The first time I played a board game in China was in 1995. I was crashing at a friends house in Xiamen. It was during the Labor Day holiday. I was sitting on my friend’s wood sofa watching TV. (I distinctly remember that it was a movie staring the actor from Highlander, Christopher Lambert, where in he played sort of a brain-washed bomber/assassin). I was drinking beer and was a little drunk. My friend’s girlfriend and her friends set up a Monopoly set and started playing. As I was watching my show while the girlfriend and her friends played the most friendly game of Monopoly I ever saw. Their game went on for about an hour without anyone winning. No one was bargaining. I politely asked them if they would mind if I played with them and we start the game over. They agreed.

I sat down with them and started to play. By about 30 minutes into the game, they were cursing at each other, using the Chinese words for mother f**ker repeatedly. I just did my thing. “What!? If you trade him Baltic and New York for Kentucky and a railroad, he will win. Do you really want him to win? Because if that’s what you want, its OK.”

I lost that game because of bad rolls at the beginning. I’m not so into Monopoly because the game tends to be too luck-based. I am likely to win most games in which luck is not the primary element. But it was a very fun game. I think my friends had fun too. However, I don’t think Monopoly is an ideal board game for Chinese people. I don’t think that they actually like the idea of screwing over their friends through bargaining and property speculation. Screwing over strangers is OK though. And I think high-drama games can be a little too intense for Chinese people to really enjoy.

Chinese people like hexie-hemu (和谐和睦 ) This means basically that everyone should just get along. It connotes that its not good to “rock the boat”. It connotes that it is not so good to stand-out. Its not good to cause trouble. My old boss talks about hexie-hemu in very derogatory terms. “No one wants to confront this asshole trouble-maker. They just want hexie-hemu.” My last boss is a very un-harmonious man… like myself.

Chinese people do play traditional PK games; Chess and Weiqi (“Go” to Americans). However, “modern” PK games – like “Magic: The Gathering” – have done poorly in China. Our Chinese distributors tell us that when talking about “hobby” games and “modern” games, they tend to like games with these characteristics:
- No chance of getting knocked out of the game early
- Opportunity for multiple people to win at the same time, possibly through sanctioned alliances
- Flexible player limit so a group of 5+ people can play the game at the same time
- Not a whole lot of bloody conflict; less drama
- Chinese people MUST be familiar with the background story of the game.

Funny thing is, this describes most of the team-building games I developed and/or ran for corporate teams while I was a consultant. Always win-win games. Many people or few could play. And people were often loath to confront the group-leaders who didn’t perform well.

As anyone who has followed this site (www.taikongren.net … not the family blog) for a while can tell, the site sort of died.  And that is in part because I am no longer a consultant.

Basically, I like being a consultant in China.  I like learning about business and sharing what I learn with my customers.  I like problem-solving my customer’s organizational development problems.  However, after much reflection, I came to the obvious conclusion that I’m not necessarily very suited to be a management consultant.  My communication style tends to be direct and somewhat aggressive, which puts some people off.  I often take the corporate back-stabbing personally and react with extreme impatience. As a consultant, I’m often in the middle of people who want to backstab each other; thus I’m an easy intermediary target.

More importantly, to be a consultant for factory managers, I need to develop relationships with said managers.  Sometimes this works out great and leads to long-ish relationships which benefit both my clients and myself.   However, even if I develop a great relationship with a General Manager of a company or factory, often he/she will move on to another position outside of China.  Then the replacement manager will not necessarily like me.  This happened at my last “gig” and it happened repeatedly over the last six years.  Furthermore, I really don’t like to form relationships for the sake of doing business; I like forming relationships because I generally like someone.  Often the people I like- who also like me- have some personality, temperament, or values similarities to myself.  This means they don’t always last long in any given corporate environment.

So I have *mostly* left the consulting business. At least, Management Consulting in China is not my main occupation at the moment.

Now I’m the CEO of my EOS (www.eos-sama.com), a small publisher which publishes table-top hobby games and table-top Role Playing Games.

I started at EOS last September.  My partner and friend is the founder of the company, Mr. Syn Chen. (below is his picture…he hates that picture). 

He started EOS about eight years ago.  He published two or three role-playing game books, a card-based game, and a few supplements.  Then stuff happened to him (military service, marriage, divorce, video games, etc) and the company died for two years.

This year, we are going to publish a Role Playing Game (RPG) book and board game in May (Nobilis and Trail of the Brotherhood), and an RPG (Legends of the Wulin) and a Nobilis supplement book in August. That’s all for the USA market.  If everything else goes right, we will also be publishing an Wuxia-genre card-based game in Hong Kong and Taiwan in July and September, followed by Mainland publication in November.  And we hope to publish a 5 part graphic novel set and a third RPG book this year too.

Next year, it is my hope to publish Japanese language versions of many of our products.  Japan is the second biggest market for RPG and boxed games.  And once in Japan, we can start also selling special hobby toys, like paintable Wuxia-action figurines modeled after Japanese adult video star, wearing school-girl costumes.

My long-term goal is to introduce RPG games to China.  Because I think Chinese young people could use this a tool to increase their creativity.

On the other hand, everything might fail, in which case, I would have blown the savings from my last year of work as a consultant, and I will have no career.  As I write this sentence, I start getting pains in my stomach.  Fortunately, I have several excellent (and one chewable) antacid medications available.

As for my former business blog site (www.taikongren.net) … I’m thinking about keeping it going, but start blogging more about the developing “game” market in China.  There really is no such thing at the moment… Its not a Chinese cultural norm to play Monopoly with the parents (although Wei-Qi / Go is pretty big).  But there are some things happening here.  And if I start blogging about this now, I guess my blog would be the first English-language blog about this market and industry.

That’s all for now.  One blog has come to an end.  A new blog at the same URL will begin.  And for those of you reading this on the Covners’-in-Asia family blog (www.taikongren.net/hard-boiled-shanghai/) … life goes on.  Miss you all.

Well, I should answer these questions before I start posting.  Ha ha!  I think I’m just going to jump into the pool and see how long I can swim for.