Yes! Ginseng (夜市人蔘), a night market-themed card game designed by Frenchman Alban Coueffe, which aims to promote Taiwan’s street food and night market culture and help foreigners learn Chinese, has raised more than NT$1 million (US$33,394) in less than two months.
The game instantly sets itself apart from other tabletop games, as it is packaged in a simple box with a pair of bamboo chopsticks and a rubber band to make it look just like a Taiwanese lunchbox.
Players, who each assume the role of a night market food stall owner, begin each round by laying three cards drawn from a deck of “order” cards on the table, facing up.
Photo courtesy of Yes! Ginseng
Each order card portrays a Taiwanese street food or traditional dish, the names of which are spelled out in Hanyu pinyin, such as “shan-yu-yi-mian” (鱔魚意麵, eel noodles) and “you-yu-geng” (魷魚羹, squid potage). Some even feature Hoklo, also known as Taiwanese. These are spelled out in Romanized Taiwanese, such as “o-a-min-suann” (蚵仔麵線, oyster vermicelli).
Each player by default receives a hand of five cards. These might include “ingredient” cards, which are used to “process” an order according to its required ingredients as shown on the order cards and make money, or “special cards,” which activate a special effect allowing a player to “attack” their opponents and either take their ingredients or thwart their next move.
Among the special cards are “picky customer,” which causes the targeted player to forfeit half of their ingredient cards; “police,” which forces the targeted player to pay a NT$2 fine or confiscates all their ingredient cards; and “hygiene inspection,” which requires all but the user of the card to forfeit their ingredient cards and put them back into the deck.
Photo: Sean Lin, Taipei Times
Before players can earn money for having made a certain meal, they are required to read its name out loud.
The player who is the first to make the agreed sum of money wins the game.
It is best played by foreigners with their language teachers or Taiwanese friends, Coueffe said.
Coueffe, who has lived in Taiwan for 15 years, said he wanted to make a game that is uniquely Taiwanese.
He had the opportunity to see his thoughts to take shape in September last year, when the design company his wife works for launched a project to design a paper product, Coueffe said.
“Night markets are a big part of Taiwanese culture. They are one of the first places Taiwanese take their foreign friends to,” he said.
He hopes his game could help foreigners learn Chinese while having fun, Coueffe said, adding that it can also be bought as a souvenir.
The game was launched on April 16 on online fundraising platform zeczec.com with a goal of raising NT$100,000. It had raised NT$1.14 million as of press time last night.
The fundraiser is to end on Thursday next week.
Starlux Airlines, Taiwan’s newest international carrier, has announced it would apply to join the Oneworld global airline alliance before the end of next year. In an investor conference on Monday, Starlux Airlines chief executive officer Glenn Chai (翟健華) said joining the alliance would help it access Taiwan. Chai said that if accepted, Starlux would work with other airlines in the alliance on flight schedules, passenger transits and frequent flyer programs. The Oneworld alliance has 13 members, including American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific and Qantas, and serves more than 900 destinations in 170 territories. Joining Oneworld would also help boost
A new tropical storm formed late yesterday near Guam and is to approach closest to Taiwan on Thursday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. Tropical Storm Pulasan became the 14th named storm of the year at 9:25pm yesterday, the agency said. As of 8am today, it was near Guam traveling northwest at 21kph, it said. The storm’s structure is relatively loose and conditions for strengthening are limited, WeatherRisk analyst Wu Sheng-yu (吳聖宇) said on Facebook. Its path is likely to be similar to Typhoon Bebinca, which passed north of Taiwan over Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and made landfall in Shanghai this morning, he said. However, it
Taiwan's Gold Apollo Co (金阿波羅通信) said today that the pagers used in detonations in Lebanon the day before were not made by it, but by a company called BAC which has a license to use its brand. At least nine people were killed and nearly 3,000 wounded when pagers used by Hezbollah members detonated simultaneously across Lebanon yesterday. Images of destroyed pagers analyzed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo. A senior Lebanese security source told Reuters that Hezbollah had ordered 5,000 pagers from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo. "The product was not
COLD FACTS: ‘Snow skin’ mooncakes, made with a glutinous rice skin and kept at a low temperature, have relatively few calories compared with other mooncakes Traditional mooncakes are a typical treat for many Taiwanese in the lead-up to the Mid-Autumn Festival, but a Taipei-based dietitian has urged people not to eat more than one per day and not to have them every day due to their high fat and calorie content. As mooncakes contain a lot of oil and sugar, they can have negative health effects on older people and those with diabetes, said Lai Yu-han (賴俞含), a dietitian at Taipei Hospital of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. “The maximum you can have is one mooncake a day, and do not eat them every day,” Lai