LUZ

LUZ is a trick-taking game. The twist here is you can’t see your own cards. You don’t know exactly what cards you have, but you can see everyone else’s cards. However you know the suits of your cards, because the cards have different coloured backs following their suits. At the start of a round, based on knowing everyone else’s cards and the suits of your own, you must predict how many tricks you will win. You score points if you get it right, and you lose points if you get it wrong. You may choose to make a precise prediction, or you can predict two numbers. The latter is safer, but you score fewer points if you get it right. 

The rest of the trick-taking rules are pretty standard. You must follow the lead suit if you can. Only the lead suit can win, unless a trump suit card is played. 

This is a fun twist. Not all cards are dealt out. Although you can see all your opponents’ cards, you don’t have complete information. If you have a yellow (trump) card in hand, but based on what you see, both the 1 and the 12 are missing, you’ll have a tough time guessing how your yellow card will play out. Many of the trick-taking tactics still apply. It feels good to have so much information. Still there is some anxiety in what cards you have exactly. Your opponents’ predictions are important information. They tell you your opponents’ intentions and whether they are still trying to win tricks. 

This is an enjoyable game and if you like trick-taking games, well, you probably have already played this. 

DETROIT

DETROIT is a lovely little two player game from Japan. You compete to build three cars. You share a factory floor, where some spaces are common while some are for you only. You have six game pieces, and you need to move them all through the assembly line, in the process combining the top and bottom pairs to form complete cars. Whoever does so first wins. 

On your turn you roll four dice, and they determine how many steps you must move one of your pieces. The dice here don’t look like dice at all. They look like traffic cones. A cone which lies on its side shows one pip at the bottom, and that means one step. A cone that is standing upright means zero. You might move up to four steps, but if you are very unlucky, you might not move at all. 

Each space on the board allows one piece only. If you move into a common space containing your opponent’s piece, you knock it off and it needs to restart. This is the key element of the game. Some of the common spaces are safe spaces. You are protected from being knocked off. Three of your pieces are top pieces, and the other three are bottom pieces. When you move a top piece to a space with your own bottom piece, you combine them to become a complete car. Thereafter you move the completed car as one piece. Now if your completed car gets knocked off by your opponent, it is taken apart and both pieces need to start over and get assembled again. 

A big part of the game is managing risk and opportunities. When you have multiple pieces, you can maximise opportunities by positioning them such that no matter what you roll next turn, there is something useful you can do. The safe spaces are fun. Sometimes you choose to move a piece there even if it means leaving another piece vulnerable. Occupying a safe space blocks your opponent from using it, which means his pieces will be more vulnerable. 

You cannot assemble a car by moving a bottom piece onto a top piece. This is an interesting challenge. If your opponent knocks off your bottom piece, and you now have a top piece far ahead of your other bottom pieces, it is a little stuck because it needs to wait for a bottom piece to catch up. You have to plan how to get your cars assembled as the pieces advance through the board. 

This is the kind of game where the game components can sell the game. The good news is the gameplay is decent and meaningful too. 

designer diary: Malaysian Holidays

Malaysia is a country which has many public holidays. We have three major ethnicities and many minor ones. We have different religions and traditions. We have national holidays as well as many state specific holidays. Every year towards the end of the year, I see infographics on social media helping people strategise when to apply for annual leave in the following year. For example if a public holiday falls on a Thursday, your strategy will be to take the Friday off, so that you have a stretch of four days to rest or go holidaying. If a public holiday falls on a Monday or a Friday, you can plan for a short getaway since you will have a long weekend. It was this kind of strategy guide that inspired me to make Malaysian Holidays. I wanted to design a game which the common Malaysian (i.e. non-gamers) can play. I wanted to look for a theme which most people can relate to and like. Public holidays and going on trips are something that unites everyone. 

Malaysian Holidays is a simple set collection game. Most of the cards in the game are public holidays. Each card is set to be a specific day of the week, and you need to collect consecutive days in order to go on holidays. That means you want to go on holidays without even needing to apply for annual leave. For example you try to collect cards Monday to Friday, or cards Wednesday to Friday. Once you have a set, you get to go on a trip! In game terms this means discarding your set to score points. The first version of the rules featured a card drafting mechanism which is pretty straightforward. If you are a boardgamer, you would have seen something similar elsewhere. However upon playtesting it I quickly discovered that this was a little overwhelming for non-gamers. They felt a little lost when I explained the game, and they got confused during play too. In the original rules, everyone draws two cards at the start of a round. You give one to the HR Manager and then the other will become available for drafting. Everyone reveals their card at the same time. The start player of the round gets first pick, and he must pick someone else's card. Whoever's card gets picked will go next. Eventually everyone will claim one card. The last player to claim a card has no choice. He will be start player next round. If you are a gamer, you probably have seen this somewhere else. The idea is I want people to offer good cards, because the more attractive your card is, the higher the likelihood that it gets picked and you go next. The intention was good, but many non-gamers found this confusing. I needed to simplify the mechanism. Eventually I just let players take turns being start player. Also all cards being offered are just placed at the centre of the table. From the start player and going clockwise, everyone picks a card. This is much easier to learn, and it still works well. 

My prototype of Malaysian Holidays

In Malaysia, if a public holiday falls on a Sunday, the subsequent Monday will be declared a replacement holiday. To represent this in the game, I have Sunday cards, and you get to use them like Monday cards. From the perspective of clean game design, I am adding rules overhead for the sake of the theme, which is a bad thing. However I feel this is worth the additional effort to create a fun experience for players. It is something they can relate to, so it is not a difficult rule to remember. There are no Saturday cards in the game. This is deliberate. If a public holiday falls on a Saturday, there is no replacement holiday on Monday or Friday. Saturdays are the worst day for public holidays. So no Saturdays! 

Malaysia has both national and state holidays. Some state holidays are observed only in one or two states, some in several more. Some national holidays apply to every state except a few. All of these are represented in the game. If you want to win, state holidays are generally inferior to national holidays. Let's say I have collected Monday to Friday, but my Monday is a Penang state holiday, and my Friday is a Johor state holiday. I can't trade this set in to go on holidays. I either work in Penang, or I work in Johor. It is not possible that I make use of both the state holidays when they are for different states. 

There is a total of 28 national and state holidays in Malaysia. To simplify matters, I count all the Sultan / governor birthdays as one. Every state has one. When working on Malaysian Holidays, I learned about several state holidays I had not known about before. I have never lived in those states. 28 cards is not enough for this game to work. In the first prototype, I had 36 holiday cards. Some major holidays like Hari Raya Puasa and Chinese New Year appeared twice. I found that the draw deck ran out too frequently, which was annoying. Eventually I modified the game to have 64 holiday cards. All holidays appear more than once, but they would be on different days. For example one Wesak Day card is a Sunday, and the other a Wednesday. The only exception is Good Friday. Both copies are on Friday, of course. 

Do you know that under Malaysian law only five public holidays are mandated off days? And these don't include the big ones like Hari Raya Puasa and Chinese New Year? The real big five are: New Year's Day, Malaysia Day, Merdeka Day, Labour Day and Sultan or Governor's Birthday. In Malaysian Holidays, these five occur three times, while the others only twice. 

I want to convey the Malaysian work culture through this game. The original inspiration is a very salaryman thing - a strategy guide for applying for annual leave. The festivals and holidays themselves already convey the multicultural society of Malaysia. What I also want to inject is some humour related to the typical salaryman mentality. There are two special holiday cards which are called MC. In Malaysia, MC means medical certificate, and it refers to sick leave. These MC cards are jokers, and you can treat them as any day of the week. That means they are the most powerful holidays in the game. In Malaysia there are employees with this mindset: sick leave is annual leave, and you want to fully utilise it and not waste it. 

There is one type of card in the game called memos. These are attack cards which add some player interaction. Memos are issued by the HR Manager, and they are used for discarding someone else's holiday card. That means cancelling someone's rest day. For example you still have to go to work on Christmas Day because of a system go-live. Yeah... no one likes the HR Manager.

When I playtested with Benz, Ruby and Edwin, they all wanted to go to Japan for holidays

Half the holiday destinations in the game are local, and the other half are overseas. During game development, Specky Studio and I discussed whether to change this. My originally intended target audience is Malaysians, so the holiday destinations are places which we Malaysians frequently visit. There are local attractions like Mount Kinabalu, Genting Highlands, Melaka and Pulau Redang, and also countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Japan and China. The reason we considered adjusting this was if we wanted to use the game to specifically promote Malaysian tourism and culture, then it might be more appropriate for all the holiday destinations to be local. This can help encourage local tourism, and if a foreign traveller buys a copy of the game, it would be a more meaningful souvenir, highlighting all Malaysian tourist attractions. Eventually we decided to stick to the original concept, so you will see other countries in Malaysian Holidays. 

One very encouraging sign during the development of the game was how well received the theme was. My target audience for the game is non-gamers and casual gamers. Often when I managed to find such players to playtest the game, they instantly liked the game. One particularly memorable incident was when I met a local book publisher to pitch another game. I brought my repertoire of both published games and works in progress, to show them that I was a serious designer. Malaysian Holidays was just one of many games to be mentioned in passing. I did not plan to show it to them. At the time my prototype copy was packed in a recycled box originally for meal supplements. I only had a piece of paper glued to the box, and on it I had hand-written "Malaysian Holidays". It was just this "Malaysian Holidays" that caught the attention of the folks I met that day. They asked me what that was. I ended up playing the game with them. Malaysians really like public holidays. 

And now I am holding this game in my hand. It is an amazing feeling physically holding the final product. 

Game in play

Holiday cards

Local destination cards (1 point)

Overseas destination cards (2 points)

This is my favourite memo card. I read it, and I giggle to myself. Yeah, I laugh at my own jokes. 

The art of Malaysian Holidays is done by Lim Chi Qing of Sunny Day. I love her style and she has presented Malaysian culture beautifully. Most of my games are published under my own indie publishing house Cili Padi Games. This is my second game published through someone else. My first such game was Dancing Queen with Matagot. I first released Dancing Queen myself under Cili Padi Games, and only after publication I managed to connect with Matagot to have an international edition published by them. The Malaysian Holidays publishing project was under Specky Studio right from the start. They specialise in using games in education, and they make games that can be used for educational purposes. They are connected to many schools and teachers. Malaysian Holidays contains many cultural and historical elements. There are many aspects that can be used in education. One important reason that Specky Studio wants to release the game in 2026 is this is Visit Malaysia Year! This is a great way to share Malaysian festivities and culture with the world. 28 illustrations of holidays celebrated in Malaysia, and 14 illustrations of travel destinations. I hope you will enjoy Malaysian Holidays too!

Now I imagine East Malaysians when you start reading this blog post you are already grumbling about the box cover of the game. Why is it only showing Peninsular Malaysia? Well the reason is that cover you see at the top is just half the cover. The box design for Malaysian Holidays has two covers, on opposite sides of the box. So East Malaysia is on the other side. Hey, I'm an East Malaysian, I certainly wouldn't allow East Malaysia to be short changed. 

Boomerang: Australia

Boomerang: Australia works very much like 7 Wonders and Sushi Go. You start with a hand of cards. You pick one and pass the rest left. You keep doing this, and eventually all the cards will be claimed, and you score points based on your set of cards. This is a simple core mechanism. How the game differs from others is how the scoring works. 

Every card has several elements. They all affect scoring in different ways. Every card in the game is a location in Australia scattered across seven states. Each location you visit gives you one point, and if you are first to cover a state, you score a bonus. You get a little scoring sheet to mark off locations you have visited. 

Some cards have souvenirs, and they just give you points. At the end of a round, if your total souvenir points is 7 or less, you get to double them. If it is more than 7, no doubling. So you have a little Blackjack going on here, trying to get as close to 7 as possible but not over. Some cards have animals. You score them only when you are able to get a pair within the same round. If you are playing a 4 player game, and you see two of the same animals in your starting hand, you can hope to claim one and wait for the other to cycle back to you. However there is no guarantee that someone else might want the same card for some other reason, for example it is a location they need for completing a state. 

Some cards have activities. At the end of every round, you have the option to choose to score one or more of the activities. After you score an activity, you can't score it any more for the rest of the game. The more icons you have, the higher you score for that activity. Ideally for each of the four rounds, you focus on collecting one of the four activities. In practice, you rarely get an ideal situation. 

The first card that you claim in a round is placed face-down before you, so no one else knows what it is. The rest are face-up, so your neighbour can check what you might need and try not to pass you those cards. This is a game with adjustable depth. You can play with a simple approach, caring only about your own collection. You can also play in a more competitive way, watching what your opponents do and trying to deny them, or trying to collect what they don't want any more. Your chances of winning are higher if you are more competitive, but you will still have fun playing in a simple way. The reason for your first card being face-down is the boomerang scoring. You compare its value with the value of the last card passed to you from your neighbour. You score the difference. That's why you don't let your neighbour know that card specifically. 

Boomerang: Australia is a pleasant set collection game. It plays smoothly. You feel like you are on holiday in Australia. Nothing ground-breaking, but it is an enjoyable experience. 

High Society

High Society is a Reiner Knizia game from 1995. I have heard of it so many times that I feel like I have played it before. This is one of the classics from Reiner Knizia that always comes back in print.  

This is an auction game. Everyone starts with the same set of money cards, each a different denomination, from $1 to $25. That’s all the money you will have in the game. A deck of properties will be auctioned off, one at a time. They have different point values. There are some special cards in the mix, some good and some bad. A good card can double your victory points. A bad one forces you to discard one property. Another bad one halves your victory points. Every round one card is revealed from the deck and auctioned off. One twist in the game is you don’t know exactly when the game will end. It ends immediately when the last of the double and half cards is drawn. The challenge the game presents is you don’t know how far you should preserve your money. If you use your money too quickly you won’t be able to compete when big cards show up. If you keep too much money and the game ends early, you would have missed the opportunities to buy valuable properties. 

Your money

Good card

Bad card

When you bid, you don’t make change. If you have placed a bid and you are overbid by someone else, you can only counter bid by adding more cards from your hand. This means sometimes you are forced to spend more than you wish. 

The most important twist is whoever has the least money when the game ends is automatically disqualified. You must keep some money to avoid being the poorest. 

When bad cards are being auctioned, it is done in a different manner. You bid to not take the card. The first player to pass takes the card. Everyone else who has placed a bid must pay up. Bad cards will usually force many people to spend money. Good cards only require the buyer to pay. 

This is a simple game that is full of difficult decisions. The special cards can have huge impacts. You are torn between keeping enough money to not get disqualified and winning enough properties to win the game. 

Legions

Legions is a 2-player card game set in the world of Abyss. There are five regions between the two players, and you play cards to compete for dominance in each of these regions. There are two ways you can win. If you manage to capture five banners, you win immediately. Banners only appear on some cards, and it is not easy to achieve this victory condition. If no one achieves this by the time the draw deck runs out, whoever has more points wins. Many cards in the game have point values, so this is probably the more common way to win. 

Cards come in five suits, corresponding to the five regions. There are also many cards which do not have suits. They are jokers and you can play them anywhere. Every round you choose a card to play simultaneously to your side of the board. The player with the lower card goes first, and will also have first pick when replenishing his hand from a market of two face-up and one face-down card. However the second player will have the opportunity to attack the first, in a region corresponding to the card he doesn't take from the market when replenishing. Attacking means turning your opponent's cards face-down, temporarily disabling them. He can revive them by playing a new card in the region. 

When you have more cards in a region than your opponent, you control it and get to enjoy its special ability. For example one region breaks ties for all other regions. One region gives you a banner if you control it. After you play your card, you draft a new card from a shared pool. This means your opponent can keep track of what you have been taking, and this gives him clues about your intentions. 

When you have three cards in the same region, or one card in every region, you get to claim a hero. This is how you can score banners and points. You claim a hero from a hero pool, and you must move two of your cards to accompany that hero. The hero and these two retired cards contribute to your points and your banners. Since you are required to remove two cards, you become weaker in the regions they were in. 

Getting to five banners is a threat you can use against your opponent. Since this is a sudden death victory, your opponent cannot let you get too close. The game is tactical. You want to maximise the small advantages you get here and there, like the region powers. 

Legions is a light strategy game that can be a filler for gamers. 

Pilgrim Poker - master and disciples

Here's another teaser for my upcoming game Pilgrim Poker. These are the four main characters in the story of Journey to the West. 

Modern day Master Tang Sanzang sits on a gaming chair and plays a handheld gaming device. I like his intensity. I find it funny. 

Modern day eldest disciple Sun Wukong is a delivery boy. His Somersault Cloud is transformed into a motorbike. I think it's an electric bike. 

Zhu Bajie (Piggy) was the first character Edwin drew. 

Sha Wujing is not a numbered card. I put him on one of the action cards. Among my number cards (from 1 to 13), only three numbers have special powers, 4, 8 and 10. So unfortunately I did not have another number card I could put him on. 

This was the first version of Sha Wujing. I felt this wasn't quite right and asked for a change. He is indeed a chill guy, but not in the sense that he is relaxed and carefree. He is chill in the sense that he is usually calm and he plays the moderator role in conflicts. He is the pacifist. Also he is always the hardworking and reliable guy. 

The master and the disciples are on the back of the box. I had originally written two paragraphs for the back of the box. Edwin decided to convert the first paragraph into a comic drawing. I think that's a great idea. 

This is the master and the disciples in my prototype. I found these drawings as a set on the internet. 

Who is your favourite among these four?