Recently my son was off at the UK Games Expo in Birmingham and came back with a selection of interesting boardgames.
Last night we dug one of these out and gave it a go. It's 108 Outlaws from Origame and is a very abstracted card game based loosely on the Chinese story 'Outlaws of the Marsh', better known to folk of a certain age as The Water Margin...
I have pretty good memories of watching this with my dad and remember him being particularly amused when we watched it in a bar on a Spanish holiday... a Japanese tv version of a Chinese story, dubbed into German, with Spanish subtitles!
The deck consists of (not surprisingly) 108 Outlaws consisting of Earthly Fiends and more powerful Heavenly Stars, because these outlaws are actually reincarnated Demons. Each card has different roles (infantry, cavalry, reconnaissance etc) and unique powers and the aim is to score victory points at the end of the game (which happens when one player has 12 cards in play).
The Heavenly stars cards score victory points and these can also be earned by undertaking a campaign, essentially matching symbols on the Campaign card to those on your cards in play.
It sounds a bit complicated but is actually very simple and easy to pick up. All the info is on the cards, albeit in some very abstracted symbols, and the whole game only takes about 30-40 minutes to play. If you're smart (like my son) its possible to engine-build sequences of actions to enable multiple actions each turn.
It's a neat little game and would be ideal for travelling.
