Watergate is a two player game about the Watergate scandal involving President Nixon. One player is the newspaper editor trying to gather evidence, link them to Nixon and expose the scandal. The other player is the Nixon administration, trying to prevent this and attempting to win by lasting till the end of the presidential term.
The game board is a network of links with
The Malaysia Boardgame Show is happening 18-19 April 2026 in Kuala Lumpur! Cili Padi Games and I will be there. There will be pre-loved games for sale, several game competitions, and there are also game hosts bringing games for visitors to try. There is even a seminar on game design. There will be a lot of the Malaysia boardgame community and events all at one place. Don't miss it!
When I say spoiler-free, I mean up to the point when you start your first game. That means by then you will have opened the first mission box and you will see what's inside. If that's fine by you, come join me to take a look at what's in Regicide Legacy, the legacy game version of the amazing cooperative card game Regicide from Badgers from Mars, New Zealand. I'm a big fan of Regicide
Bombastic was first explained to me as advanced tic-tac-toe. It is a two-player-only abstract game played using 9 tiles laid out face-down in a 3x3 grid. Four of the tiles show a circle, another four a cross, and the last one a bomb. Each player is assigned an icon, circle or cross. Your goal is to reveal exactly three of your icon in a row on your turn. Beware. If you ever reveal the
Skara Brae brings us to the Orkney Islands in prehistoric
Scotland. You manage a growing settlement. As more and more people flock to
your settlement, you need to make sure you gather enough resources, build
shelter, and cook enough food to feed everyone. At the same time you need to
manage the waste generated by the settlement. There is a message about
sustainability here
Wizards of the Grimoire is a two-player head-to-head battle game. You are wizards and you deal damage to each other by casting spells. To win the game, you need to reduce your opponent's health points to zero. This structure is pretty common. However the way you pick spells to use and manage mana needed to cast them is interesting. The game certainly offers something new.
There is
Toy Battle is a two player abstract game. My first impression is
this is a game when you play with not only those tiny green toy soldiers but
also with unicorns, dinosaurs and robots, and you make proper rules for a
battle game in your living room, which you can imagine to be any world - space
station, beach front or graveyard. The game comes with many different boards,
HWC Coffee is a Malaysian specialty coffee chain. They made a card game which was given away for free if you bought coffee (and other stuff) worth more than a certain amount within a single transaction. It is encouraging to see this. I would love to have my game designs used in such projects. Zus Coffee had something like this just last year, a Sembang Raya card game. Something that promotes
Bebop is a tile placement game about a jazz music fair. You are
ticket sellers trying to book the right seats for customers who enjoy specific
performances - piano, brass (trumpets) or percussion (drums). I find the link
between theme and mechanism a little weak, but still, it’s nice to see a music
fair setting, which is not something you see often. This being a tile
The past weekend was the Dice N Dine event at Lalaport, Kuala Lumpur, organised by The Magic Rain. It was not entirely a boardgame event. There were art booths and some cosplaying too. Surprisingly not many local game designers set up booths this time. Normally we have more. The venue is the Level 4 food court. The Dice N Dine concept is to run smallish events at food courts, because there
Over the Chinese New Year holidays I managed to get some friends and family to help me playtest Pilgrim Poker. The rules were more or less final, but I wanted to get more different people to try it, to see whether there were any issues I hadn't detected. This is stress testing the game. When you get people who have never played a game to try it, you can discover situations you have never seen
It's happening this weekend! Come try my games at Lalaport shopping mall,
Kuala Lumpur. I will be there both Saturday and Sunday. My booth will be at
Level 4.
The Malaysia Boardgame Show is happening 18-19 April 2026 in Kuala Lumpur! Cili Padi Games and I will be there. Come play with me! More information on Instagram and Linktree. There is an open-to-public area and a ticketed area for activities. Tickets for the latter here. Early bird prices ending this week. Buy now!
Ghosts Galore is a simple tile laying game in which you fill your own 3x3 board with tiles. Your player board is an underground mine. The tiles have tracks for mine carts, and monsters, and diamonds. The monsters score points in different ways. Diamonds have point values. You also want to lay your tracks to connect exits properly so that you can score points with them.
You
This is a card from my upcoming game Malaysian Holidays, which celebrates all our Malaysian national holidays and state holidays. This year Nuzul Al-Quran falls on a Saturday. Don't mind the THU on the card. In the game it is a Thursday card. And that 2 in the corner means there are two such cards in the game. Malaysian Holidays is coming soon this year from Specky Studio. Watch this space!
Libertalia is a game from 2012. I have heard of it before several times, but never had the chance to give it a go until recently. I had high hopes for the game, because I had heard only good stuff. Unfortunately for me, I am meeting a good game at a bad time. I would have enjoyed the game more had I played it earlier. This is a simultaneous action selection game. You and your opponents have
Who else has watched the Disney cartoon 101 Dalmatians as a kid? Spots is a light dice game about dalmatians! Well, maybe not specifically dalmatians. Just dogs with spots. Many of the dogs in this game don't actually look like dalmatians. This is a game with a bit of push-your-luck, in which you race to fill six dog cards with dice of the right number of pips.
You start
I thought it would be an interesting exercise to look at the current Top 100
games on www.BoardGameGeek.com and
see how well I'm doing in playing them all. I realise I have never done this
before in 19 years of blogging about boardgames. Certainly the Top 100 looks
very different from 19 years ago. No more Tigris & Euphrates today. I
don't actually browse the Top 100 list often
Dionysia is a microgame from Buttonshy Games. So you know what to expect. A game with exactly 18 cards which comes in a wallet that fits comfortably in your shirt pocket.
Dionysia is a two player game in which you draft cards to make a play. Cards represent scenes. Your play has three acts, and each act must have three scenes. You take turns drafting a card from a market of