Cockamania is a delightful, intertextual romp that reads at once like a personal journal, an anthropological text, a fantasy gazetteer, a hex crawl, and a recipe book. The game circulates around the event of the cockfight, but urges you to also take in the ephemera surrounding the event, the tables that produce futures leading away from the event, and the kinds of magic that seep into the seemingly mundane at all turns.
What one comes to understand is that one must know the town to know the cockfight, and one must know the cockfight to know the town. And in order to know either at all, one must grapple with the very particular kinds of landscapes, animals, and people, magically mundane, mundanely magical, and altogether just incredibly interesting without ever feeling “foreign.”
In a gaming world full of orientalist takes on Asian countries attempting to define what Asia means, BJ’s game says nothing, makes no statement, and in doing so, says so much.
This game doesn’t seek to create an Asian experience for a Western audience, but instead asks you to sit with the mundanity of a small town and it’s magical and festive happenings. It speaks only for itself, and no one else.
And in doing so, Cockamania is a great example of the kinds of games being produced by the vibrant Southeast Asian gaming community, and a stunning example of what the future of tabletop can be.