Fishing is a deck-building trick-taking game from mad scientist designer Friedemann Friese. The game is played over eight rounds. Every round you score points based on the cards you win. These cards are shuffled, and they go to the bottom of your personal draw deck. In the next round, you draw cards from your personal draw deck. Your draw deck starts empty. In the first round, if you don’t

Little Fighters 2 was a hit digital indie game released in Hong Kong in 2000. It was remastered and re-released in 2025, its 25th anniversary. Together with the re-release, a novel was published, and the deluxe version of the novel comes with a small box card game. This is that small box card game.  This is a game for 2 to 4 players. You play one of four characters in the digital

The first thing 5 Towers reminds me of is Lost Cities. You have five suits, and you must play your cards in a specific order, with no turning back. However there are several important differences, so 5 Towers delivers a different play experience. You can build up to five different towers, each a different colour, and you most likely will. Building a tower means playing cards of the same suit

The Gang turns Texas Hold 'em Poker into a cooperative game. It's a great idea. Most of the cards in the game are just standard poker cards. Unknowing passers by will probably think you are just playing regular poker.  Your goal as a team is to guess the order of your hands based on strength. You need to guess who has the strongest hand, then the second strongest, and so on. You

This is Han's game, and it has a ton of miniatures. This box you see is just for the basic components, including the game board, the player boards and the player markers. However you cannot fit the miniatures into this box. There are at least two other huge boxes needed for all the miniatures in the game. When you need to bring this game to game night, you'll be carrying several bags like

The Rich and the Good is the English version of Hab & Gut. I’m going to refer to the game as Hab & Gut, not because I’m being pretentious, but because I’ve always heard of it being referred to in the original German name. Also it’s a much shorter name to type. This is a game of commodity price manipulation, insider information and making donations. You are an investor (well, to be totally

 

Wine Cellar is a very pretty game. It is about collecting bottles of wine. Throughout the game you will collect a stack of 8 bottles, and at the end of the game you score points to see who wins.  You start the game with a hand of 8 cards. You use them for simultaneous bidding, and the number in the top left corner is the strength of your card. Every round there will be a number of

Diamonds is a trick-taking game for 2 to 6 players. The basic rules are the same as standard trick-taking games. You must follow suit if you can, and the highest card in the lead suit wins the trick. There is no trump suit. What's special about this game is the suit powers. There are four suits in the game, and the cards are numbered 1 to 15. The theme is jewellers. Each player has his

Burst is a light card game that can be described as group Black Jack. That’s just like my game Pinocchio, but in Pinocchio the cards are hidden. In Burst you can see all the cards played.  On your turn you either draw a card or play a card to the centre of the table. You have a hand size of three, so if you have three cards, you must play one. Cards in hand are your points. They are

I would like to hear your opinion. Since 2022, Cili Padi Games has been publishing one game per year. My idea is to do this once a year to gradually build up my product line and my brand. However I also remind myself that my goal is to focus on being a designer, not a publisher. If I am able to pitch a to a publisher successfully, I would happily play the role of designer only. So far

Super Fantasy Brawl is a 2-player game in which you control a team of three fighters and you go head to head against the opponent team in a grand arena decorated with three statues.  You don’t fight to the death. Instead you race to score points. Fighters don’t die. They respawn at the deployment zone. You score points by knocking out enemy fighters and by completing challenges, which

The Flatiron building is a famous landmark in New York, well-known for its triangular shape. When I first saw the name, I thought it was rather weird because I thought it was pronounced as "fla-tee-ron". Only after I saw the Chinese name I realised this name was "flat" and "iron" combined. I feel dumb now. This is a 2-player game about constructing the Flatiron building. You are builders

Moonshine is a game about running a speakeasy in the prohibition era. You roll dice to generate resources. You have some casual customers who can help you generate resources or roll more dice. You will spend resources to recruit your casual customers to become loyal customers. Some of these give permanent benefits. Some give points. When you reach 12 points, the game ends and you win. 

12 - 14 December 2025 was the BGC boardgame retreat organised by Jeff and Wai Yan of boardgamecafe.net. This is already their 13th year doing this. Although I have known Jeff and Wai Yan for many years, this was the first time I participated in their annual retreat. I did participate in a mini retreat some years ago, but this was not the main annual event. So I consider myself a newbie. 

Quantum is a game of interstellar colonisation and warfare. The spaceships in the game are dice. Different die values represent spaceships of different classes. They have different speeds, strengths and special abilities. You goal is to be able to deploy all your influence cubes. You do this by establishing colonies on planets and by accumulating battle victories.  The play area is

Ra is one of Reiner Knizia's classics, first published in 1999. This is an important game in my boardgame journey, being one of the games I played a lot of when I first got into the hobby. At the time (2003) the game was out of print. I searched for images online and hand made a copy so that I could play it. Now that I think about the time and effort required to hand make a game with 180 tiles, I

Orapa Mine is a game from Korea. You are mining specialists and your company is about to start mining a huge gemstone mine. Your job is to detect the exact positions of the gems. You do this by directing ultrasound signals into the ground and observing how these signals are reflected by the gems.  The game is for 2 to 5 players. With 2 players, each sets up a puzzle, and you

I first played Architects of the West Kingdom as a physical game. Playing online in asynchronous mode is not as good as playing face-to-face. I guess that's true for most boardgames. For strategy games like this, it is still not too bad. There is much you can plan and think about between your turns. You don't have many turns in a game, so the game doesn't go too long. Some games which