Oink Games are best known for their small box games. Tiger & Dragon is in a much bigger box (around four times the size of most other Oink games) but it's still very compact in comparison with most other publisher's games. The reason for its larger size is that the key components in Tiger & Dragon are chunky Mah Jong-style tiles.
The tiles in Tiger & Dragon are numbered 1 to 8 - the odd numbers in red and the even numbers in blue - and the number of tiles of each number correspond to the number itself (ie: there's just one 1 tile, two 2 tiles etc). In addition there is a red dragon tile and a blue tiger tile. The 2-5 players each have a hand of tiles and they are competing to be the first to get rid of all their tiles. The first player leads a tile to represent their 'attack'. Other players can pass or they can defend, but to defend you must exactly match the attack tile. The Tiger or Dragon tile can be played to defend against a tile of the matching colour. If no-one is able to or chooses to defend, then the player who led with the attack gets to choose any one of their other tiles to place face down on their board. That tile will score them a bonus point if they win the round (ie: if they are the player to shed all their tiles).
There's more because the game incorporates a set of 10 cards that set out various tweaks to the rules and different rewards for winning. For example, on the Dojo card, recommended for players' first game, you get 4 points (plus any bonuses) if you win the round with a 7 or 8 as your last tile. The idea is that players play to be the first to reach 10 points.
Tiger & Dragon is designed by Hashimoto Atsushi, with art by Roe Komatsuzaki and Jun Sasaki, and it's based on the traditional Japanese team game Goita. You can play Tiger & Dragon too as a 2 vs 2 team game. However you play, Tiger & Dragon plays quickly: our games at Board's Eye View have rarely run to more than 15-20 minutes. The chunky tiles are pleasing to use and there's more to the game than might be immediately apparent because, unlike trick-taking card games where players are obliged to play if they can, there's scope in this game for bluff and misdirection: if I fail to play a tile in defence is that because I don't have a tile with that number or is that a feint on my part? In a multiplayer game I may hold back in the expectation that another player will defend, so exhausting defence tiles that might be played against my own subsequent attack... If an opponent plays a 2 and I have the other 2, I may prefer to pass and allow them to win the attack knowing that my 2 is subsequently guaranteed to be a winning attack, unless of course an opponent is holding the Tiger tile...