Giving tabletop games a boost
Rich Man, a Monopoly-like game published by Yawan Stationery, is a classic board game that most Taiwanese grew up playing. In 2008, Yawan established its own game design studio, Two Plus. The following year they launched three original games—Rabbit Hunt, Fuzzy Tiger, and Fire Bulls—becoming a pioneer in Taiwanese-created tabletop games.
However, at that time the Taiwanese tabletop game market was still dominated by Western games, with homegrown games a rare sight in game stores. Many players began asking themselves why all the famous, fun games were coming from abroad, and whether Taiwan could design good games of its own.
The tough part for most game designers is visualizing their ideas. This was why in April 2012 veteran tabletop gamer Smoox Chen convened a group of like-minded friends for the first Taipei Boardgame Playtest. Online, he invited people to bring their game projects along for testing and discussion. As well as helping build out the games’ mechanics, meetups like this have offered aspiring game makers a way to share resources and work together to develop a blueprint for Taiwanese-made games. As such, they played a vital role in the early stages of the industry’s development.
Ever since that first playtest seven years ago, they’ve been held once a month without fail. Many of the people that showed up to the first event, Chen shares, didn’t have any experience in publishing tabletop games, but everyone kept at it step by step, driven by their enthusiasm. Today, those same people are still at it and have become core members of publishing companies like EmperorS4 Games and Moaideas Game Design.
Rachel Chen, chair of the Asia Gamification Innovation Education Association, is committed to bringing tabletop games into education to help make learning fun.