JELLY JELLY GAMES at TOBE 2025: Recap
Hello, everyone! It’s Matthew Moller from JELLY JELLY INTL. A little over a week ago, we sent three members of JELLY JELLY GAMES to the 2025 Taiwan Original Board Game Expo (TOBE) - myself, our CEO, and the leader of our Global Development team, Jacek. You may know him from some of the JELLY JELLY GAMES English how-to-play videos.
TOBE had at least 81 participating companies this year; I was certainly impressed with how well everything was organized and want to say thank you in advance to everyone who worked hard to make this happen. This article summarizes our trip and how the expo went for us—with pictures!
We all made our way to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport separately, met up in the departure lobby, and arrived in Taiwan with as many games as our suitcases could carry! (Probably too many, actually, as we went over the weight limit…) We eventually got to our hotel where we discussed our plans for the next five days: setup day, the three expo days, and departure day. Above is the view from our hotel in Taipei.
The welcome sign for TOBE 2025!
On setup day, we headed to the venue—some warehouses at the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park—to set up our booth. The warehouses used to be part of a tobacco factory, but were eventually closed, refurbished, and repurposed as a venue for creative exhibitions. While TOBE 2025 (which was in warehouses 4 and 5) was going on, the other warehouses around us were busy hosting different events. Since there was also a large mall nearby (shown behind the warehouses below), getting our hands on food and drinks when we needed them was a cinch.
The warehouses in front of the mall—a stark contrast, but I feel like they fit well together. (This was actually taken on the second day of the event, but it's the best picture I’ve got of the warehouses with the mall!)
Here are the warehouses from an angle with less in the background on setup day. Don’t let the cloud cover fool you; it was incredibly hot and humid outside.
The entrance to warehouse 5, where our booth was, definitely screamed “repurposed warehouse!” I loved it. I was initially worried about whether being towards the very back of the second warehouse would limit the number of people who came to our booth, but these worries turned out to be unfounded.
The warehouses we used appeared to have been newly redone on the inside. We were one of the first groups to get there for setup, so I was able to take some pictures of warehouse 5 while it was still practically empty (above)! This also gave me some time to look at the cool wooden crossbeams supporting the roof.
We went ahead and set up our banners (before and after, above), but decided to set all of our games out on the morning of the event. We then used the subway to return home.
Taiwan’s subway system—apparently you can’t drink anything on the subway. This is different from Japan, where it’s only food that isn’t allowed, so we had to be careful to hold our milk tea (yes, of course we were drinking it!) away from our faces so as to not accidentally commit cultural faux pas out of habit!
Then began the first of three expo days. All of them kind of blended together in my head afterwards because I spent basically the whole time explaining games, but I do have some notable highlights for each day.
Day 1 marked my first time manning a booth at an expo, but since I’ve worked at a JELLY JELLY CAFE location explaining games to customers for years at this point, I didn’t feel out of my element at all. The only difference was that I finally had a chance to actually explain games in my native language, English! As far as how things went, we sold around half of our YUBIBO and a third of our FIXER stock on day 1. Given that the expo was held over three days, and that day 1 was a Friday (so not everyone could even come because of work and school), this was a more than satisfactory result.
YUBIBO is very visually striking—our mannequin hand display, visible in the right corner of the above photo, drew in lots of customers. Because of how quick the game is and the large player count it supports, it was easy to invite groups of people (often separate event-goers) to play all at once. A very handy list of qualities for expos.
Playing YUBIBO, our best seller at this particular event, with our CEO and an event-goer! YUBIBO is a great game for expos because though the objective is easy to understand in concept, it is challenging in practice—a cooperative game isn’t worth it if it’s easy to clear… (In my opinion!)
Another picture of people playing at our booth from day 1—for clarification purposes, permission to use photos for social media/article purposes was obtained for all close-up shots of people that might be recognizable.
By day 2 of the event, we were feeling good about how things went on day 1, and were keenly aware of the popularity of White Runner, which was selling well given the fact that YUBIBO and FIXER had dedicated banners.
People playing at our booth on day 2: one group is playing White Runner (available on our INTL store, hint, hint!) while another plays YUBIBO in the back. Day 2 saw our regular stock of YUBIBO and White Runner sell out. I appreciated the chance to discuss the development of White Runner with customers—the game is fairly simple, but there are many elements of cross-country skiing actually built-in. The dynamic card selection/movement order are particularly notable for me; feel free to check the Game Overview on the product page if you want a more in-depth explanation. The art style was, of course, a bit hit!
I was able to make my way over to warehouse 4 at some point, where I noticed that the back of the welcome poster for this building had been signed by a ton of people! There were plenty of cat drawings as well. Looking at this wall made me think about ancient cave paintings and scribbles in the margins of century+ year old books—people really do love doodling and writing their names on things, don’t they? I thought it was a great way to get participants to feel involved in the event, along with the sticker system (collecting stickers from various booths in order to get a prize). I’m not totally sure about the specifics of the system, since I was just giving the stickers out, but we did end up running out multiple times. It got to the point where we gave up and started signing the sticker space on peoples’ event maps instead.
Another view from inside warehouse 4.
By the end of day 2, we were basically down to our demo copies of YUBIBO, FIXER, and White Runner, which all promptly sold out at the beginning of day 3 (yes, even the demo copies!).
After YUBIBO and FIXER fully sold out, we focused more on some of our smaller games that tend to get overlooked at expos: Bahamut Dispute, Charge & Spark, and the game pictured above, Monster Biotope, a cooperative independent puzzle game recently added to the INTL store. Of the groups that attempted it, only one was successful. I happened to be explaining a different game when they were victorious, and so was unable to get a picture. Unfortunate!
Pictured above is one of our Taiwanese part-time staff members who helped us cross the language barrier introducing Bahamut Dispute to a booth visitor. We wouldn’t have been able to get through these three days as smoothly without their help, and I’m glad we got to work together. They also showed us some delicious food spots (more on that at the end). Keen-eyed readers may notice that our display table has changed—YUBIBO and FIXER are effectively gone, so the focus has shifted to small box games!
Another picture of the Monster Biotope group as they inch towards victory!
By the end of the expo we were all tired, but glad that we went. Our suitcases were considerably lighter on the way back to the hotel after cleaning up: a truly great feeling! On the next day, we all headed to the airport and finally home to Japan with a sense of satisfaction.
I would be remiss to simply end the recap of our Taiwan trip here with no mention of the food, but I wanted to keep the focus mainly on the expo in the main body of the piece. Here is a collage of some of the tasty grub we had:
Above, we have a variety of different foods: a type of tantanmen, a couple types of beef noodle soup, as well as some delicious pork belly slow cooked in a sweet and savory broth. Coming from Japan, some of the flavors felt familiar, but everything was definitely unique. Taiwanese tantanmen (dan dan mian) is actually quite different from that sold in Japan—while it tends to be brothier in Japan, in Taiwan it felt more like dry noodles with a thick sauce. Both are good, and I’m glad I get to live in a world where they both exist. The top middle picture of the collage is a Taiwanese dessert called douhua—we got ours cold (literally ice cold, actually), and it was filled with various additional toppings aside from just the sweet tofu base. It was very different from what we're used to, but refreshing after a hot and humid day.
We also had some mooncakes that we received as a gift from one of our part-time staff members! I’m really happy we got to have some during our time in Taiwan; apparently we came during just the right time for them.
Alright, that should be plenty about our trip to Taiwan and our participation in the Taiwan Original Boardgame Expo 2025! I could go on forever, truly, but I don’t want this recap getting way too long. Thank you all so much for reading, and we hope to see you at an expo in the future!
- Matthew Moller, JELLY JELLY INTL