We flew non-stop from JFK in New York to Hong Kong. What better way to wait for departure than playing mini games of Carcassonne?
In Hong Kong, we visited a tiny shop that still makes hand-carved Mahjong sets:
I passed on the beautiful hand-made mahjong set and instead bought a set of Chinese dominos, and then googled the rules for Tien Gow. The dominos are cool, but my family didn’t love that particular game, so we didn’t play much.
Next we flew to Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan, where we found a Mahjong parlor, with automated tables to shuffle and deal the tiles! Everyone won one hand except me!
The next day, we went to see the “Purple Butterflies” of Maolin. By the time we reached the pagoda at the top of the hill, we had not seen any butterflies, so we decided to play a quick game of TinderBlox (using my modified rules
), which we really have been enjoying as a travel game. Happily, on the way down, we did encounter the lovely butterflies!
Next we played Spades on the train to Hualien:
After a long day of walking trails in Taroko Gorge, what better way to relax than playing Sichuan style mahjong (inspired by watching some games in a local night market in Kaohsiung) and Bananagrams:
Finally, we made our way to Taipei, where serendipity sent us the gaming highlight of the trip! We saw two locals playing Banqi in the Jade market. They showed us the ranking of the pieces and then we used google to figure out the rest:
We were lucky enough to find a Chinese chess (Xiangqi) set in a small shop near NCCU, including a paper board for easy storage, so we started learning and playing this wonderful game of Banqi. It is sort of like chaotic random Stratego that gradually morphs into chess!
If anyone wants to try it out, you can get the “Chinese Dark Chess King” app. You’ll have to invest a bit in learning the pieces: note that equal ranks have different symbols in black and red, just to make life more interesting! During the flight home, I was able to practice enough to beat the “Easy” computer, but still was losing on the “Medium” setting. But this game is super fun—I highly recommend it as a quick 2-player game with a great mix of luck and skill.
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