Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall’s second serving expands the immigrant experience
The RPG about a haunted family restaurant believes food and monsters bind many children of two countries.
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When Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall first launched in 2020, its premise of baking Chinese immigrant trauma and familial tensions into a collaborative horror game was evocative and compelling. Here was this tabletop RPG-in-a-box with gorgeous cover art from Kwanchai Moriya that threw its players into the roles of family members trying to survive the night as their restaurant is haunted by the eponymous Jiangshi, commonly known as the Chinese hopping vampire.
Now, co-creators and tabletop veterans Banana Chan and Sen-Foong Lim have returned (alongside publisher Wet Ink Games) to fund a second printing with the goal of addressing a plate full of layout tweaks and copy errors while also cutting down on the overall cost. Tabletop games have not suddenly transformed into a more affordable hobby over the intervening four years, and the pair have reportedly upturned every rock in search of methods to balance quality and cost. Don’t expect any rules changes or new systems to pop up—Lim explicitly clarified that Jiangshi is not due for a second edition quite yet.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the original and this second trip to the buffet table comes from a book full of new scenarios written by tabletop talent hailing from a wide variety of immigrant backgrounds. Lim and Chan talked long about the ubiquity of food and monsters (cultural or literal) within the experience of people who came to the US from abroad, bringing with them customs, languages, and a way of life that isn’t always so easily accepted by Americans.
The creators told Rascal in an interview that Jiangshi has always resonated with immigrants beyond their own Chinese-American and Chinese-Canadian lives, and they wanted the chance to adapt their RPG to fit as many as possible. Maybe its Korean fried chicken or South American cuisine instead of Chinese recipes adapted for West Coast palettes, and perhaps the hopping demon’s voracious, bottomless appetite lives in some other twisted form, but, as Lim said, “food plus monsters equals fun.”
This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
