Yuhang boardgame retreat June 2026

The retreat didn't actually have a name. I call it the Yuhang retreat simply because it was organised by Yuhang. This was a private event of a group of boardgamers in Kuala Lumpur coming together for 3 days of gaming, staying at an Airbnb at Taman OUG. I didn't know Yuhang well before this. It was Jon who asked me whether I wanted to join. It was only after I had signed up that I found out I know several of the others who were going, like Julian and Tim. 

We started Friday afternoon. Some already checked in by 3pm. I went in the evening. The original idea was all of us would stay at the Airbnb, so it would be three days of just boardgames, eat and sleep (and shower). However some of us (including me) decided to go home for the shower and the sleep. My home was only 20 minutes away. We went out for some meals, and ordered delivery for others. The latest I stayed up was about 2.30am. Some of them played till 5am. I don't have that kind of stamina anymore. In the mornings we started around 10am, and some started around noon. 

I realised I hadn't played High Society after so many years in the hobby. This is a well regarded game from Reiner Knizia. 

We brought out Splotter's Horseless Carriage. I own a copy but I have only played it once before. It was a three player game. I think this game is best with five. At the retreat we did a four player game, using Julian's copy. I had forgotten many of the rules, so he did the teaching. Look at all these folks looking so serious staring at their car factories. You know this is a tough game. 

My factory

Julian had some 3D printed accessories which were very helpful. The slots for the white bars help secure them, in case the players accidentally knock these boards. 

Game in progress

In this particular game we had much demand for sedans, and some for pickups. We had very little demand for sports cars. 

I made a mistake when expanding my factory. I had one mainline producing sedans. I wanted to set up another so that I could produce and sell more cars. I think this is the minimum if you want to be in contention to win. It is something you need to plan for far ahead. If you look at the expansion board at the lower left, you will notice that the entrance is facing right. I had wanted to place another mainline in the lower right area, so that it could be connected to both the group of darkest grey tiles and also the group of light grey tiles. This way, the new mainline would meet many of the requirements expected by consumers. However my poor expansion tile placement from earlier on stopped me from adding the next expansion tile here. The doorway facing right prevented me from attaching an expansion tile here. I gave up, and I placed a ton of planning tiles on the right, on the other expansion tile I didn't have any use for now. This gave me an advantage in choosing turn order. I couldn't do much else with that expansion on the right anyway, so I might as well utilise it. 

We had more demand than we could fulfil. I think that means we were not doing a good job. Most of the demand was either very cheap cars or very expensive cars. 

Julian has this nice 3D-printed tray which I find super convenient. 

Late in the game, I was on my way to come last when I realised I might be able to redeem myself a little bit. At the time Jon was still behind me, but he was catching up. I added a mainline to produce pickups at the top left. I fought for turn order so that at least for one round I had access to all the highest techs at the time, and I could make an up-to-par pickup. This didn't earn me much money (i.e. points) since it was quite late in the game, but at least it helped me hang on to third place. Barely. Sorry Jon. Lesson learnt - don't give up easily. 

If you look closely at the photo above, you will find another bad mistake. In Horseless Carriage, those tiny arrows are important and you want to leave space to place them next to car part producing tiles. One car part you produce can give you several features, if you have access to the tech. However for each feature you must be able to place the matching arrow. I had not planned for this well, and later in the game when I was able to access the higher techs, I could not place the arrows, so I missed the opportunity to improve my cars. 

Joon Lam (blue) and Julian (red) had a close fight, and so did Jon (green) and I (yellow). Jon and I were far behind the other two. 

Julian, Joon Lam, me, Jon

We had friends who came for only part of the retreat. In total we had maybe 18 attendees, and at any one time I think the highest player count we had was around 14, i.e. three tables. 

I did not play this. I just saw others playing it. I think Marc brought this. He and Joanne came all the way from Johor to join the retreat. 

So colourful. 

A jigsaw puzzle! 

Captain Sonar was a game I brought. I have wanted to play this again for some time but it has been hard to find the right occasion and to get enough players. I'm glad I got to experience the excitement again. 

Some of the whiteboard markers that came with the game had dried up. Thankfully I brought along some extras. I was the radio operator on my team, and I thought I did pretty well figuring out the position of the enemy submarine. However when they used silenced movement, it threw me off and I got confused. At one point I thought they were at the exact same position as us. I couldn't ask my captain to shoot, because the torpedo would damage us as well. The opponent sub managed to track us, and soon destroyed us. 

This is Jon's prototype - Foundations of Rome. I have seen this game go through several iterations. It is like watching your friend's child grow up. I keep telling him this game is better than Castle Combo. He started designing this game before Castle Combo was released. These two games look similar, because you are also playing cards into a 3x3 grid. I found Castle Combo so so. Nothing really grabs me. I like that in Foundation of Rome you need to plan carefully how to upgrade your buildings. If planned well, they give you great rewards. You will be placing people on the buildings. People are one of the ways you score points. 

Foundations of Rome (prototype)

I played a physical copy of Castle Combo for the first time. Prior to this I have played it several times on BoardGameArena.com. 

I went for the money bag strategy, collecting many such bags, and trying to amass a healthy amount of money. Castle Combo is hugely popular now. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It's a simple and accessible tableau-building game. I am not keen about it because it doesn't offer me anything particularly new or interesting. Jon loves this game. I realise Jon and I disagree on so many games. Maybe we chat often so we discover many games we disagree on. We do agree on many games too. Or maybe I'm just a hard-to-please. 

Another one of Jon's prototypes I played was On Three. This is a two-player game which uses poker hands. I really like it. It's thinky and compact, and it uses just a normal deck of playing cards. I told Jon this is his Regicide. 

Samurai Spirit was another game I brought. I have fond memories of it. It is a challenging cooperative game. We did a six-player game. We made it to round 3, but unfortunately we lost because we were short of one doll icon. All the villager families were killed by the bandits. Tragic!

Joon Lam asked me whether I brought my prototype Pilgrim Poker. I did. I didn't intend to push for getting it played. I wanted it to be there on standby. If the opportunity arose and people wanted to take a break from heavy games to play a light one, I could bring it out. I hadn't expected that it would be specifically requested. 

We had great fun with it. In one particular round, I saw that Julian had a 13 (the highest card), and Joon Lam a 12. This would be difficult for me to win. The other cards were middling. Julian issued a Side Bet against Joon Lam. That made me go hmmmm.... Julian didn't know he had the 13. The only reason I could think of for him to go against such a strong card was I must be holding the special card (4 - Zhu Bajie) which made the lowest card win instead of the highest. Only then would the 12 be a weak card. This round we did several times of Side Bets and Raises. Eventually both Julian and Joon Lam folded. I had raised the bet amount to $10 (the max). I also had a Side Bet against Chan, at $10 as well. Now Chan had a special card too (10 - Sun Wukong). He did not fold. Win or lose, his bet would be doubled. I felt confident I could beat him, because I was pretty sure I had the 4. When it was time to reveal our cards, I was stunned. I did not have the 4! I had a 12. I panicked for a split second because this was out of my expectation. Then I felt relief. I still won because 12 beat 10, and I won a lot of money from Chan because of his special character. He had to pay me extra. That was a painful loss for him. 

We discussed after that round ended. Julian explained that he was just bluffing when he initiated a Side Bet against Joon Lam. At the time, both of them were leading, and both had a lot of money. So for Julian to issue a $10 Side Bet against Joon Lam wasn't a big deal. Julian wanted to intimidate and confuse Joon Lam. I'm happy that hardcore gamers enjoy Pilgrim Poker. I try to make my games accessible to the casual crowd, and sometimes this means sacrificing gamers. So I am glad my game is interesting enough for them too. 

Lifeboats is one of the most colourful games I played at the retreat. 

This is a noisy game with much politicking. I will write more about it in a separate post. 

Julian is a big fan of Obsession. He has a very nice insert set for it too. I am amazed by how well designed these 3D-printed custom inserts are. 

Sticheln (1993) is a trick-taking game that's more than 30 years old. I've always enjoyed it. I think the latest version is called Stick 'Em. There is also a version called Picante. It introduces some interesting twists, and they make the gameplay highly strategic. At the start of every round, everyone chooses a pain colour. During the game, every card you win gets you only one point. Every card in your pain colour that you win costs you points, based on its card value. This can be very painful. With four players, the card value goes up to 12. Winning one 12 in your pain colour will cause you to lose 12 points. You will need to win three tricks to recover from that. So you play this game very carefully, doing your best not to win cards in your pain colour. This can be difficult, because of another unusual rule. For every trick, any colour which is not the lead colour is a trump colour. That means if someone leads a trick with your pain colour, you'd better have a small card in your pain colour so that you can avoid winning this trick. Or you hope someone else who has a different pain colour wants to win it for himself and will play a card of a different colour. The tactics in Sticheln take a little while to get used to, and you will experience pain in the process (my friends can attest to it). The game looks simple, but the implications of these little twists are many. 

When they played the game, the first comment was this was obviously a pretty old copy. Some of the card edges had yellowing. Not exactly in bad shape, but the signs of age showed. 

Xiu Yi, Yuhang and Chan. Some of them declared this the best trick-taking game they have ever played. I'm glad I introduced the game to them. We played this on the very last day of the retreat, when we had a smaller group. We were too tired to play any more heavy games. 

One other game that was a pleasant surprise for me was Rajas of the Ganges. This is a pretty well known game, and I certainly have heard of it before. I did not have much interest to try it, because it sounded like just another worker placement game. Now that I have played it, yes, indeed it is a worker placement game, and it doesn't have any mechanism which is particularly innovative. However I found myself enjoying it a lot. I will need to think about why before I write more about this game. 

I played 13 new-to-me games throughout the retreat. I will later write about them all. Gosh this one retreat is giving me a lot of homework. 

This is the kind of retreat that makes you feel you are 30 years younger and still doing crazy stuff with your immature schoolmates. We were still in Kuala Lumpur and not some remote mountain, but the three days away from all other activities and worries, being able to spend time with friends who are equally mad about boardgames, playing and discussing and laughing, have been wonderful. 

This Game is Killer: Frozen Horror

During the lifetime of a game taster, once in a while we stumble upon unheard of games which take us by surprise. This Game is Killer: Frozen Horror is one such game for me. It is not a ground-breaking genre nor is it a highly unusual setting. It is just how well the game is put together in a concise way, plus some genius ideas thrown in. 

First and foremost, this is a one-vs-many secret identity game. One of the players is the horror, and the rest are humans. The game is played until the horror kills all the humans, or the humans manage to kill the horror. You win if you are still alive. The twist in this game is you draw identity cards every round. Every round, the horror might be any of the characters still alive. Imagine a ghost which jumps from body to body to possess them. 

The setting is a research station in the Arctic. You can start in any of the four rooms. They are connected to other rooms via doors in specific colours. The colours are important because movement cards let you move through doors in specific colours, and some cards let you temporarily lock a door in a specific colour. 

Every round you draw two cards and you will play them both. One must be played for movement, and the other for its power text. After all cards are played, you check whether the horror is in the same room as any human. If so, the horror kills some or all of these humans. When you are human, you need to try to guess who the horror is and you want to avoid him. If you are the horror, you normally want to go to where the most people are, or where at least one human is. You want to kill. 

When you are human, the behaviour of the other players will give you some clues on whether they are the horror. The horror will try to be subtle. He may pretend he suspects another player is the horror, and that's why he's coming to your room. He may try to make excuses for questionable actions. By default, the horror kills someone sharing the room. For a human to kill the horror it is much harder. You rely on having drawn certain cards. For example there's a card which lets you shoot a person who enters your room. Now that poor fellow might actually be human. There is a card which lets you shoot someone in your room then leave. If the horror uses this card well, he can kill twice. 

As the number of players dwindle, some rooms will be destroyed. It's hard to run away from sharing a room. 

When you are eliminated as a human, you don't participate anymore, but you can still cheer on the remaining humans. This is a player elimination game, but it is short and entertaining that even watching others play is fun. 

I like that this game distils the genre into something so minimalistic while still retaining the psychological play. In fact, I feel you get extra doses of this excitement because every round the identity of the horror may change. You are constantly wondering who the horror is. You question every action of your fellow players. Are they laying a trap? Are they trying to avoid danger or are they trying to trick you? Who can you trust? 

Sabah National Tabletop Con is tomorrow!

 

This is happening 20-21 Jun 2026 at the Sabah Art Gallery. I will be there together with many other Malaysian game designers, and also many from overseas. Early copies of my latest game, Malaysian Holidays, published by Specky Studio, will be available! If you are in KK, come visit me! 

Tournament Arc

This is a game about preparing your team of anime characters for a tournament. Everyone has a team of three characters. During the game you get to train them, modifying their stats. You can mess with your opponents by modifying the stats of their characters too. When the game starts, you don't know yet what the tournament is going to be about. It will only be known by the mid point of the game. The tournament card when revealed specifies how many characters you get to send, and which stats are taken into account. Some tournaments have special rules. During the game, the tournament card may change, and suddenly you may find that your team has all the wrong skills. The whole game is about manipulating the characters and also the tournament. The game culminates in that one grand tournament which is resolved at the very end. 

Everyone starts with three characters. You choose one then pass the other two left. From those two given to you by your neighbour, you pick another character and you pass the one you don't want left. Everyone will end up with three characters. 

You have a hand of five cards. Every round you get to play two cards. The cards have all sorts of powers. Some modify the stats of characters. You can play them on your own characters or on those of other players. There are fancy powers like swapping characters with others, drawing a new character, and so on. 

Cards modifying stats are tucked under character cards. Every character has four stats. 

This is one of the tournament cards. If this is the tournament in effect, all four stats of characters will count (all of them have plus signs). You only get to send one character to compete. The character with a strength closest to but not above 21 wins. 

This is a pretty chaotic game. There is a lot of attacking your opponents. Generally you try to boost your characters, but in the early game you don't really how which stats are important. It is fun to see all the nice anime characters in the game. The card effects are funny too. There is not a lot of control. You are rarely able to protect your own characters. You can save some of the powerful cards for the right moment, or till late enough that it's hard for others to stop you. 

The game didn't work for me. The setting is entertaining. The art is nice. I don't like that this is a pretty random game with lots of attacking. I find that the stats are tedious to keep track of. When I have a bad card I want to play on an opponent's character, I need to examine all these characters one by one to see who is the strongest in a particular stat. That means I need to add up all the numbers attached to the characters. We had 5 players, and thus around 15 characters in total. It felt like a lot of work for me. This is a light game with much player interaction which works better with a casual crowd. 

boardgaming in photos: playtesting

Choon Ean and I were at Kinokuniya bookstore (Pavilion Damansara Heights) demoing our games over the weekend of 30-31 May 2026. This time our tables were occupied more, compared to two weeks earlier when I was there by myself. There were people who stayed to play for quite long. It feels great to see people enjoy my games and want to play again and again. That weekend I think I sold out all the copies of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves at this Kinokuniya branch. At least I didn't see any more left. Not sure if they still had some in storage. 

My friend TS Tan visited, bringing his family. This was the first event I used my new apron. The colour is not the same red as my Cili Padi Games logo, but I quite like it. 

This was my setup. 

Jon had an ad hoc game session at Lolla Paluza cafe on a Tuesday which was a public holiday (replacement for Agong's birthday, which was offset by the replacement for Wesak Day). This was one of the games we played, Martin Wallace's Hit Z Road. It's a zombie game, and it's an auction game. Yeah, this sounds weird, but the game works pretty well. 

The currency in the game is bottle caps. There are three types - ammunition, fuel and adrenalin. 

Every round there are as many pairs of encounters as there are players, and the players bid for turn order to pick a pair of encounters. Encounters are a mix of good and bad. As the game progresses, they get worse - more zombies, fewer resources, more types of dangers. I think we bid too much. We spent a lot of resources to try to avoid bad encounters. When bids go high, it's bad for everyone. We have fewer resources to help us survive and fight the zombies. 

I was the first to lose all my people and thus lose the game. It happened in the second last round. Jon and Ji Li lost in the final round. Darryl was the only player who managed to survive and get to California. 

One of the encounters. 

The Collectors Court event was held at the Summit USJ mall over the weekend of 6-7 Jun 2026. This was mostly focused on trading card games (TCG's). Jon and Haireey had booths there. There were tables made available for playtesting. The Design & Play game design competition is ongoing now. Jon, Haireey and I are part of the judging team, together with Chee Kong, Logan and Buddhima. Contestants were encouraged to come to the event to playtest one another's games. We the judges also brought our games to be playtested, even though they were not contest entries. News at 8 is Haireey's prototype. I have seen it being playtested several times, but this was my first time trying it. By now it is already different from the earlier versions. 

Every round, one player needs to perform. He reads a news item, and depending on the intensity card he draws (which the other players cannot see), he needs to fill in some blanks to convey the intensity level (or newsworthiness). 

Intensity goes from 1 to 10, so 8 is high.

The guessing players need to fight for these number tokens. There is only one for each number. You need to grab the one you think is the correct answer. 

This is Vinod's prototype, a game about matchmaking. It will be released by I-van under Roll Rebellion. It is a simple game for casual players. 

To win the game, you need to find bride and groom of matching colours, a date which matches their colour, and also you need a priest. 

On your turn you draw two cards, one after the other. You can take a card for yourself, or you can give it to someone else (they must accept). This is a game where you can mess with your friends a lot. The fate cards have all sorts of powers, some good and some bad. 

Playing this game and observing it being played gave me much food for thought. This is a very simple game with plenty of luck. It is not my type of game. However in the same game I played, I noticed how much others enjoyed it. People liked the setting. I-van's HR Game has been hugely successful in Malaysia. Also a simple game, and also not my type, but it has been very well received. I think I-van has made a good pick with Vinod's matchmaking game and I think it will do well. When I choose which games of my own to publish, I have been moving towards simpler games, which I hope will get more acceptance by the Malaysian general public. My first published game Dancing Queen is the most complex, and my fourth, Pinocchio, is the simplest. The next one, Pilgrim Poker, is not as simple as Pinocchio. It is roughly at the Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves level of complexity, i.e. not very complex. I have a weakness in making simple games. I do try to make my games as simple as they can be, while still offering something unique, or a least some twist. However I can never quite make a truly simple game that the casual crowd will immediately like. I hope Malaysian Holidays can be something like that, but even then I think I have some rules that will require some effort for non-gamers to digest. 

Many contest entries for the Design & Play competition were playtested at the Collectors Court event, but I did not get to try many of them, because I couldn't stay long. It is encouraging to see many people actively participating in the playtesting session. 

Jeixel brought his contest entry, a game about lousang, a Chinese custom during Chinese New Year, practised by Malaysian and Singaporean Chinese. Lousing is about tossing various food ingredients to bring good luck. In the game, you mix the cards and make a messy pile at the centre of the table. You then drop dice to claim ingredient cards. When Jeixel explained the rules to us, my first thought was "What? That's it?!"  However once we started playing, this turned out to be more challenging and more fun than I had expected. Those dice that you drop, most of the time they roll away, forcing you to take a different card from what you originally intended. Sometimes they roll off the card pile and you get nothing. You can try to knock your opponents' dice away, and this happened a lot in our game. If two players have dice on the same card, it is the higher valued die which wins. Very simple concept, which didn't sound like much at first, but once I started playing, I was pleasantly surprised. 

Each card is 1 point. 

When you have three of a kind, you get +2 points.

I asked others to help me playtest my Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦) game. I have a nagging feeling that it is too simple. Maybe I should not think that way. Simple is good. Now I am experimenting with adding a bit more to the game. This might be my next game for 2027. 

The green cubes are a new element. When you play a meld, if the exact same meld has been played before, whether by yourself or by other players, your latest meld scores a bonus 1 point for each previously played meld. At the moment this little new rule seems to work okay. People don't find this difficult to remember, and it adds a little bit of strategic consideration. Players may hold back on playing a meld, hoping someone else will play theirs first. Is this absolutely necessary? Maybe not. This might end up being a variant. 

Another rule change I have playtested is giving Jia Baoyu (the 0 card) a special power. If you don't play a meld on your turn, you may discard JBY to take any card from the discard pile. This can be a very powerful move if you are short of just one card for a big meld. However, JBY is often a very important card you need for big melds too. So using it for its power is not something you take lightly. I've only playtested this once. The players did use it. I'm not sure yet whether this is a good addition. 

There are other more complicated additions I am toying with. In the game there are 11 types of melds. I have a little board listing them all. When you play a meld, if this is the first time in the game this meld is played, you mark the board with a cube. Every meld in the game refers to a chapter in the book. The characters required for a meld are the main characters in the corresponding chapter. Instead of playing 3 rounds, the game ends after all melds have been marked. This is thematic. The story is complete after all chapters are covered. But this might be tedious. I'm not sure whether the experience is worth the tedium.

The next addition is also related to marking melds off. The player gets a bonus 1 point whenever the 2nd, 4th, 6th etc meld type is marked. Whoever marks the 11th meld type gets 2 points. This mechanism introduces a new layer for planning. I have not tried this, and I am already worried it is tiresome. 

Another one related to marking off melds - the ironman rule. Every meld can only be played once within the same round. If someone else has played a meld, you can't play it any more. You don't need a central board to track this. You just need to check the melds in front of other players before you play any meld. This might be an interesting variant. If someone has already made the strongest meld (11 points), if you have been working towards that, you are forced to switch tact. There will be some anxiety because the melds are first come first served. 

I have just started playtesting my Water Margin (水浒传) game. I am trying to make this a negotiation game. One key concept in the story of Water Margin is how those 108 main characters are stars fallen from heaven. They are the chosen ones. Now if I imagine myself in that world, in a bandits' lair with lots of outlaws, how would I know who are the fated 108 and who are not? Everyone wants to be the chosen one. So the game is going to be about being the chosen ones. 

My initial idea is that all players must play a card simultaneously, and they want to plan such that all their cards added up will make 108. If they can achieve this, everyone who has contributed cards scores points. If they go beyond (i.e. go bust), then some cards are discarded, and those who are forced to discard cards lose points. Some cards have special powers, e.g. being able to remove another card, being able to double the points of another card, and being protected against attacks. This is not a cooperative game, even though every round you generally try to work together to achieve the 108. Ultimately it is everyone for himself. You will want to discard your sworn brother's card if it's going to score him many points. 

I have playtested two versions of my game, and the big big problem is this - too much math. I made the card values 0, 4, 8, 20, 40, and 80, hoping to make the math manageable. However it is still too much. Too tiresome. For my next iteration I will completely remove this math part. The negotiations, the discussions, and the coordination before committing a card, all seem to work reasonably well. You have to rely on others, but you know no one is your friend. 

In the next version, instead of every card being numbered, I'm just going to have some cards which have a "1", some with a "0", and some with an "8". To "achieve 108", you need to have exactly one each of these numbered cards in play. If any number appears twice, there will be penalties and cards will be discarded. Doing it this way will be much simpler. No more math.