Spiel Essen 2019 – Taiwan Boardgame Design

At Taiwan Boardgame Design a collective of the best Taiwanese designers comes together at monthly playtest meetings to eventually show off their board games to the Spiel audience. Their goal is to make Taiwanese games more accessible to the rest of the world and they do, because started only in 2013 they became a well-known player in the board game community with a really good game record.

The face behind all this is Smoox, I met him last year at an after Spiel gathering and of course I tried a few of their games at Spiel itself. Also for this year my planning was to visit him and the Taiwan Boardgame Design booth once again. From the dozen new releases they were bringing, I was personally most interested in Electropolis and Kung Fur Fight and I was happy to try one at Spiel and took them both home with us.

In Kung Fur Fight, the everlasting battle between Cats and Dogs are being fought. As a dog lover, I love to settle this once and for all. Stupid Cats, DIE!!! (ahum, sorry for that). Lucky for me, my lovely demo lady and coincidental the designer of the game Yunus Hsieh is a Cat lover, so we didn’t have to argue for who is playing with which faction.

Nicest moment of the game was when I opened up the player screen and I stared a little bit too long, with most likely a dumb expression on my face, to all the Mandarin signs on the player screen. Having no clue at all what is stated, I feel already an advantage growing for the opposite faction.

Of course, everything is translated and except for a few places, you won’t encounter much other than English in the game. You know what, I actually like it and to be honest it didn’t disturb me at all and I think it is kind of the charm of playing foreign games. Plus it is a good way to catch up on my Mandarin.

The game I didn’t had the time to play at Spiel, Electropolis, I already had the chance to play it at home and I like it so far. I need some more plays in and then you can expect a full review from both games, in time.