Prowl: Clans & Cunning

Prowl: Clans & Cunning is a game from Singapore, designed by Russell Wee and published by Playlogue. It is a card game set in a fantastical Japanese Warring States period. There are four factions in the game and you secretly support one of them. During the game you influence the strengths of the factions. At the end of the game, if the faction you support is the strongest, you win. 

During game setup the relative strengths of the four factions are randomly determined. Everyone draws six cards. The cards come in four suits matching the four factions. Each card is a fighter with its own power. During the game you do not draw cards. These six cards are all you have. 

Of these six cards, you start off picking one of them to become the faction you support. You place that card face-down before you, keeping it secret. Now you only have five cards left. Each turn you must play a card to perform an action. You will only have 5 actions in the whole game. There are three types of action. The basic one is playing a card and using its power. There are two parts to the card power, and you can use them in any order. You get to strengthen the faction of the card, i.e. increasing its rank. You also use the power described by the card text. These powers vary greatly, and there is a theme to each of the four factions. 

The second action type is swapping your faction card. Play your card face-down to become your new faction card, and reveal then discard the old faction card. The third action type is accusing an opponent of supporting a specific faction. When you do this, you discard a card face-up without strengthening the faction or using the card power. The opponent being accused must answer truthfully. If you guess right, you may choose to steal the king token (a tiebreaker token), or you may force your opponent to change his faction card next round. 

Throughout the game you will try to manipulate the relative strengths of the factions, hopefully making your faction the strongest. If you are able to guess your opponents' factions, it can help tremendously. It is possible that multiple players support the same faction. If you see that someone seems to be helping your faction win, chances are he's on the same side. However, there can only be one winner. This is when the competition for the king token (the tiebreaker) becomes important. One twist is, in this situation, if your shared faction is the strongest but neither of you have the king token, both of you will lose, and victory goes to the next strongest faction. If you feel confident about that opponent supporting the same faction as you, you can accuse him and force him to change his faction card. But then if he is smart, maybe he will have a card of that same faction on standby for exactly this play. 

To be honest I didn't have high expectations when I listened to the game overview. Even after reading the rules, I wasn't convinced this would be interesting. Nothing in the rules pops out to say "interesting mechanism". It all seems to be something I've seen somewhere else before. Only by sitting down to play the game I discovered how delicious it is. This is a short game, short enough to feel like a microgame. You only have 5 actions, so every action feels important. This is a compact game, as in you have few decisions to make, but there are many considerations behind each decision. There are multiple possibilities to contemplate. Even that first decision during setup is not easy - which faction to support. When you choose a card to be your faction, you are already sacrificing its strength. That's one card fewer you can use for strengthening the faction. The faction being secret is clever. You do have to be careful not to be too blatantly supporting a specific faction, because there are consequences. Or maybe you are bluffing? Or you pretend to be bluffing?

This is a card with a quirky power. You give it to a target player, and he must then discard a card. If you think deeper about this, this can be a powerful play in the second last round, potentially disrupting someone else's perfect plan. Often players will keep a strong card as the last card, so that they can make a solid final push. If you play this Untrained Acolyte on them, you not only spoil their plans, you now also know exactly what card they have in hand for the final turn. 

The cards are large, showcasing the art

I had thought Prowl would be a simple light game, but it turned out to be a compact, clever and thinky microgame. Few actions, but there are mind games and plenty of tactics to explore. 

DNP Game Design Competition finalists

Judgement Day for the Malaysia DNP game design competition was Sat 30 Aug 2025. All six of us judges assembled at Bored boardgame cafe to play and rate the nine finalists. The final results of the competition will be out on 16 Sep 2025 (Malaysia Day).  

• Awake En - Botanical Grabber (video) (rulebook)
• Lim Feng Keat - Gotong-Royong (video) (rulebook)
• Tang Hoe Ching - Malashion (video) (rulebook)
• Rasis - Rentak Wau! (video) (rulebook)
• Ray Tan - Teh Tarik Game (video) (rulebook)
• Jeixel Heng - Twin Towers (video) (rulebook)
• Jason Sondoh - Kandar Klash! (video) (rulebook)
• Anas Maghfur - Batik (video) (rulebook)
• Kenny Goh - JAM! (video) (rulebook)

All of the games are short or very short. We started at 10am, and I had expected we would be done by 4pm comfortably, including a lunch break. It turned out to be not the case. We needed to play some games multiple times to properly assess them. We also needed time to discuss and debate. It was a serious and intense affair. We challenged one another and posed sharp questions. It was a good mental workout for me, like I've played a full day of Splotter titles. It was interesting to hear different perspectives and opinions. 

One thing I observed was that some games were as good as they appeared to be based on watching the video introduction and reading the rulebook, while some were not as impressive in action as on paper. This is a limitation of our competition format. We didn't want to ask everyone to send in their prototypes, because we didn't have enough time to play every prototype. In Stage 1 of the competition we scored the game designs only based on video and rulebook, without actually having played the games themselves. This is certainly not a perfect approach. It is what is feasible and practical, and we have to accept the limitation. We mitigate the risk by having every game scored by multiple judges in Stage 1. 

One thing we might consider doing if (or maybe I should say when) we run this again next year is in Stage 1 to encourage contestants to share some or all of their print-and-play game cards. Some games have simple rules, and much of the gameplay is captured in the card powers, which are not shown through the video or rulebook, unless the designer deliberately inserts some of this information to showcase to the judges. If the card powers are submitted, we as judges can get a better idea of what the game is like. 

I notice how rulebook writing can be very difficult. We had a mixed bag. Some were done very well. Clean, clear and minimalistic. Some were frustrating and we had to spend time debating the designer's intention. We had to decide for ourselves how to interpret the rules. I have written rules myself, and I know how hard it is. It is not a surprise that some contestants have difficulties. It is more surprising that some managed to write so well. 

By the end of the day, we were quite happy with our ranking of the nine finalists. We had debates and we made adjustments after hearing different views, but ultimately all of us felt confident and proud to stand by our final ranking. 

Now that I have experienced being on the other side of a game design competition, I have learned that judging someone else's game is highly subjective. Whether a game does well in a competition is not an absolute measure of how good it is. It is only a measure of how good the panel of judges collectively think it is at the time of the competition. We the judges do our best to be objective, and to select the best game of the crop, but we know in game design there is no such thing as being 100% objective. 

Competitions are cruel, in that 99% of contestants walk away feeling disappointed. There is only one winner. Unfortunately, and this is probably an Asian culture thing, we tend to fixate on whether we win anything, and we overlook other things we gain along the way. Going through the whole game design, development and testing process and learning how to do them hands-on. Writing and rewriting the rulebook. Writing the script for a 2-minute video to make sure I present the most notable aspects of my game. Sharing my rulebook and asking others to critique it. We as judges wanted to give all contestants as much as we can, and we wrote detailed feedback and suggestions. We hope we will grow the community of boardgame designers in Malaysia, and have more and more quality designs emerge from this community. 

Here are our nine finalist games. 

Rentak Wau by Rasis is a 2-player microgame using only 18 cards. Over three rounds you want to fly your kite higher than your opponent, or you want to cut his kite down so that yours become the only kite remaining. Beware, if the wind is too strong, you might lose your kite to the wind. 

Gotong-Royong by Lim Feng Kiat has players playing cards to get as close to a specific target number as possible, but not more than that. If you go overboard, you get nothing. If you and another player achieve the same number, you clash and both get nothing. Of the remaining players, whoever is nearest to the target number wins the round. Cards can be played face-up or face-down, so you often don't know for sure what your opponents have. Cards have special powers which can modify your own total or your opponents' totals. One interesting aspect of the game is how you must conserve your cards. You don't draw cards by default. At the end of every round, you may decide to refill your hand to the standard hand size. However, whenever you do so, your hand size shrinks by one. 

Teh Tarik Game by Ray Tan is played with exactly two teams of two, and teammates sit across the table from each other. Each team has exactly two opportunities to complete a teh tarik (bubbly milk tea) in the whole game. Each card in your cup scores 1 point. However, during the game you may spill tea too, either because you are unable to play a card on your turn, or you decide not to use your teh tarik card yet. When you spill tea, each card is negative 1 point. 

Each team has one cup, and when you start making tea, cards must be played in ascending order. The nasty part of this game is you can play a card in your opponent's cup. Yes, you are potentially giving them a point, but most likely you will be messing with them and limiting their plays. Some cards allow you to change the number requirement to the opposite direction, e.g. play in descending order instead. This can help you get more cards played to your cup, and thus score more points. 

Kandar Klash! by Jason Sondoh is a real-time game and requires some spatial skills. Every round an order is revealed, and everyone tries to complete that order as quickly as possible. 

Everyone has the same set of 6 cards. You must arrange them to create the pattern shown on the order card. Ideally you do so with as few of your 6 cards as possible. If you are quick enough, you score 1 point plus 1 point per leftover card in hand. If you are too slow, you get nothing. If you are quick, but you make a mistake, you are penalised instead. 

JAM! from Kenny Goh unites all Malaysians in hating traffic jams. Everyone wants to advance, and you simultaneously choose whether to take the highway, the city road or the back alley. If others choose the same route as you do, you will clash, creating the dreaded jam. You may end up in a standstill, or you may even be forced to go backwards. This is a game about trying to guess your opponents' choices. 

Batik from Anas Maghfur is a game of pattern recognition. Cards are double sided, with one side being a batik pattern, and the other being an objective you can try to fulfil and score points for. On your turn, you normally draw a card (deciding up front whether to make it an objective or batik), or play a batik to the table. 

At any time, including on other players' turns, if one of your objectives is fulfilled, you may declare so and play that objective before you. One interesting mechanism in the game is each completed objective can be tapped once per game to give you an extra play action on your turn. This can be crucial in completing some of the high-valued objectives. 

In Malashion by Tang Hoe Ching you try to claim traditional costumes by creating a row or column of three specific materials. You always have a hand of four materials which you can use for swapping with materials on the table. There are specific rules around when the swapped card stays face-up or must be turned face-down. Turning a card face-down is important because only the row and column of that face-down card can be used to claim a costume. 

Costumes come from different ethnic groups in Malaysia. If you collect two or more of the same ethnic group, you score bonus points. 

Botanical Grabber by Awake En is a 2-player game in which one plays the human and the other the monkey. The monkey has just stolen the human's bag, and the human needs to hunt down the monkey to get it back. Side note: Haireey who is from Penang has a different take on this. When we played, he was the human and he tried to run away from me, the monkey. He said in real life that is what he would do, because the monkeys in Penang are mad, and if you lose your bag to them, just kiss that bag goodbye. I think he's just making an excuse for having lost to me. 

The game is played over 8 rounds. The human wins by catching the monkey, and the monkey wins by avoiding capture for 8 rounds. Every round, both players simultaneously play a movement card and optionally an action card. The human movement cards offer more flexibility. The human can always choose one of two directions. The monkey movement cards only point at one direction. The human's movement is resolved before the monkey's. 

Action cards are drafted before the game starts, so once you are familiar with the game, you'll know which cards your opponent has chosen. 

Twin Towers by Jeixel Heng is a 2-player cooperative game with communication restrictions. You can't discuss your cards. You build the Petronas Twin Towers and try to go as high as possible. At Tower A, cards must be played in ascending order, while at Tower B, it must be descending. You must play a card every turn, because once you fail to do so, the game will end, and you will score based whatever you have achieved so far. 

You want the two towers to be of the same height. If they are not, a penalty is applied. I needed to take this photo to show how good I was at the game. I scored 23 points, partnering with Haireey. That was the high score. The other judges were nowhere near. Haiya... what are you guys doing? 

Haireey, Buddhima, Chee Kong, Logan, Jon and I 

Sail

Sail is a two player cooperative trick taking game. The idea is you are crew of a ship and you need to sail to a destination within the time limit, while surviving the attacks of the Kraken. 

Your ship starts on the left and needs to get into the target zone on the right.

Cards come in three suits and in this game, you must follow suit if you can. You cannot discuss your cards. The cards are numbered 1 to 9 and they have icons. The result of a trick depends on the icon combination. Generally, when you win a trick the ship sails diagonally forward in your direction. If you hit the edge or an island, your movement is wasted, and you will stay where you are. 

Cards in the game

Only specific combinations have effects.

There is a small deck of cards which represent your ship health. Depending on your icon combination, you may increase the health so that you can endure more attacks from the Kraken. There are some combinations which will trigger a Kraken attack. You will lose if your ship gets destroyed. 

The face-up deck on the left with 7 cards is your ship health.

I find the game challenging. There are several scenarios and you can play this as a campaign. Before the start of a round, you exchange one card with your partner. This can be an important way to convey some information. It takes some effort to be able to play the game well. It is fun if both you and your partner have some idea what you are doing, and you are able to communicate well through card play. If you like trick-taking games, this might be your thing.

You may always examine the ship health deck and the discard pile.

This is just the beginner scenario. The more advanced ones are longer.

Imhotep

Imhotep was the Pharaoh's chancellor in ancient Egypt. He was a high priest, and most probably also a master architect. In Egyptian history, he was one of very few commoners who was deified. The game Imhotep is from Phil Walker-Harding. You play master builders working on multiple construction projects for the Pharaoh. Everyone contributes to every project, but the stones you supply are in your colour, so you can keep track of who has contributed to which part of the projects. Although you are technically working together for the same boss, ultimately there can only be one winner - whoever has scored the most points from his contributions. 

Everyone has his own warehouse, in which you can keep at most 5 stone blocks. There are only three basic actions you can perform in this game. The first one is to move three stones from the quarry to your warehouse. The second one is to move one block from your warehouse to one of the ships which has not sailed yet. Ships have different capacities. You can place your block on any available spot. There is a minimum quantity before a ship is allowed to sail. The spot in which you place your block is something you need to consider carefully. When the ship sails and arrives at a construction site, the blocks unload in a specific order, from bow to stern. The blocks are added to the structure following this order, and the location you block eventually rests determines the points you score.  

Your third possible action is to sail. You may choose any ship which has enough blocks, and you may sail it to any construction site which has not had a delivery yet this round. There are four ships and five construction sites. This means one of the construction sites will get no delivery in the current round.

The first site is actually not a construction site. It is the market where you can sell your blocks and earn special ability cards. Some are single-use special actions. Some help you score additional points at game end. The second site is for a pyramid. It must be constructed following a strict sequence. Blocks will be added to the structure in the order they arrive, and each space gives a specific number of points. The third site is for a temple. This is built like a wall. You fill the bottom layer, and once that is done you start filling the second layer. This site scores every round, based on the colours you see from above. What this means is when you start a new layer, the previous layer will gradually be covered and it will not score anymore once covered. Only the topmost blocks will score points.

The fourth site is the burial chamber. Here, you want your blocks to be connected. At the end of the game, when you have a large group of connected blocks, you will score many points. The fifth site is for obelisks. You stack your blocks into a tall pillar. At the end of the game, you score points based on who has the tallest obelisk.

The game appears simple, but behind the simple actions there are several tactical considerations. It is generally good to load your blocks onto ships, because as a general rule blocks which get delivered to sites will do you some good. However you are always a little anxious when loading a ship, because on the next player's turn maybe he will ship that block where you don't want it to go, or someone will place another block on the same ship and mess up your plan. Shipping other people's blocks can be a nasty thing to do, for example someone already has the tallest obelisk by far. Sending more of his blocks there will just be a waste. Similarly if you are far behind in obelisks, sending more of your blocks won't help either, so that would be a waste too. In this game you will be constantly evaluating the possibilities of which ship might go where and the order the blocks would get unloaded. 

Sailing is the action which makes you feel the most in control. You get to decide which ship to sail, and to which site. If you are doing well at a particular site and don't want others to mess with you, you can send a ship there which has only your blocks, or few of others blocks, so that your position is not compromised. It is tempting to do sailing because of that feeling of power. However, you can't just sail all the time. If you are not loading your blocks and they are are not being delivered, you won't score points. 

The game mechanisms are simple, but they create many interesting tactical dilemmas. Which ship should you load your block to? And to which spot on the ship? This is an open information game. That means when you plan one move, you can easily look ahead to see how your opponents may spoil your plans. It is anxiety-inducing. Your opponents may not always do the worst you imagine. Sometimes the motivation to help oneself is larger than that to hurt others. I find that this game can be played with two different mindsets. You can play defensively, or you can play ambitiously. Defensive play means you are always thinking about the worst your opponents will do to you, and you play to protect yourself against this. You also try to sabotage your opponents at every opportunity. To play ambitiously means trying to maximise your own score without bothering to mess with others too much. My game was a two-player game, and I played rather defensively. I felt like a rather negative person and a jerk, always expecting the worst, and always being nasty. I think this is precisely because it was a two-player game. Being nasty to your opponent means being good to yourself. 

Imhotep is a clever and light strategy game. I find it charming. 

Aquatica

Aquatica is set in an underwater world. You have a team of fighters with various abilities. You use them to capture locations, which offer various rewards. Locations need to be developed, and they are worth points after being fully developed. At every step of development they provide some benefit, which help you in different ways. There are four objectives in the game. The earlier you complete one, the more points you score. When a player completes all four, the game ends. The game can also end by the location deck or the fighter deck running out. 

On the game board you lay out locations you can claim and fighters you can recruit.

You start the game with all fighters in hand. On your turn you simply play a fighter card to use its power. Once used, the fighter goes to your personal discard pile and you can’t use it until you do a reset action that returns all cards to hand. One type of action you can do is to recruit a new fighter. This augments your hand. So there is a bit of deck building in this game. 

This is the fighter who lets you reset your hand of fighters.

Locations can be captured by force or by cash. Some of your characters provide these. You can control at most five locations at the same time. Every location has a little development track, with each space offering some benefit. Some spaces give you extra strength or money. Some simply help you advance on the development track of another location. Some let you score locations which are fully developed. Managing your set of locations is interesting. They can help you a lot, supporting the fighter you play. You also want to develop them quickly so that you can score them and free up space for new locations. 

Location card. Cost on top, development track and benefits at the bottom left.

Location cards are tucked into slits in your player board. The topmost exposed icon is your next development step and also the benefit you can gain.  

These are the four objectives you must work towards.

Aquatica is a pleasant mid-weight strategy game. It is mostly a card game. You have much freedom to plan your actions because you have access to all your fighters unless they have been recently used. The locations you capture help you in making big moves, and planning such big moves is satisfying.

Unlock! - Game Adventures

There are two highly successful escape room game series. One is Exit, and the other is Unlock! There are two main differences between these series. Unlock! doesn't require you change or damage any of the game components, which means after you are done with the game, you can give it to a friend. Or if you have very bad memory, you can play it again. The other difference is Unlock! must be played together with a phone app. It is a timer, you can use it to check whether some of your answers are correct, you ask ask for clues, and so on. 

This box of Unlock! - Game Adventures contains three games. They are independent games, set in three different game universes - Ticket To Ride, Mysterium and Pandemic. I have written about how the game system works, so I won't repeat. I'll just share about my experience with these three. 

You don't need to have played the original games to be able to play the Unlock! versions. That's what the rulebook says. However I think it helps a little if you have played the original. It is certainly more fun if you are familiar with the original, because you see so many familiar elements in the puzzle version. The three games in the set go from easy difficulty to hard. I played the games with my two daughters (18 & 20), and we played them in order. Ironically, we didn't do so well in Ticket To Ride, but we did best with Pandemic. I think it is because we had not played the Unlock! series for a while and we were rusty. Having practised our problem-solving skills with the first two games, we did better with the third. 

We only scored three stars in Ticket To Ride. The game comes with a solution handbook, and we sometimes referred to it. When we got really stuck, we had to. We tried using hints from the app first, but when those didn't work either, or they told us what we already knew, we had to go for the handbook. Sometimes we solved problems too far ahead. By piecing together other pieces of information, we skipped ahead and solved a problem which we were not supposed to be able to solve yet. This created a deadlock, because before we got to that point, we should have obtained a few other pieces of information. Now we were stuck because we were missing those pieces, which were needed for solving other problems. 

The first row are some of the cards from Ticket To Ride, and the second row are cards from Mysterium. The art is great and evocative of the original games. This is a big part of the enjoyment. 

App interface of Ticket To Ride

App interface of Mysterium

App interface of Pandemic

The puzzles in Unlock! - Game Adventures are interesting and challenging. The app is used in creative ways, and the game challenges you to think out of the box. Not literally, so don't go destroying the game box please. If you like solving puzzles and riddles, and especially if you like the original boardgames, go for it. This is a great family game too. 

We scored 5 stars in Pandemic