1-2-3-4-5 I Love Coup

The card game 1-2-3-4-5 I Love Coup, from Thai game designers Vanta Studio, was released in 2022, and an expansion pack—the Choc Mint Edition—was added last year. The game is a satire of Thai politics since the 2014 coup, and the Choc Mint update features cards based on the 2023 election and its aftermath. The box art shows the military comandeering Democracy Monument and using it as a tank.

The title is a pun on the Bottom Blues song 12345 I Love You, which also inspired the student protest slogan ‘12345 ai hia Tu’. (Ai hia is a strong insult, and Tu is coup leader Prayut Chan-o-cha’s nickname.) The game’s logo, 1•2•III•4•5 I♥COUP, uses Roman numerals for the number ‘3’, in a reference to the three-finger salute adopted by the protest movement.

Satirical Games

There are a few other games based on Thai politics, including the smartphone game Yingluck vs Zombies and the ThaiFight app. Yingluck vs Zombies, launched in 2014, features former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra fending off zombie versions of Suthep Thaugsuban and Abhisit Vejjajiva, in a zombified recreation of the People’s Democratic Reform Committee protests. ThaiFight, developed by Supasheep Srijumnong in 2013, is a fighting game with characters based on Thai politicians and celebrities.

There are also two Thai games, designed to be downloaded and printed out, that make visual reference to specific political events: the board game Coconut Empire, created by Wipaphan Wongsawang in 2018, and the card game Bangkok’s Big Brother (เราจะทำตามสัญญา), released by iLaw in 2016. The downloadable version of Coconut Empire, for example, included symbols such as a folding chair, in reference to the Neal Ulevich photograph of the 6th October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University. But the later commercial release of the game was more generic in its satire.

The game that most resembles 1-2-3-4-5 I Love Coup is Thai Democracy Timeline Game, an online game released by Elect aimed at raising awareness of the democratic process prior to the 2019 election. Promotional copies of a card-game version of Thai Democracy Timeline Game were sent to various institutions, and an updated edition was released before last year’s election. Another card game, Political Mess (การเมืองจิ๋วๆ), was released in 2020 by Wise Box.

Banned Games

Ironically, the Bulgarian video game Tropico 5—in which a fictional coup takes place—was banned in Thailand just a few months after the 2014 Thai coup. Fight of Gods, a Taiwanese video game in which players fight against characters based on religious figures including Buddha, was banned in Thailand in 2017.

More recently, promotional copies of the Thai card game Patani Colonial Territory were seized by police in Yala province on 28th November 2022, and the game’s public release was subsequently cancelled by its developer, Chachiluk. Patani Colonial Territory was designed as an educational tool, to provoke discussion about the contested history of the Patani region.