BIGF & TOBE 2026 Event Recaps (Bangkok and Taiwan)

Hello, everyone! It’s Matthew. It’s been a little while since our last article was posted. I hope all of you have been playing some great games in the meantime! Today’s article will recap a couple of the many international events the team at JELLY JELLY GAMES has gone to within the past month or so. First, we’ll hear from Jacek about his trip to BIGF (Bangkok International Game Festival), and then you’ll get my recap of this year's TOBE (Taiwan Original Boardgame Expo)!

Let's begin!

Bangkok International Game Festival (BIGF)
Hey everyone!

Jacek from JELLY JELLY INTL here. I hope that you’re having a good start to Spooktober (or just October, if you’re not into all that horror stuff).

As we’re all about sharing the Japanese board game culture with the world, I thought I’d give you a little insight into an expo that I recently participated in - Bangkok International Games Festival in Thailand!

Taking place from the 28th to 30th of August, this event saw a range of publishers across the globe come together and share their titles with the Thai community.



36 publishers made their way to the centralwOrld shopping and culture complex - the ninth largest in the world! The event itself took place on the top floor; the TK Park venue. This gorgeous, well-lit open space was surrounded by a public library, which included board games and video games too!

I braved the ~7 hour flight early in the morning all by my lonesome, and arrived on the setup day of the event. Though this was my first time in Thailand (prior plans to visit were postponed thanks to COVID), and the food stalls were calling my name - and nose - I hurried over to centralwOrld to get everything ready.

Within an hour, the booth went from looking like this:

To this:

After several hours of catching up with friends, test-playing games, and making new connections, I descended the escalator on the hunt for some sticky mango rice through the various night market streets (which I 100% recommend you try).




Shibuya looks different than I remember…

Good thing this guy was keeping an eye on things!

The next morning I headed over to get the remainder of stock ready, and to meet my part-time staff who very kindly made up for my lack of Thai fluency - though in most cases, English was not a problem!

For this event, I divided the booth into two sections: JELLY JELLY GAMES original titles on the left, JELLY JELLY INTERNATIONAL titles on the right.

Within the first hour of the show, I had someone play every single game that I brought - all 8 of them! Good thing that I recently went through all the rules… Our booth ended up wonderfully located right at the front of the venue, so any visitors were met with the sight of people holding up sticks between their hands and laughing (or screaming) (or both) (usually both).

As always, YUBIBO was a delight to showcase - no matter the group size, age, gender, or familiarity of the players, everyone left with a smile on their face. It was a delightful surprise to have YUBIBO win Best Family Game at the show - thank you to all the judges!


YUBIBO aside, it was a lot of fun to introduce people to The Slasher, TRiNiTY, and Cross Golems - all games that uniquely showcase the Japanese design mindset, I feel. From the minimal approach of The Slasher and TRiNiTY only consisting of a small deck of cards each, to a quirky title where you combine cards by slotting them into each other - it’s one of my favorite things about these shows.


Getting to see and share the design philosophies and approach across cultures. Noticing artistic or thematic trends/differences. Introducing newcomers to the wonderful world of modern board games. And did I mention all the food?

The bubble teas, y’all. They were so good. Sadly I have no photos of those to share, so instead please accept this pineapple cocktail served in a pineapple:

After 6-7 hours of standing and teaching games, many of us found ourselves in a massage parlor. Thai massages are just as nice as you may have heard, but trust me when I tell you that there are somehow even more massage places than you could imagine.

The show continued like this for two more days:

• 3 or so hours of teaching games
• Bubble tea (lunch optional)
• 4 or 5 hours of teaching games
• Night market dinner
• Massage

And before I realized it, it was already time to go home. I sadly did not get a chance to explore Bangkok beyond the centralwOrld area, but I’m already itching to be back.

Thank you to the event organizers, the participating publishers, and the players who took time to stop by and take a look at our booth.

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Taiwan Original Boardgame Expo (TOBE)
Alright, it's back to me, Matthew, now! We visited the Taiwan Original Boardgame Expo again this year, heading to Taiwan on Thursday, September 24th and leaving on the 28th. We have Tokyo Game Market and SPIEL Essen coming up in October, so we sadly couldn’t spend too much time out of the office for this trip.

Thursday, September 24th:

Just like last year, we sent three people: Sho Shirasaka (our company President), Jacek Mackiewicz (our Global Development team lead), and me!

We left Japan very early in the morning - I had to ride the first train (leaving around 4 am) to even get to Narita Airport by the agreed-upon time. For anyone considering staying in Tokyo, Haneda Airport is typically closer to most areas of the city. Narita Airport is actually in the neighboring prefecture, Chiba, so you’ll have to travel even farther if you want to take advantage of its often cheaper fares. Tokyo Game Market is also ironically hosted in Chiba, not Tokyo, though it is roughly the same distance from both airports… (Just a little tidbit for anyone hoping to come to Tokyo Game Market in the future!)

After our flight, we headed straight to the venue - the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park. Some of you may remember this name, as it is the same venue as last year! After grabbing lunch nearby, we emptied our suitcases of our games and other supplies and got to work setting up the booth.

For some reason the tape we brought with us had poor compatibility with the banners, so we were lucky enough to be able to borrow some strong double-sided tape from fellow publisher Moaideas Game Design. Thank you so much!

After that, we headed back to our hotel where we rested up in preparation for day 1 of the expo.

Friday, September 25th:
Friday, the 25th was the first day of the expo itself. We learned that Friday–Monday were all holidays in Taiwan, so we weren’t sure how many people would end up coming to the expo on each day. Friday was the busiest day for our booth - we had The Slasher and Two Rooms out for playtesting and sold a solid number of copies of each. To represent our online store, we also brought some stock of a very popular Japanese indie game, Fusion!! Cross Golems.


Though The Slasher is a very challenging game, many players were able to make it out alive playing the introductory easy mode! We had several pairs where at least one person only had 1 health remaining upon clearing the game.


That night, we also participated in a wonderful dinner event for attending exhibitors/publishers. We had a blast talking about all kinds of things, from games to whether or not I was born yet when certain people at the table first started playing DND. (Spoiler: it turns out I was not!)

Saturday, September 26th:

Moving into the next day of the event, we were very grateful to have received an extra shelf from Taiwanese publisher and distributor Dog Bark Train (D.B.T.). We moved all of our game stock to this side shelf and expanded our playtesting area from one to two tables.


The Slasher was as popular as ever - we got many comments from people who playtested The Slasher that they bought FIXER, another one of our trick-takers, at last year’s TOBE and that they were still enjoying it! The Slasher and FIXER were both worked by Oike Takaaki (designer name Takaaki Iida), so it was really nice to be able to come back to Japan and tell him he has a growing fanbase in Taiwan!


After the event, Shirasaka-san and I went to a Taiwanese beef noodle soup place. The tea and beer were fantastic, and the beef noodle soup was exactly what I had been looking for in Taiwan.

The clock and strainer ambience was a nice touch.


Awaiting my beef noodle soup. (The photo ended up looking kind of ominous...)

Sunday, September 27th:

The final day of the expo wrapped up with a lot of YUBIBO and Two Rooms (see Nina, the win condition of Two Rooms, getting taken out in the above image) playtests. Many people told us that they remembered YUBIBO from last year, and that they still play their copy! YUBIBO tends to do well as expos, so though this wasn’t a surprise to me, I was still very glad to hear it!


After packing up, we were able to go to dinner with Taiwanese publisher Play With Us Design. Everything on the menu had tea infused into it in some way, so I was more than happy to explore the offerings and dig in! Above is a collage of photos from the dinner. (One of my favorite things all night was actually the fried tea leaves with tea salt - yes, tea powdered and mixed into salt! The braised pork ribs were also really delicious.)

After eating dinner, Shirasaka-san and I went out and explored a Taiwanese night market. Definitely a different experience from the Shotengai (shopping streets) in Japan - stalls were quite close together and there were tons of people out - even at nearly midnight! Unfortunately, because I had just eaten a very large dinner, I was unable to partake in the night market’s offerings…though I really wanted to! (Also sadly forgot to take pictures - all I have are videos of me talking the whole time...)

Monday, September 28th:
The next day we headed back to Japan relatively early in the day - aside from one last milk tea in the airport, we weren’t able to do any sightseeing. Overall, we had a great time interacting with people at the expo and enjoying the food and culture of Taiwan! A huge thank as well to all the people who worked to make it happen. It was too short, but maybe we can make time to do a little more travelling around Taiwan itself next year!

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Thank you all so much for reading over our expo recaps! This October, we have Tokyo Game Market and SPIEL Essen, so brace yourselves for our event recaps for those massive expos as well! They're sure to bring an influx of Japanese indie games into our store. Have a great October!