The past weekend was the Dice N Dine event at Lalaport, Kuala Lumpur, organised by The Magic Rain. It was not entirely a boardgame event. There were art booths and some cosplaying too. Surprisingly not many local game designers set up booths this time. Normally we have more. The venue is the Level 4 food court. The Dice N Dine concept is to run smallish events at food courts, because there will be foot traffic (I almost typed "food traffic"), and the event itself will also attract some foot traffic. Everybody wins.
This being a smallish event, I didn't have high expectations about game sales. However my sales turned out okay, better than I expected. My main reason for attending these events is to promote boardgames as a whole. These are opportunities to let the public get to know about modern boardgames. The Malaysian boardgame industry still needs to do much to grow public awareness and to grow the market.
Since many of my local designer friends couldn't make it to this event, I brought their games along to sell. Nasi Lemak is doing well. The Faculty of Fun team has done a great job developing and marketing their game. At the event, many people who visited my booth already knew about Nasi Lemak. They have either already played it before, or they have seen it somewhere else. It is often the first game visitors pick up to check out among all these titles. There is a lot I can learn from the success of Nasi Lemak. Faculty of Fun has just released their second game Roti Canai.
I'm ready. Let's play!
This group of IIUM students had much fun with Pinocchio.
I was unwell a few days before the event. I had a slight fever and a sore throat. Thankfully the fever was gone by the time of the event, but my sore throat hadn't fully recovered. My booth was generally busy on Saturday. I was occupied most of the day teaching games. By mid afternoon I started to lose my voice. The event was 11am to 9pm. By the end of the day I almost completely lost my voice. I had a big problem now. How was I (well, my throat) going to last another full day? So I made this little sign board above. My thinking was if I couldn't speak at all, or if I wanted to rest my voice, I'd ask visitors to scan the QR codes to watch how-to-play videos themselves. Self-service. In the end, that didn't happen. I still did all the game teaching on Sunday. In a terrible voice. The crowd was smaller on Sunday. It feels weird to say that it's a good thing, but it was less taxing on my throat.
They placed me at the first spot, which was nice. It was a visible spot.
The Malaysia Boardgame Show had a booth too, to promote the event, which is happening on 18-19 April 2026.
The game which sold best at the event was Pinocchio. That surprised me a little. Out of four of my published game titles, the one which is selling best in Malaysia is Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. I had prepare the most copies of Ali Baba. I think Pinocchio did well partly because of the price point. It is MYR29, and this is the kind of price that the general public thinks of as "that's not expensive". Card games like that in the boardgame hobby sell for roughly MYR60 to MYR120. Boardgamers are used to that price range, but non-gamers find this rather high. One couple who tried Pinocchio straight-away bought two copies, one to keep at home and the other to bring to the office to play with colleagues. They expected the office copy to suffer much wear-and-tear, and they wanted one longer lasting copy for themselves.
One other thing that made me happy at the event was when two gamer guys sat down to try Dancing Queen and then they each bought a copy. This doesn't often happen. Usually when a few friends visit my booth together and one of them buys a game, the others will think since you have a copy, I can also borrow it from you when I feel like playing it. When these two guys both liked my game enough to want a copy in their own collections, that made me proud and happy.
I had a visitor from the Philippines. She is a gamer. She asked whether I would be at the Asian Board Games Festival in Manila in May this year. I said yes. If she knew about the ABGF, she must be a gamer. I'm looking forward to that event. I have never exhibited in the Philippines before. I'm keen to see whether my games will do well there.
I am thankful several of my friends who knew I was at the event came to visit. This photo above was taken by Chung and Moh Yen. Proof that I was working hard. Teacher Teh came to visit. Eva came to visit, and even bought me some lozenges when she saw (well, heard) the condition of my throat.
Kuplay is a Malaysian online boardgame retailer founded just a few years ago and is doing well. Ji Li (right) regularly took stock from me, so Cili Padi Games is grateful to him for supporting local designs. At this particular game of Dancing Queen, I the veteran lost to both of them playing as a team. They were new to the game, but certainly not new to boardgames. I guess I can't beat dual core!
(photo courtesy of The Magic Rain)
My wife Michelle dropped me off and picked me up both days, so that I didn't need to park my car there the whole day. I'm grateful for that, and that she supports me in doing crazy stuff like this - I was not feeling well, and I was still going out for full days doing something that was tiring and not very profitable. When she picked me up in the evening, she came early and accompanied me for a while at my booth. She saw how players laughed and had fun with my games, and she understood the value and the purpose behind me doing all this mad stuff.
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