by Julius Hsu

I have been a board game lover since I was a kid, and I enjoy making board games. I am a huge fan of card games and have always wanted to create a board game that utilizes cards for strategic purposes.

After working several years in New Zealand and Taiwan, I decided to move to Japan because I am a huge fan of the Sengoku period, samurai, and ninja. Before my departure to Japan, I had some spare time, so I started brainstorming for fun, thinking up a two-player area control game with meeples, cards, and a map to play on.

This eventually became Cube War, a Sengoku period-themed area-control game in which you can play samurai and ninja cards every turn to take over the world.

Cube War featured wooden blocks of red and blue as meeples for both sides, with vector art illustrated samurai and ninja for the strategy cards. The battles took place on a poker card-sized map for the supremacy of the Sengoku period.

When I started designing Cube War, I had to take into account how many cards there would be in total, how many meeples each player should start with, and what kind of mechanisms I should have on the cards. At first, I started with something like Risk in which you would place meeples on the map depending on how many areas you conquered. The map that I designed for battles is a lot smaller than Risk, however, so instead I decided to emphasize the cards themselves and use action points.


After several iterations, Cube War felt fun to play, so I started taking trains to visit friends to playtest the game. The feedback from my friends was not all positive, but they felt the game was fun and had potential.

After about a month of testing and tuning, I felt like the game was balanced and fun, so I decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign for Cube War, which caught the attention of Daniel from Board Game Circus, and this event eventually changed my life and made my dream of publishing a board game come true.


Through discussions with Daniel, we decided to walk a different path from Cube War and change it to a fantasy theme, replacing samurai and ninja with bright and colorful animals, each with their own background story.

Board Game Circus released the design in early 2024 as Lost Lights, a two-player strategic area control game with wonderful illustrations by Folko Streese.


I cannot express how touched I felt when I saw the final version of the game with amazing artwork, an excellent and easy-to-understand rulebook, cute customised meeples, and a large, well-illustrated map to battle on.

UK publisher Dranda Games will debut an English-language version of the game — Lost Lumina — at SPIEL Essen 25, and I am now eagerly awaiting this version so that I can grab a copy myself!

Julius Hsu