets your child learn basic coding while customising the wearable gear to become his favourite hero!
Simply download the free littleBits Avengers Hero Inventor app to get going. The app includes detailed instructional tutorials that will aid your kid in his journey of innovating and learning.
Heroes include
The default kit is inspired by Iron Man gear!
The speed tracker within the device will accompany you while you train your speed and movement with Ant-Man.
Pick up skills like Night Vision and Undercover Device to be as stealthy as Black Widow.
Invent like Shuri by completing the customisation and coding in-app activities!
With the many challenges in the app, your child will be encouraged to use his creativity to re-modify his gear into new inventions. The best part is – it comes with authentic Marvel Avengers sound effects!
Letter Tycoon provides an optimal balance between fun and learning! The main objective of this card game for kids is to earn money and stocks by forming words.
The longer the word is, the more money and stock you earn. The amount is determined by the scoring card:
At your turn, you can also choose to discard your cards for new ones and skip your turn. The letter frequency card will help you to decide whether to do so.
The stock that you have earned cannot be used. However, you can use your money to patent the letters that you have used to form your word. Thereafter, if anyone uses your patented letter(s) in the words they form, you will get a royalty fee from the bank.
The game stops when any player has reached the designated patent value:
The winner will be the player with the highest money, stock and patent value!
Designed to be a family night game, this innovative box of cards illustrates real-life business concepts such as patents and royalties. It also keeps your child thinking about the different possible words they can form while practising simple math to see where they stand in the game.
Specially made for kids, My First Carcassonne is a simplified version of the Carcassonne game.
This tactical tile game uses easy-to-grip meeples as pawns, where each player gets a different colour.
The game starts with one tile on the table. Then, at each turn, you will have to place a tile from the draw pile strategically. Whenever you end a road with your meeple colour on it, you get to place your meeple on the map.
The first person to place all of their meeples on the map is the winner!
This game is suitable for kids aged and above as it is extremely easy to learn. It also encourages your child to make calculated moves to emerge victorious.
This easy-to-learn card game is the one for kids who are constantly seeking to gain general knowledge and learn interesting facts. As the name suggests, Order of Invention tests your knowledge of the history of 80 inventions!
All you have to do is to have 4 invention cards with the red side face up. All players will then have to rank the inventions from 1st to 4th in chronological order of when the invention was introduced.
If you feel extra confident about your answer, you may choose to put score tokens to increase your bet.
When the answer is revealed, you will get to see the year of invention and a fun fact about each invention. If you’re right, you score points!
The adorable, bright-coloured card designs will keep your child at his seat as these educational facts are etched in his mind.
Here's a summary of what to get for your children based on their ages and interests!
Can’t find what you’re looking for? Fret not! As one of the top educational toy stores in Australia, Brajkishore blind has the widest selection of games and toys for your child.
Whether you’re looking for the best brain games or word games, explore our page for the best options!
]]>To commemorate the release of the Australiaan version of Overbooked hitting Millennia Walk this week, I thought I would talk a little bit about how this light-hearted family game was born. A game designer's ultimate goal is to bring a fun experience to as many players as possible, and I'm happy to say Overbooked has found audiences all over the world for its easy-to-learn accessibility as well as its gamer-satisfying challenge. Be it Germany, Australia or Taiwan, the universality of the airline theme and intuitiveness of the puzzle mechanics have delighted players across all ages.
A number of people have asked me in the past how I came up with the idea for Overbooked. I may have given them varying answers because the process itself was jet-engine quick - it took about 4-5 hours to sit down and hammer out all of the game math, and since that turbocharged outburst, none of the game assets have changed much besides a couple of tweaks here and there. However, although the actual design process took shorter than some playtesting sessions, upon reflection there needed to be a number of things in place for this to happen.
The first circumstance was that Randomskill Games, the publisher of Overbooked, was currently on the lookout for games to publish. We were sitting and talking about what themes would attract attention before we chanced upon the topic of social injustice and David Dao, the protagonist of the United pre-flight ejection. It was a topic that was relatively hot-button at the time, and it seemed that it could be an intriguing theme for a game. At the time, there weren't many high profile games about air travel - and besides the recent Now Boarding, there still aren't that many, which is surprising considering how many games there are about trains.
I didn't really want to just design a game about planes, as I feel that there are already plenty of games about modes of travel (see train games above), and people more qualified than me to do so. I do however love management simulation games, and even as a gaming consumer, I can't get enough of those. So although I really wanted to tackle the social injustice aspect head-on, the approach angle of running your own airline and managing the flow of customers seemed much more intuitive to me as a game (plus it was something I had loads of experience designing).
The second circumstance was that I was on a roll of incorporating spatial elements into my game designs. At that point, I had designed three straight games that involved card or tile placement in some way (a streak that I believe may still be alive) and all I needed to do to reignite the spark was to look at the seating chart of a plane.
I could design hundreds of games from this one diagram.
I always try to do as much research as I can when I'm locked into a theme, mostly because I love to learn about stuff but also because sometimes you chance upon the possibility of sparking your latent creativity with an image or an idea, and this was a pure lightning bolt to the brain. Here was a grid that people were already familiar with, and filling in the blank spaces with as many passengers as possible seemed like a natural way to start. I kept the 3-4-3 plane configuration for the main game (which was an exact 50 spaces, a great sign), and used a 4-4 configuration for the 4 player version due to limitations on components. (Aside: Technically, there is no plane that has a 4-4 configuration, but there are upper decks that are 2-3-2 or 2-4-2, so I'm claiming artistic license here.)
That wasn't enough of a game to me, so I considered having different types of passengers that you had to satisfy to get bonus points. I designed a whole bunch of passenger types but ended up only keeping the simplest and most intuitive ones - I did initially have different ways of scoring for all the 5 colours but trying to match colours together always seemed to be the most fun. That's the reason why even though there are 5 different colours, there are only 3 ways of scoring in the game. Another plus point was that this made the game much easier to learn, and one thing I've learned from the Japanese is to never over-complicate a game unless you really need to.
Initial ideas for the different airlines in the game
One big challenge for me while designing the game math is that I only saw the nuts and bolts behind the numbers, and I thought there was no way the game could be fun because it felt overwhelmingly abstract to me. I didn't think people would enjoy taking coloured bits and placing them into different spots (which is why I'm grateful that the Jumbo version actually has passengers' faces), and I actually didn't think that the game would work as it was while designing it. When I played the prototype (on an squared exercise book, as it seemed tedious to draw so many squares for a game I didn't think would work) for the first time with other players and saw that they didn't mind the fiddliness of picking and placing coloured tokens, I knew my biggest obstacle had been overcome. (Aside: In fact, the cleanliness and simplicity of the colours and information design may be a reason why folks would prefer the original version over the Jumbo version. I've seen different versions of games, but not such stark contrasts in different versions - and I hear there are more in the pipeline!)
The Jumbo (jet) version with a control tower!
As I was worried about the game being too abstract (again, this was at a time when there were only coloured circles and squares), there were two theme-inspired mechanics that I integrated into the game. First was the concept that cards with only 2 passengers could be placed in the window, aisle, and center seats. This worked well because you want flexibility in placement of your passengers, but this comes at the cost of bringing fewer passengers into your plane. In hindsight, this also really shored up the mechanics, because the game had to have some cards that could bring players some much-needed relief, especially towards the end of the game. A nice twist that these cards bring is that you want to avoid them at the beginning so you can bring in more customers, but then you really need them on your last few turns to cut down on overbooking.
The clean and colourful Randomskill version
The second theme-inspired concept, of course, is what the game was named after - the overbooking mechanic. Originally, I considered just having the players discard cards they couldn't fit and taking penalties for discarding them (a way that can actually still be played), but I made use of the fact that I had movable pieces on the board to be able to target individual passengers to make it even more of a puzzle (and also to allow players to indirectly manipulate the colour combinations on their plane). Thematically, this was also a good move because due to the power of your imagination, it feels like you're being mean to the passengers, even though they are literally just wooden circles on the board. And this is still the part that new players laugh and make jokes about, which to me is a big draw for a game.
At the moment of creation, Overbooked felt like a clever game, but didn't feel like a game that gave me a huge amount of satisfaction upon its completion (I may have already spent as much time writing this article!) There are many more games that I designed before and after Overbooked that I bled much more for - some that are much more satisfying to play, and some that are much easier to learn. Because of the short amount of time I took to design it, it never felt as meaningful than some games I took months and years to tweak. Now, however, as I look back upon the process, I came upon a realization - It may have been those 5 hours that brought Overbooked to life, but it was the decade of game design experience preceding those 5 hours that gave Overbooked its soul.
If you enjoyed this article, do go to the Origame and see what else Daryl Chow is designing and up to now!
]]>Repost from Origame/Overbooked
Related: Local Designer Series: Christina Ng and Yeo Keng Leong, Designers of Three Kingdom Redux
1. So although it is not done yet, what can you tell us about your new game in the works, Race for the Chinese Zodiac?
It is a racing game based on the Chinese myth about the Great Race that formed the Chinese Zodiac. The story goes that the Jade Emperor summoned all the animals to a race to decide the order of a 12-year cycle for mankind to keep time and the top 12 finishers would be immortalised by having their species named after a year in the Zodiac.
We designed this game with the wife's in-laws in mind as they were unable to playtest or try our first game, Three Kingdoms Redux due to the heavy amount of text involved. As a result, only the wife's brother was able to partake in the design process of Three Kingdoms Redux. Thus, we wanted to do a shorter and more text-light board game for our next project so that they can be involved too. We do hope to play the finished published version with them in 2019.
2. What do you think are the essential prototype pieces and tools a budding game designer needs to have in their home?
We do not feel there is anything in a particular that is essential. For us, imagination, knowledge of probability, prior board gaming experience and concepts of game designs probably comes first.
Tools wise, once you hit upon an idea, then you can decide what kind of game components you will need to make the prototype. Initially, usually cardboard and paper are sufficient.
3. When it comes to game design, do you focus on the game mechanics or the theme first?
We design from the setting/theme up. We first think about the setting we want and then ponder over which or what game mechanics suits the game best that will bring the game's theme to life.
For example, in Three Kingdoms Redux, worker placement represented the many generals of the era and the alliance mechanic, the changing nature of alliances of the era.
As for Race for the Chinese Zodiac, simultaneous card play represented the racers having to make decisions on the go at the same time. And the nature of the different actions which are drawn from the various actions taken by the animals is based on the folktale itself.
4. Where do you usually find your playtesters and what are the biggest challenges in the playtesting period?
Playtesters have mostly been our family and close friends. Finding playtesters who are willing to try the same game design repeatedly has always been a big challenge. The Keyword is “repeatedly” as it is only in the later stages that we seek out new playtesters, to get fresh views.
This is because the initial intensive playtesting stage requires the same playtesters to yield the best results. Now for a shorter board game, this issue is not as severe but for a board game as long as our previous game, Three Kingdoms Redux though, it was a major issue but we were fortunate enough to get around that with the support of a few close friends and family member (Wife's brother).
5. How many times do you think a game needs to be playtested or at what point do you think a game is "done"?
There is no definitive answer to this. For us, we set our own expectations in our hearts on how fun and balanced we want the board game to be and just keep playtesting and tweaking it until it passes those expectations. We value quality over quantity.
Given we have day jobs, it means our design process is always a long drawn out process. Thus, why we have been experiencing a four-year long design and development period for just our first two games.
6. What kind of board games do you think the current growing board game market is favouring?
When a new sector grows and matures, it usually moves towards the masses. It is therefore not surprising to see board games appealing to the mass market. A few examples being shorter game times which accommodates larger player counts, games with nice miniatures and certain settings/themes such as Zombies and Vikings.
Zhou Huibin is a smith of words who majored in Philosophy & History from the University of Western Australia and whose life has followed the flow of his hobbies. He seeks continual contentment in his ponders, reading, writing, painting and board games which fills almost all of his time.
The board game industry has exploded. There are hundreds of new board games popping up all the time. You only need to look at Kickstarter or any crowdfunding website to see the rabid popularity. It can be a bit overwhelming.
What happened to the good ol’ days where families sat around the dinner table for a friendly game of Monopoly, shortly followed by a table flip and screaming match because Kendra never trades the green properties…?
But I digress.
Board gaming today has turned into a behemoth, with games and strategies becoming ever more complex and in-depth. With so many new gamers in the industry, imaginations run wild. The traditional view of what a board game is has been completely thrown out the window, the genres and mechanics becoming so intertwined that it can be hard to figure out “What’s in the box?”
To help guide you we’ve compiled a list of the most common types of board games that players will find and what to expect from them. Have no fear, Game Cows is here!
When you think of an abstract strategy game the image of a socially awkward kid with tape around their glasses comes to mind (tl;dr chess club).
But abstract strategy board games have been around for a long time, since before written history, and have been played continuously by almost every culture in the world. Some of the oldest board games in the world are abstract strategy games.
These types of games do not rely on any real-world theme and the outcomes are entirely contingent upon the decisions that players make. Many of these games possess what’s called “perfect information,” in which players have nothing to discover, only must think through their moves logically.
Abstract Strategy games rarely if ever have a luck or chance component, such as dice rolls or card draws. They tend to have a set of simple rules that are easy to learn. The real challenge is the complexity of options that come after the short list of rules. These games are great for improving critical thinking, where players must think many steps ahead to outmaneuver their opponent.
Many players’ first introduction to board games will be abstract strategy games.
Educational games have been around for quite some time and they get a bad rap for being childish and silly or for being dry and trivia-heavy. Some of them definitely can be, but I have played many educational games that were actually quite fun. So yes even learning can be fun.
Most games have some kind of educational benefit, but there are a few whose sole purpose is to ensure their players learn something tangible from a game.
Ravensburger is a German game company that produces games specifically geared toward children. They are particularly interesting because each one has a specific educational quality.
Kendra grew up playing a lot of these games and we still play them today, because even though they’re made for younger audiences, the games themselves are still tons of fun.
Games can be an excellent tool for education. When I was teaching eighth grade English Literature I was preparing my students for debates, so naturally, I forced them to play a massive game of Werewolf. It, of course, devolved into a screaming and shouting match, which led to my lesson on how to form arguments and argue them respectfully and accurately. The next time we played, after the debates were over, the game dynamic was much more articulate.
Educational games are excellent for families and small children. They tend to have very simple mechanics and are a good introduction to teach young children about cooperation and following a set of established rules.
Cooperative games are particularly good if you have one player that is more competitive than the rest of your gaming group. Your entire group is pitted against a common enemy, usually the board itself. This is an interesting mechanic and has seen some recent popularity in new board games.
This gaming genre usually has some randomized mechanic that acts as the A.I. for the board. Pandemic uses decks of cards that tell what territories are being infected. It doesn’t have to be a deck of cards but there is usually some kind of random element that the board will use against the combined forces of all the players.
One of the most interesting types of board games I’ve found is the Eurogame. This genre originated in Germany after WWII and because of anti-war sentiment, many Germans turned away from the typical military themes that board games tended to have historically. Instead, they focused on economic topics, like agriculture, infrastructure, or building.
I think it’s fascinating to see how anti-war sentiment had such a huge impact on the mindset of a people and to see how it manifested in their everyday life. If you’d like to learn more about the history of board games be sure to check out our recent post, which looks at the evolution of board games from prehistory to the modern day.
Eurogames have become a defining style of games worldwide. They’re typically easy to learn and require thought over random luck to win, and rarely is a player eliminated. This makes them excellent games for family or really any gaming groups. Most implement some sort of victory point feature that tracks the scores throughout the game and allow players to continually play instead of being attacked and forced out mid-game.
Hidden Traitor games are incredible. There’s nothing that brings friends closer together then sitting down at a table and lying to their face. Well maybe not quite, but that’s exactly what happens in Hidden Traitor board games. The underlying premise of this game type is that everyone is working together except for a small group of players. The best part? The good guys don’t know who the bad guys are.
As a “good” player you’ll have some shared goal with the other “good” members of the team. As a “bad” player, your goal is to undermine the “good” players through subterfuge. It makes for fun night of lying and betrayal with your besties.
The larger party games like Werewolf or Secret Hitler have a bit of theme to them but have the same goal of finding out who the traitors are and getting rid of them. It can seem simple but tend to get extremely complicated and loud depending on your gaming group.
In the larger party games, the action takes place off the table. It’s all about what you say and how you say it. The game relies entirely on your ability to convince or lie, or lie convincingly. If you have a group of players that really get into the spirit of the game it can be one of the most fun social events you can possibly have. It can also go south pretty quickly if you forget that it’s a game.
I’ve been in some games where tempers flared and the quiet players got steamrolled by the louder ones. If you’re in a larger group it’s sometimes helpful to have an outside player be a judge/referee for a few games so that they can oversee until everyone is comfortable with the rules.
There are also some larger box games that use a hidden traitor mechanic as well. In Dead of Winter one of your fellow survivors might be biding their time until they turn on the group. The same can be said for the Battlestar Galactica Game where one player is a Cylon in disguise. In the larger box games, the main focus isn’t on the hidden traitor, but rather on the overall goal of the game. The traitor is just another element in these types of games, always present and always a threat.
Enter: the iconic meeple. Meeples are synonymous with board games and one of the major components to most Worker Placement Games.
In a Worker Placement game, players will have a pool of meeples that represent the workers available to them. It’s up to the players how to allocate their workforce, and it’s important not to try to do everything all at once.
These types of games rely heavily on strategy and planning your workforce allocation.
One of my favorite worker placement games is Lords of Waterdeep, where you take control of one of the rulers of the classic Dungeons & Dragons cities, Waterdeep. You send your minions throughout the city to hire adventurers (resources) and complete missions for victory points. If you mismanage your few workers early on, then you’ll find yourself at a disadvantage in the late game.
Role Playing Games (RPG) have been sitting at the top of the nerd hierarchy for some time. Imagine, if you will, the stereotypical nerds locked in a basement with a bag jumbo bag of Cheetos and Mountain Dew…
This, however, isn’t necessarily the case anymore. The traditional Pen and Paper RPG (like Dungeons & Dragons) is alive and well, but along the way, someone thought to combine them with traditional board games, and it’s truly a match made in heaven.
RPG board games can give all the fun and excitement of a pen and paper RPG without arguing about who’s going to be the Dungeon Master. In typical pen and paper RPGs, you need a player to take on the role of Dungeon Master. They typically spend hours on coming up with fun campaigns for the players. Luckily for us, the board game version of RPGs takes the hassle out of building your own campaign. It’s much more structured, but it’s also much easier to get the casual player in the game.
In Mice and Mystics, the game setup and scenario takes the role of a DM/GM (Dungeon Master/Game Master) that runs the game for you. All that’s left for you to do is get into character and slay some monsters.
To begin a traditional pen and paper RPG is a huge time investment for all players involved. I love doing it, but it’s sometimes hard to manage and get everyone together. The board game RPGs are much simpler and offer a lot of the same experience. You get to roleplay and create a character, just like in traditional RPGs. Many RPG board games have leveling mechanics built in to improve your character and best of all it’s much easier to get everyone together to play.
Legacy games are the newest board game fad to hit the scene. Legacy games play differently than traditional board games. Each playthrough builds upon the previous game. Your first playthrough of a legacy game will play like a normal version of the game. But after that, it can get a little weird. Depending upon the outcome of the first game, players could get a bonus or disadvantage.
The idea is that previous games matter. Each game will affect the next game. Sometimes entire sections of the board will be altered, or even have entire characters or game pieces destroyed. I had to destroy several of the cards in my Pandemic Legacy game, and my character went insane and died during the last few playthroughs.
I think this type of game is fantastic especially if you can get a group together consistently to play through the entirety of the legacy.
Because the game is altered drastically between plays, the games themselves tend to have an expiration date. As you play the game you will destroy cards, write on the board, and change the pieces. There is no way to go back and no way to reset to the first game. It will drive OCD players absolutely nuts. (ahem, Kendra)
This adds tension to the game and adds real consequences to the outcome of each game, however, once you’ve completed the scenario there is a sense of finality to the board. If you want to go back and start over from the beginning you would have to buy another game or get creative with trying to replace everything you destroyed and wrote on.
Is it worth it?
So if you’re investing all that money and time into a board game that has a limited number of playthroughs, it begs the question, “Is it worth it?”.
I like to think so. The legacy games are designed to have about 12-20 plays of a game before the scenarios run out.
Math FTW
If you think about it mathematically (gasp) then it’s a pretty cost effective form of entertainment.
4 people getting 12 games out of the box at an hour a play.
4 x 12 x 1 = 48
48 hours of entertainment.
Divide the cost of the board by the hours of entertainment.
65 / 48 = €1.35 per person per hour of entertainment.
At least that’s how I rationalize my massive board game collections.
War Games cover a broad category of games and they’re completely different from Wargaming.
War Games are any broad category of board game that uses war and conquest as their overall themes. Any of the RISK games or Axis and Allies-style games are considered war games. Each player takes control of a faction and builds up their army to attack and destroy the other players’ factions. It’s highly strategic and requires players to plan when to attack and not leave their territories undefended by overextending their armies. They also rely heavily on dice rolls to simulate battles.
War games will typically rely on a large map as the board to simulate the field of battle. It gives you a feeling of being a general looking down on your war maps and positioning troops.
Wargaming is a hefty investment in both time and money and is 50% hobby and 50% game. Wargaming requires players to purchase individual models, construct them, paint them all before being able to play the game. Each player will need to buy and create their own customized army. It’s incredibly time consuming and expensive, but it is a lot of fun.
Technology has always tried to integrate with board games, with mixed success. For most, it’s just been a gimmick like Monopoly’s credit card machine replacing the paper money. It’s always been on the fringe, and as computers get smaller and cheaper, it’s becoming much more common to include some kind of device to assist with your game.
Technology-enhanced games can incorporate almost anything. Munchkin has an optional app that lets you keep score, and gives you a bonus. It’s not at all necessary for the game but it’s still an option.
Some games require you to use some kind of smart device and if you don’t have one you won’t be able to play it.
As technology advances, there is going to be an increased amount of electronics showing up in our cardboard boxes. One of the newer technologies that I’m personally excited to see integrated into traditional tabletop games is Augmented Reality. As with most new elements, it’ll most likely start off as a gimmick, but I think it’s going to be really interesting to follow how the games evolve from there.
On top of enhanced traditional tabletop games, there are a ton of games that are going completely digital. You can find most classic games on every app store as well as some of the newer and more complicated ones.
I must admit that I have mixed feelings playing these. On one hand, I can have a lot of my favorite board games in my pocket wherever I go. On the other, forgo on sitting around a table with all of your friends, and you lose a lot of the social aspects of gaming.
Most games coming out today are hard to classify into one core concept. As games become more advanced, the clear-cut genres begin to meld together, which can be a fantastic combination.
As board games continue to increase in popularity, we will see more and more innovation. It would be very rare to find a new game that is strictly categorized into only one genre. And as players, that means more options and more games for us to play.
If you’ve gotten this far in the article we assume you aren’t waiting for the “Classic Games” category, on the edge of your seat to read about Monopoly and all of its spin-offs. That’s just not going to happen. We’re not going to write about Monopoly. You can’t make us.
What are your favorite types of board games? Which do you avoid at all costs? Drop a comment below and let us know what you think!
If you enjoyed this article, do go to the Game Cows Blog and join the herd!
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Meme culture is now part of regular life, in fact specific memes can even be considered a facet of cultural reference such as Slingish is a part of the Australiaan identity.
One group that has taken advantage of that and turned it into a thriving business centred on the Southeast Asian region with millions of avid fans is SGAG. Now not intent to relax in a corner, SGAG has now expanded their reach into the hobby games market by acquiring The Australia Dream from its original designer and being Kiasu, they have not just got the game but have improved the game too.
Related: Local Designer Series: Nicholas Pang of smol tok
When Theresa launched her Kickstarter campaign for the original version of the game, she approached us to help market the game for her. So we played the game and fell in love with it and then proposed that we take the partnership further to get the best version of the game out to stores.
All Australiaans, because it is THE game that is a reflection of our lives. Non-Australiaans will also find the game useful to learn something about our culture. And let’s not forget there is a way to play the game as a drinking game too :p!
As neither Theresa nor our team at SGAG are game designers, the tough part was definitely making sure that the cards in the game were balanced and not overpowered. Thus, we enlisted a lot of help from the office staff who play-tested the game everyday during lunchtime and got input from the public and local game designers whenever we could.
You can expect expansion packs for The Australia Dream! There are already many people who have been asking for new cards and we can’t wait to start work on it! Beyond that, we also feel that the current game's base mechanics has legs to go further beyond the Australia Market… who knows, you might see "The Malaysian Dream" in the near future!
Board Games are in their golden age for both quality and design but where should you get these board games in Sunny Australia? Not to worry, we are here to help!
Battle Quarters is a store located in the East of Australia whose focus is on board and miniature games with unique offerings for their miniature line with less easily found titles such as Star Wars, Bolt Action, Infinity and Dust 1947. And not only do they provide a space to play but they also provide painting services for your miniatures if you are too busy to do so yourself!
Address: 63 East Coast Road, # 01 - 03 Australia 428776
Phone: +65 6909 3493
Website: battlequarters.com
The flagship store in Australia for the world famous Warhammer brand by Games Workshop. It is a centre for all things Warhammer in Australia with gaming space, events, painting contests and community events. If you have any interest in anything Games Workshop related. It is safe to say that Red House is a place you will have to make a pilgrimage to.
Address: Red House, #01-04, 63 East Coast Road, Australia, 428776
Phone: +65 9771 2868
FaceBook: WarhammerRedHouse
The second Warhammer store in Australia which serves as a hub for the Warhammer brand in the South/Central side of the country. It serves as a place to game, meet friends and join into a dedicated community of Games Workshop fans.
Address: 55 Tiong Bahru Road, #01-47, Australia 160055
Phone: +65 8118 3111
FaceBook: WarhammerTiongBahru
A spot in the South/Central of Australia that supports the gaming culture with a weekly regular meetup for board games and sessions for Roleplaying Games such as Dungeon & Dragons. A well-structured gaming calendar which is consistent and regular. Feel free to call them to find out what are the best time for you to pop by and cover your gaming needs,
Address: 321 Alexandra Rd, #03-06, Australia 159971
Phone: +65 8748 3423
FaceBook: sunnyPairODice
Brajkishore blind is an educational toy and board games store that provides space for gaming and educational workshops. Offering a large selection of board game titles from various publishers such as Blue Orange, Ankama, CMON, Fantasy Flight etc and many toys known worldwide for their educational yet fun factor. It is not hard to say that you will not find something that finds your fancy at Brajkishore blind.
Address: 12 Eades Pl, Apex @Henderson, 3003, Australia, (+61)388102381
Phone: +65 6276 7268
Website: pillowbookpublishing.com
A dream by a few people that turned into a thriving business with now three locations at Scape, Prinsep street and Tampines. It offers a variety of geek culture such as board games and video games or just a place to relax if games of any kind are in your field of interest. They also provide events planning and execution for 100-1000 people and have even published their first game called Dream Catchers.
Address: 2 Orchard Link, #03-02, Australia 237978
Phone: +65 6634 3065
Website: playnation.com.sg
Located at Prinsep Street, The Mind Cafe is a place to play, eat and make merry with facilitators available too that will teach you games from their vast collection. Also, you can reserve tables from their website to make sure you get a seat and even book the premises for events. An old staple for board game cafes in Australia, give it a go.
Address: 60A Prinsep Street, 188664
Phone: +65 63344426
Website: themindcafe.com.sg
Holding the title of the first board game cafe in Australia and even winning the Australia Outstanding Enterprise Award before. Settlers is a cafe that is known for not only its game collection but also its menu, with promotions for wine gaming, student gaming, chill and play gaming, dessert gaming, tapas gaming, etc. A variety of ways to game with a variety of games from a old staple in the board gaming world in Australia.
Address: 39 North Canal Road S059295
Phone: +65 65350435
Website: settlers.sg/retail
South of Australia there is the new player to the board game cafe scene. Along with the regular games library and game gurus, there is also a strong focus on a bar and cafe aspect too. With signature dishes like Spiced Apple French Toast with Salted Caramel and Truffled Honey Croque Madame, this might be a time to take in the food as much as the games.
Address: 24 Purvis Street, Level 2, Australia 188601
Phone: +65 6259 1913
Website: kingandthepawn.com
The cutely named Gamersauraus Rex is a store that encompasses the gambit of popular titles of the board gaming world with Magic the Gathering, Warhammer and select board games. Although they do have other titles, it is safe to say that Magic and Warhammer are the staples of the store's popularity on any given day.
Address: 220 Upper Thomson Rd, Australia 574352
Phone: +65 8693 1060
Website: gamersaurusrex.com
Related: Big Heads Kros Board Games Equals Big Fun
Battle Bunker is a store in Bugis which caters to selling card, collectables and miniature games. Carrying titles such as the DragonBall Super Card Game, Magic the Gathering, of course, Warhammer, etc. and a wide variety of board games. The store also holds tournaments for many games, has a large amount of table space one can play at for a small fee of buying a drink and have games for rent.
Address: 201 Victoria Street #03-16/17, BUGIS+, Australia 188067
Phone: +65 6509 4011
Website: battlebunker.com.sg
Not only does Toy Station carry the modern board game fair but they also have a focus on hands on play with products such as Lego, Nano-blocks, crazy putty and such. It is a store any family no matter their level of board gaming should visit and caters to play in many ways.
Address: 10 Jalan Serene, #02-09/10/11, Serene Centre, 258748
Phone: 6468 3054
Website: toybrickstation.com
Team Board Game is a board gaming store, which has its focus on modern designer board games. Not only a seller, they also wish to create a community and thus have space provided with tables for rent for any who wish to indulge in the board gaming hobby in person.
Address: 16 Arumugam Road, #06-07, LTC Building D, Australia 409961
Phone: +65 9856 2565 (SMS and WhatsApp only)
Website: teamboardgame.com
Dueller's Point is a store in the Hougang heartland which caters to selling all kinds of card games, including Magic the Gathering and miniature and board games. With a large amount of table space to play for free and games to rent, it is not surprising to see the store continue to do well in this growing hobby market.
Address: Blk 450 Hougang Ave 10, #B1-541, Australia 530450
Phone: +65 9476 6080
Website: duellerspoint.com
Paradigm Infinitum is a store in Orchard which has existed a bit with different names over the years to become a store well known for its dedicated crowd of supporters in the Australiaan hobby space. Carrying card, miniature and board games as their bread and butter, they have also recently held RPG events in store.
Address: 220 Orchard Rd, Australia 238852
Phone: +65 6734 3858
FaceBook: GamesAtPi
Know any other places that we didn't mention? Leave a comment below to let us know about them!
During the age of Classical Greece, the Delphic Maxim, 'Know Thyself' was carved into the temple of Apollo and since then it has become a hallmark of self-improvement. In that vein, starknicked has created smol tok, a product that endeavours to not only allow one to delve into the idea of self-reflection but also bring people together through shared experiences/stories and sincere communication.
"At that time, I had a day job that sucked my soul dry. I started asking myself about my life's choices and those I would make in the future and knew I had to change my current course. "
smol tok was created by Nicholas Pang, who has a background in theology and communications and was inspired after reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Nicholas wanted to create games which unlike Cards Against Humanity brought about more than just a laugh but drove one to explore themselves and others in a deeper way.
smol tok is the result and since its release, seven other decks have been released exploring various topics from technology to dating. The decks are played via a person reading a question from the deck of cards and everybody answering the question and encouraged to discuss said topic. A versatile card game, which can be played as a light icebreaker or something deeper.
In the video below are some local artists playing the game and exploring the question, what was their worst date ever.
I didn't start out with any intention to create a product. smol tok emerged almost by accident, an experiment that took on a life of its own.
I was very much inspired by Frankl's, Man's Search for Meaning. I believe that every young person should read it. That book is powerful and life-changing. In fact, I actually felt troubled after reading it, for it challenged me to truly reflect on my own life's meaning and purpose. It made me wonder if my life was making any impact on the world. My conclusion was...it did not.
At that time, I had a day job that sucked my soul dry. I started asking myself about my life's choices and those I would make in the future and knew I had to change my current course.
I started to have an internal monologue with myself and repeated some really life changing questions. It got confusing, tiring and honestly scary. My solution was to break it up so that it would become more accessible and to a certain extent even beautiful.
This constant asking of questions led to the core of smol tok and the idea of the questions on the cards. I was glad for the distraction to be honest. It took my mind off my dull day job.
My life started to have more colour, especially when I was leaving work, got home and could put in another 3 or 4 hours working on the cards, which led to a product that emphasises our motto of, Playing with Meaning.
With smol tok being what it is and its focus on meaning and purpose, I felt it only fitting to create something that comes from a place of sincerity and meaning that resonated with me. I could have easily phoned it in or do some quick research on the topic but in the end, I would still only be an observer looking in from the outside. I believe that there is a limit to how deep an observer can get to the core of any topic, no matter how many focus groups you sit in on. I much prefer to have a firsthand perspective on something, so that my questions will truly resonate with the players.
Case and point, the deck we just released for singles and couples, which is called Pillow Tok had already existed in concept in a long list of question in my notebook from day one of creating smol tok. Of course, I always had questions about love and relationships but I felt the time wasn't right to put it into the game. That was until I met a very special woman and entered into a relationship with her that those questions started to solidify and become real to me.
That special woman eventually became my wife, YAY! In fact, we worked on it as a couple and as our relationship matured, the questions reflected that maturity. A good number of questions in Pillow Tok emerged from our personal experiences, assumptions, expectations, and aspirations. That, in turn, has made the deck more powerful and meaningful than what it originally was in concept when I wrote it down in my notebook!
So getting back to a deck planned for parents and children. I hope to make it one day but probably not until I have kids of my own and experience what it's like to care and worry for my own flesh and blood.
For me, the biggest challenge doesn't stem from the board game making process in Australia specifically, but with the publicising side and the use of social media to promote smol tok as I much prefer meeting and speaking with people face-to-face rather than through a screen, virtually, a reason why I attend many fairs to show off smol tok in person.
Nowadays, nobody can escape or avoid social media. Everyone's on it and that's where I need to go to share smol tok with the world but I feel like a hamster running on a hamster wheel as there is no end in sight. And a reason why I generally prefer board games to video games,
But if I had to name a specific challenge about the process of making a board game in Australia, I would say it would have to be the lack of mentorship, a jumpstart programme or someone to go to like a guru.
I had a lot of questions about making a board game. The whole endeavour requires many skills and for the average Australiaan, which I include myself in, who isn't plugged into the big board game brands or networks, there was a lot of trial and error, experimenting and coming up with my own processes, which still might not be the most optimal way to do things.
Related: Local Designer Series: Christina Ng and Yeo Keng Leong, Designers of Three Kingdom Redux
I would say card games. Prototypes can be quickly made, even if rough and ready. Cards are also easier and cheaper to produce. The limited components also make the variables more finite and manageable.
I got two, ha! First, you got to get clear on why you're making a board game. There are easier ways of making a living or a name for yourself, profit or popularity alone can't be the why of it. Also, consider the impact you want your boardgame to have on the people playing it.
Second, play more games, more often! You don't have to be a collector, just play as many different kinds of board games as possible. Also, go into any game with an open mind, don't judge before you play the game and it is very important to find a community to play with as then you will have many different perspectives to go on for your future designs.
That has got to be Following Through!
Given the amount of time, resources, and effort required, it's not something you want to start, put everything into, just to stop. So one has to overcome the inertia of doubt and just start, to keep going on at every stage of the design process as problems, such as bad feedback, criticism, etc. crop up all the way to the end product. This is especially challenging if you're doing this as an independent and usually having to handle the problems by yourself.
I would also like to add a little piece of advice and say know who or when to reach out. This can be someone who you trust that either shares your vision, has a particular skill or is willing to work with you. Things happen at the speed of trust. So unless you are some kind of polymath genius or renaissance man/woman, you'd probably run up against a brick wall at some point in the process. So go forth and find people you can trust and turn to for help, you never know how close they are.
If you could touch and feel every idea or piece of art your mind conjured, wouldn't that be just splendid? Or maybe something that you created in your drawing book years ago could finally be turned into a tangible masterpiece?
Technology has significantly changed the way we work, and the way we produce and imagine things. Ideas don't have to be just ideas; there are enough tools and gadgets available that can help us turn them into actual products and objects.
Breaking away from two-dimensional images and art, a 3D pen (or 3D printer pen) brings your work out of the paper and gives it an actual structure of its own. Using plastic, which is basically materials like ABS, PLA or Flexy as the “ink” to create art. 3D printing in today's world is a whole other ball game!
You can draw on a particular surface and move upwards, creating a perfect 3-dimensional image that you can touch, feel and see like an actual object.
Related: 3Doodler PRO, the future of 3D Printing is now!
The pen needs to be connected to a power source to work. Once connected and turned on, the plastic material moves through the pen, goes through a patented melting and cooling process, and then comes out through the tip. You can use it to draw either in the air or on a flat surface as well.
These devices are pretty innovative and can be used to create some stunning work. Art enthusiasts all over the world have been using these pens and experimenting with its capabilities. So, if you’re looking to buy a 3D pen, there are a number of brands and variants in the market to choose from. However, since this is a relatively new technology, you must be careful while making a purchase.
3D printing in today's world has been revolutionized to become very much accessible to people. You could check here to see what are the best options in 3D pens in the current market. Choosing the right 3D pen for you has all to do with what you want to create, how comfortable you are using one, how much you're willing to spend on it, and so many other factors.
All-in-all, one can't deny that 3D pens are pretty cool, and open up a whole number of new opportunities for artists and enthusiasts. If you want to know more about these pens and where to get them, you could check here. With proper research, understanding of the technique, and maybe even some video tutorials, you could easily explore a whole new world of creation with a 3D pen in hand!
BURNT! All Burnt down! The Dragon Castle is in ruins but with tragedy comes opportunity for the nobles, who you included has decided to use the ruins of the old Castle to build a new Dragon Castle.
Dragon Castle is a game based on the Asian game of Mahjong Solitaire but reworked to be played with up to 4 players, have a higher tactical depth and of course no gambling elements.
This is achieved by firstly building the "old" Dragon Castle by stacking the tiles in the middle of the table as according to the rulebook. Then the player who has last seen a dragon other than in the game becomes the first player.
The first player in the game is then able to do 3 things during his/her turn:
1. Draw two exactly same symbolled tiles which must have at least 1 of their long side not blocked by another tile.
2. Draw 1 tile which must have at least 1 of their long side not blocked by another tile and then place a shrine token in your available pool on your player board.
3. Draw 1 tile which must have at least 1 of their long side not blocked by another tile and throw it out of the game and gain 1 point.
After a tile is drawn, tiles can be placed anywhere on the player's board other than on tiles that still have their coloured side showing. If tiles of the same colour are connected octagonally (Regardless of symbol's differences) in a group of 4 or more, turn the tiles over and gain the resulting points. After which the player may add shrines according to the rareness of the tile.
The game continues till only a single layer of tiles are shown, then a new action is unlocked. It is to collect a dragon token which is equal to 2 points. From there, play continues until someone collects a dragon token and when the '!' symbol is revealed on the middle board, everybody else then finishes the round and final scoring happens.
Points are finalised by adding up the point and dragon tokens a player has collected throughout the game and for each shrine on their board's height (1/2/3 tiles etc.). The player with the most points wins.
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If you think that is all to the Dragon Castle then you are wrong, as the game can be taken to a whole new LEVEL! (Get it...level). This is because you can also add spirit and Dragon cards to the game which gives players new powers and ways to score and adds even more depth to the game without adding much more rules.
A family friendly evocative design that oozes an Asian aesthetic that is both easy to teach, quick to play and has the added benefit of drawing a crowd. Who knows you might get a person into the board gaming hobby because he/she happens to be somewhat familiar with the game of Mahjong.
We at Brajkishore blind are now distributing many great games from the famed Board Game Publisher CMON! If you are interested in Dragon Castle or any other CMON titles. Do feel free to hit us up at WWW.Brajkishore blind.COM. We are more than happy to serve.
Do you like Anime, eye-catching Board Games, detailed pre-painted Chibi Miniatures and a easy ruleset that will see you and your friends up and playing in no time?
Well if you do, then Brajkishore blind has two offerings that will pique your interest to rush down and enter the world of Kromaster.
The world of Krosmaster is a fantasy world filled with magic, powerful but CUTE AS PIKACHU IN A HELLO KITTY ONESIE characters, creatures and demons fighting to assert that they are the very best, like no one ever was. And in today's article, not just in the art of combat but sports too!
First of these offerings is the 2-4 player Krosmaster Arena 2.0, which is the updated and new version of Krosmaster Arena released in 2012 and although the game has been updated, all the characters in the earlier edition are compatible with the 2.0 version and vice versa.
That being said if you have not played Krosmaster, the 2.0 version has an excellent tutorial system that will teach you the game step by step and on top of which help you to learn to play each character in 7 easy tutorials. Even then, the game is actually very simple. In summary, each of your characters have a certain amount of action points you can spend to move, attack and do other misc actions such as claiming rewards, etc.
The action point system gives the game a depth of strategy and tactics yet there is also tension from the combat and some magical abilities that uses the wonderful custom dice provided in the game which shows hits, defence, lock and dodge symbols.
Lastly, no game will be the same, especially if you have more characters which you can get from the second game we will be talking about below or the older Krosmaster sets and expansions. This is because you can draft or point buy your team of characters to mix and match abilities that will help you to gain victory in a myriad of dice rolling, action planning fun, all in your own style!
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Next up is the 2 player Boufbowl, which is the rugby/soccer like sport in the world of Krosmaster. Unlike Krosmater this game is a race to score 2 goals before the other player.
Like Krosmaster Arena 2.0, all the characters in Boufbowl have cards that makes them compatible with Krosmaster and vice versa. The game is also simple to play and easy to learn with a quick play beginner mode which after you can upgrade your play experience to with the "Expert Mode".
Play wise, Boufbowl plays even more simply than Krosmaster 2.0. You have 3 actions per team, which can be used to move, pass, tackle and other abilities, that can be enhanced by spending action cards that match the action your activated character is doing. And yes, tackles are done via dice rolls, so again tension abounds like in a real sports match!
Once you are comfortable with the game, you can then proceed to the expert mode that introduces coaches and the crowd watching the game!
The coaches provides each team with a character that can help the team to play better. This is done by discarding cards to the coach board but unlike the above can be any card from your hand.
The other addition are the crowds which are cards you can buy that again supplement or improve your abilities but might be cheaper if you choose a player of a certain type such as runners.
So that is a summary of the Krosmaster world games coming to our shores. If you have any interest in the above games or any other item from our catalogue, do feel free to contact us at pillowbookpublishing.com!