Wouter & Ymke 
Peranakan: Tiles and Tactics is a tile-laying game inspired by Chinese Peranakan culture, which developed through the blending of Chinese traditions with those of the Malay-Indonesian archipelago. Designed and illustrated by Eugene Lim in Singapore, it focuses mainly on decorative Peranakan tiles and Nyonya kueh, traditional sweet treats. Nyonyas and Babas, traditional titles for women and men in Chinese Peranakan communities, appear as wooden figures collecting those sweets from the mosaic you create.
Everyone builds that mosaic together. You’re adding colourful tiles to the same board and trying to make useful patterns around your figures, knowing that whatever you place may also be exactly what somebody else was waiting for. It looks rather friendly on the table. Our intentions towards each other’s mosaics weren’t always quite as friendly.
If you’re heading to Spiel Essen ’26, Peranakan: Tiles and Tactics will be available at the Nekuma Studio booth in Hall 5, booth K415.
👥 2-5 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designer: Eugene Lim
🎨 Artwork: Eugene Lim
🏢 Publisher: Genie Games Co (review copy provided by Nekuma Studio)
Gameplay Overview
The aim is to collect complete sets of kueh. There are four different types, and a set contains one of each. The player with the most complete sets at the end wins.
Each turn starts by choosing one of five available tiles. Four sit in a row beside the deck, with the fifth being the top tile of the deck itself. Their positions are linked to the kueh supplies, so taking a tile also gives you one corresponding sweet. Choosing the tile furthest from the deck lets you take any available type. Your tile then goes onto the communal board, after which the remaining tiles slide along and the display is replenished.
After placing a tile, you may put one of your Nyonyas or Babas on it. A Nyonya collects once both the horizontal and vertical lines crossing her position have been completely filled. She takes the kueh shown on tiles in those lines that match the pattern beneath her. A Baba instead waits until all eight spaces surrounding him are occupied, then collects from matching tiles around his position. Rainbow symbols let you choose any available kueh.
Once a figure has collected, it’s removed from the game, but the tiles remain and can contribute to other figures later. If one of the kueh supplies is already empty when a figure collects, you simply miss out on that particular type.
Tiles can also be stacked. You may cover an existing tile, replacing its pattern and changing what any figure standing there will use when collecting. A figure already on the space stays there, and you can add another figure to the newly placed tile. A space can only be stacked once.
The game ends when the deck runs out, all four kueh supplies are empty, or every player’s figures have collected. Players count their complete sets, with the total number of individual kueh used as the tiebreaker.
Artwork & Components
Peranakan is very colourful, with deep blues, greens, pinks, purples and golds covering the box, playmat and tiles. Its four patterns have their own meanings. The mirrored peacocks represent love, the ceramics home, the butterflies beauty and the goldfish abundance. I particularly like the peacock tiles, where the two birds face each other and almost form a heart. The butterfly design also draws from kasut manek, traditional beaded slippers.
The board is a neoprene playmat with a batik-inspired floral design rather than a folding cardboard board. On top of it go forty thick cardboard tiles, ten of each pattern. The wooden Nyonyas and Babas have printed clothing details and are much easier to spot among all those patterns than standard meeples would have been.
The cardboard kueh tokens are based on actual sweets, including Kueh Bahulu, Ang Ku Kueh, Ondeh Ondeh and Tutu Kueh, with the rainbow symbol inspired by Rainbow Lapis. I like that they’re illustrated as the sweets rather than reduced to four coloured resources. They also made me want actual kueh, which the box rather inconsiderately doesn’t include.
There is a practical downside to the amount of decoration. A developed board contains several patterns, figures and plenty of small kueh symbols, and checking a Nyonya’s two lines can involve leaning across the table to see what’s actually there. We never struggled to tell the four patterns apart, but the smaller symbols aren’t always as easy to read.
Our Experience
Peranakan was easy for us to get into. During our first game, most of our attention went towards our own figures. If a Nyonya needed another peacock in her row, we’d look for one. If a Baba was nearly surrounded, we’d try to fill the remaining spaces. We soon had enough figures close together that looking at only our own plans stopped being particularly sensible.
Placing figures in areas that other players were already developing became common. If somebody else was likely to fill those spaces anyway, there wasn’t much reason to do all the work yourself. This also produced several placements where someone put down exactly the tile they wanted, only for another player to benefit immediately. The resulting “Thanks!” tended to come from the other side of the table. We sometimes deliberately completed another player’s figure earlier than they wanted as well. Giving them some kueh now could be preferable to letting the surrounding area grow into something much better, though it also meant that player no longer had to worry about finishing it.
We were more cautious with stacking after seeing how many figures one changed pattern could affect. Covering an inconvenient tile sometimes fixed our own position, sometimes reduced what another player could collect, and occasionally did both. There were also stacks that looked useful until we noticed another figure a couple of spaces away. Because that space couldn’t be changed again afterwards, those mistakes stayed on the board for everyone to admire.
Our Nyonyas and Babas didn’t always fare much better. We had figures placed in lovely-looking positions that spent most of the game waiting for the board to cooperate. I had one that looked as though it would eventually collect a considerable pile and ended up with nothing. We became less ambitious about waiting for everything to line up perfectly, especially once the kueh supplies were getting low. A figure collecting a few useful sweets was generally preferable to one preparing for a feast that never happened.
The player count changed things noticeably. With two players, we could follow what the other person was preparing and had a reasonable idea of what might happen before our next turn. With more people, several tiles could appear before play came back around and an area we’d been watching could look completely different. There were more accidental benefits too, not just unwanted changes. I preferred the busier games with more people involved, though the two-player game gave us much more control over what we were trying to build.
Our Thoughts
One of the better decisions in Peranakan comes before a tile even reaches the board. The pattern you want and the kueh you need aren’t necessarily attached to the same position in the display. We regularly had a useful tile sitting beside a sweet we already had plenty of, while the kueh needed to complete a set came with a pattern that wasn’t doing much for us. Taking a tile also shifts what remains towards the other kueh positions, so sometimes we were looking not only at what we’d receive, but at what we’d leave for the next player. This is a small part of the turn, but it stops tile selection from being purely about finding the best pattern.
The shared board won’t suit players who want to construct something of their own and have it remain largely untouched. Other players can benefit from what you’ve built, change a pattern through stacking or simply occupy spaces in a way that doesn’t suit you. With several players, planning far ahead becomes unreliable. Later turns can take longer too, particularly with someone who wants to check every figure affected by a placement. The rules themselves remain straightforward; reading the developed board is where most of the work ends up.
We’re less keen on how abruptly some plans can disappear at the end. A figure can sit one tile away from collecting and never get there, and the final four tiles aren’t played once the deck is exhausted. The dwindling kueh supplies can cause a similar problem if the particular sweets a figure would collect have already gone. There’s enough information available to take those risks into account, but that doesn’t make an unfinished figure much less disappointing.
After several games, we did wonder how long four patterns and two types of figures would keep the game feeling different. There aren’t variable player powers or changing objectives to alter what you’re trying to do. Different arrangements, stacks and overlapping figures provide the variation, and changing the number of players has a noticeable effect. I wouldn’t expect Peranakan to reveal a substantially different game after twenty plays, though. The cultural theme is also much stronger in its presentation than in the decisions themselves. I enjoyed reading the background in the rulebook and learning what the patterns and kueh represent, but during play we’re mostly thinking about colours, positions and sweets rather than their cultural meaning.
For us, those limitations don’t get in the way of what Peranakan is trying to be. It’s easy to teach, has no written text to deal with during play, and gives everyone reasons to keep an eye on the same board. I can see it working particularly well when some people around the table play games regularly and others don’t. After several plays, we were still getting caught out by unexpectedly helpful placements, interfering with each other’s figures and watching promising Nyonyas wait rather hopefully for one final tile. We’d happily bring it out again, particularly with three or four people around the table.
📝 We received a review copy of Peranakan: Tiles and Tactics from Nekuma Studio. The game is published by Genie Games Co.
Heading to Spiel Essen ’26? You can find all our Spiel ’26 coverage here.
