Creating moments in Pilgrim Poker - why I make games

Over the Chinese New Year holidays I managed to get some friends and family to help me playtest Pilgrim Poker. The rules were more or less final, but I wanted to get more different people to try it, to see whether there were any issues I hadn't detected. This is stress testing the game. When you get people who have never played a game to try it, you can discover situations you have never seen before. New people bring new perspectives. For me it is important to see what people don't understand when they learn a game. I need to do all I can to make learning the game easy, and playing the game fun. 

I enjoy observing how people play my games. Making games is about creating happy moments for people. It is satisfying when I see these moments. Here are some such moments I observed when watching my friends and family play Pilgrim Poker. 

The basic idea of the game is everyone draws one card, and whoever has the highest number wins. The twist is you know everyone else's numbers, but you can't see your own number. A round of play is similar to poker. Everyone commits to a base bet every round, and during the round you can raise that, and others can decide whether to call or to fold. If you think your card is weak, one action you can perform is to change your card. When you discard your old card, you will get to see what it is. When you take your new card, you can't look at it. You only show it to everyone else. Sometimes you will sense that your card is small because other players challenge you to a side bet, i.e. a one-on-one duel. They may not know their own numbers, but when they see you have a small number, they know their chances are good in a side bet. If you have been challenged and you think you might lose, and if the change card action is still available, you probably want to take that when your turn comes. 

In the deck, the numbers go from 1 to 13, and each number occurs twice. One situation I have seen was my youngest uncle holding the 1 and deciding to change card. He could sense he had a weak card, so changing card was the right decision. When he discarded his 1 and saw what it was, he was relieved that he had made the right choice. When you discard a 1 to draw a new card, you can't do any worse. When he drew his new card, everyone else started giggling. He didn't do any worse, but he drew the other 1. 

Creating moments - extreme bad luck is hilarious.

In Pilgrim Poker, you start the game with $50. The base bet you need to pay every round is $1. When you raise, there is a cap of $10. If 6 players are playing, and someone raises the bet to $10, and everyone calls, the pool will be $60. This is a huge sum, more than what you start with. Some rounds can go like this, especially with players who are new to the game and are impetuous. Winning such a round is dizzying. When you sweep all those chips towards you and form a huge pile, you feel ecstatic. 

Creating moments - big wins are electrifying. 

Some moments are subtle, but they are just as satisfying to watch. I like watching people start to understand the intricacies of a game. The lightbulb moment. The aha moment. One player saw that another player with a 13 was challenged to a side bet. Normally 13 is the strongest card, and no sane person would want to challenge a 13, unless he is trying to bluff. The player seeing this challenge suddenly realised he knew why this was happening. He realised his own cards which he could not see was a special card, which made the smallest card win instead. 13 had become the weakest number because of this special power card being in play. 

Creating moments - little gems of tactics which players can discover and use are fun. 

One other type of moment that gives me much satisfaction is when players start appreciating the more advanced tactics. In Pilgrim Poker when you take a turn, you flip over an action card. You may perform the action specified by the card, and you may also choose not to use it. One of the action cards is Change Card. If you choose it, you may discard your current card, putting it out of play, and draw a new card. Most of the time when a new player chooses this action card, they will use the power and hope to draw a better card, because they are guessing their current card is weak. The lightbulb moment I sometimes see is a player who is confident about their card choosing Change Card and not using the power. They choose the card to prevent others from using it. They want to secure their victory. I try to make simple games which are easy to learn, but I also want to have some depth which players can discover as they play. 

One type of moment which I deliberately create will sound odd at first. I intentionally create moments of regret. Let me explain. This has happened to me several times when I took part in playtesting. Recently I saw this happen to Ah Yung. She had the 13, the strongest card in the deck. However she folded when someone else raised the stakes. It was a bluff, and at the time there was another player who had a high card too. Given what she knew (she didn't know her own card), I can't say she made a poor decision. Had she called and stayed in the round, she would have won a ton of chips. From the game design perspective, the feeling of regret makes you want to play again. It's like the 2011 Taiwanese love story movie You are the Apple of My Eye. What you almost had but lost is always bitter-sweet and unforgettable. 

Creating moments - the feeling of loss, of what it could have been. 

The flip side of the missed opportunities would be the lucky escapes. You don't have complete information, and you often have to make decisions based on your best guess. If another person challenges you to a side bet, you have to decide right now whether to accept the challenge. If you do, the side bet will only be resolved at the end of the round. If you don't, you immediately pay half the bet amount. Often it is not easy to swallow your pride when you are challenged to a side bet. When someone raises, do you fold or call? The luckiest escapes are when you hold the 10. The 10 in Pilgrim Poker is Sun Wukong. The special power of the 10 is whether you win or lose with it, you gain or lose double the amount. Unless you have folded, i.e. dropped out of the round. Then if you would have lost, you don't lose double. You just lose the amount you surrendered at the point you folded. If you would have lost while holding a 10, the difference can be between losing $1 and losing $20. The base bet is $1. If someone raises it to the max of $10, and if you call, you would lose $20. Avoiding a big loss is sometimes almost as satisfying as making a big win. 

Creating moments - the lucky escapes. 

The seasoned gamer side of me tends to think that games need to be balanced. There should be meaningful decision-making. There is an expectation that players will be logical and take actions which help them most towards winning. The game designer side of me has now learned that people are not always rational. One thing I observe in Pilgrim Poker is how people challenge others to side bets (i.e. one-to-one duels) simply because they want to take revenge for a side bet they have lost to earlier. This sometimes happens even when the targeted person has a strong card. That is not rational at all. If you want to challenge someone to a side bet, you should be targeting the weakest person, so that your chances of winning are higher. But hey, this is a game, not a math problem. People do what makes them happy, or feel better. As Joker in The Dark Knight says, it's not about the money, it's about sending a message. 

Creating moments - emotions and personal attachment make games memorable. 

(I don't want to say revenge is sweet)

After a few rounds, new players will feel more familiar with the game, and they start playing the people as opposed to just playing the game. Normally when you issue a side bet against another player, that player will think that he probably has the lowest number. If the lowest number he sees is a 2, then he will know that he probably has a 1. Why else would the active player not challenge the 2, which is already such a low number? Once players figure out this logic, the active player may decide to start confusing everyone by challenging the 2 instead of the 1. This way the 1 will not learn that he is a 1, and the 2 will wonder whether he is also a 1, or whether he is holding some special card, or whether the active player is bluffing. I love it when I see players interact with others this way, when the game becomes a medium that connects people, as opposed to being a mathematical or logistical problem everyone is solving by themselves. 

Creating moments - when you start to psycho your opponents and guess their intentions. 

The development of Pilgrim Poker (previously also called Saikoyu - Japanese-sounding non-word meant to sound like "psycho you" - and Bet West) was an unexpected journey. I started work on it in 2021, and my inspiration was Hanabi. I have submitted it before to a game design competition. It did not fare well. At one point I abandoned the game. Players felt they had too little control. It was upon Jon's suggestion that I revisited the game. He had played the earlier version and remembered it. When I returned to the game, I thought why not use something tried and tested - poker. The concepts of raising, calling and folding are familiar to most people. Even if you don't play poker, you've probably seen it played in movies and thus have a general idea. I introduced poker mechanisms into Pilgrim Poker, and it helped with two things. The first is players learn the game more easily. The second is it gives more control to the players. I am glad I gave it another try. With the new adjustments, I was confident enough to make it the 5th game title under Cili Padi Games. 

One thing I learned quite late is there is one public domain game it is quite similar to, called Indian Poker. It is frustrating to discover that someone else has already made a game you are making. Indian Poker is not commonly known in Malaysia, so I have never heard of it before. Pilgrim Poker is essentially a slightly more complicated version of Indian Poker, depending on which variant of Indian Poker you compare it against. I have decided to go ahead with Pilgrim Poker anyhow. I believe it still brings something new to the table. 

Dice & Dine event at Lalaport, Kuala Lumpur 14-15 Mar 2026

 

It's happening this weekend! Come try my games at Lalaport shopping mall, Kuala Lumpur. I will be there both Saturday and Sunday. My booth will be at Level 4. 

Malaysia Boardgame Show 2026 - early bird tickets closing soon

The Malaysia Boardgame Show is happening 18-19 April 2026 in Kuala Lumpur! Cili Padi Games and I will be there. Come play with me! 

More information on Instagram and Linktree. There is an open-to-public area and a ticketed area for activities. Tickets for the latter here. Early bird prices ending this week. Buy now! 

Ghosts Galore

Ghosts Galore is a simple tile laying game in which you fill your own 3x3 board with tiles. Your player board is an underground mine. The tiles have tracks for mine carts, and monsters, and diamonds. The monsters score points in different ways. Diamonds have point values. You also want to lay your tracks to connect exits properly so that you can score points with them. 

You start the game with one tile in hand which is kept secret from everyone else. This is the last tile you will place in your mine. You have to plan your mine so that hopefully this last tile will fit well and score points well for you. 

Every round, there will be a stack of face-down tiles available, and everyone will eventually claim one to place in their mine. On your turn, you either reveal the top tile and decide whether to take it, or if there are already face-up tiles available, you may take one of them. Once all players but one have claimed a tile, any remaining face-down tiles are revealed and the last player must now claim their tile. 

There are nine monster types and they all score in different ways. For example golems score many points if you have many of them and they are not adjacent to one another. Satyrs score points based on how many different monster types are on the same track as they are on. Werewolves give you a good bonus if you have the most. A track is considered complete if it goes from one exit to another without interruption. Such tracks score 1 point per tile. There are two types of special exits - bone exits and tooth exits. Tracks which connect them score double. 

Jia Yaik's ghosts are earning him a ton of points. When you have three or more ghosts on the same track, they each score 6 points. Otherwise they only score 3 points each. 

At this point I had connected the two tooth exits and also a pair of regular exits. Skeletons earn 1 point per diamond icon. Earlier on in the game I had placed a golem tile incorrectly because I didn't know how to use the user interface properly. I had intended to place my golems so that they wouldn't be adjacent to one another. 

Ghosts Galore is a pretty simple tile laying game. It's pretty Euro, in that you are mostly playing in your own area. There is some player interaction, but it is not the aggressive type. You sometimes compete to grab tiles you need. Sometimes you want to avoid competing in the same categories so that others don't take what you need. There's a puzzle element as you try to fit the tracks properly and also fulfil the scoring conditions of the various monsters. It's cute, but for me not very memorable. 

Wishing you peace on Nuzul Al-Quran

This is a card from my upcoming game Malaysian Holidays, which celebrates all our Malaysian national holidays and state holidays. This year Nuzul Al-Quran falls on a Saturday. Don't mind the THU on the card. In the game it is a Thursday card. And that 2 in the corner means there are two such cards in the game. Malaysian Holidays is coming soon this year from Specky Studio. Watch this space! 

Libertalia

Libertalia is a game from 2012. I have heard of it before several times, but never had the chance to give it a go until recently. I had high hopes for the game, because I had heard only good stuff. Unfortunately for me, I am meeting a good game at a bad time. I would have enjoyed the game more had I played it earlier. This is a simultaneous action selection game. You and your opponents have the same set of cards. Your challenge is trying to guess which cards they will be playing, so that you can play a card which helps you more. By now this game mechanism is not novel. So I did not find anything particularly new or exciting in Libertalia. Hence why I think I would have enjoyed it more had I played it earlier. 

The game is played over three campaigns. At the start of the first campaign, every gets the same set of cards. Every round everyone picks one card to play. You know what cards your opponents have, but not which one they will play. You won't use all your cards by the end of the first campaign. In subsequent campaigns, everyone gets the same new cards, but your hands will be a little different, depending on which cards you have left over from the previous campaigns. 

Cards in the game are all numbered. They have various powers. Each round everyone plays one card simultaneously. These cards are then sorted. You get to execute the cards' dawn powers from lowest numbered card to highest. You then get to claim a loot token, but this is done from highest card to lowest. The loot tokens are a mix of good and bad stuff. Some tokens are worth points. Some tokens cost you points. Some tokens let you attack one of your neighbours. 

Cards you have played go to your den, i.e. a play area before you. Some card powers take effect when the cards are in your den. One way you attack your neighbours is you remove cards from their dens. Some powers take effect only at the end of a campaign. These tend to be powerful, and you want to position yourself well to maximise them. 

It is common to have clashing numbers. Players will sometimes play cards with the same number. In such cases, you determine the action order by a secondary number on the cards. There will never be ties. This particular character above, the Mutineer, forces you to lose characters from your den, but you earn money (i.e. gain points) for each character lost. 

The anchor icon on a card means a power which triggers only at the end of a campaign. If you have the First Officer, you will want to have as many characters in your den as possible by the end of the campaign. 

At the start of a campaign you can already see the loot tokens for all six rounds of the campaign. You can start planning when to use your high cards and when to use your low cards. You will likely adjust your plans midway through, depending on how your opponents play. Treasure maps are only worth points if you have a set of three. You have to think carefully whether to go for them. If you manage a set it is lucrative. 

This is a game of planning what you are going to do with your crew. Everyone has (mostly) the same crew, and you want to outwit your opponents by making better guesses and better picks. There is some double guessing and psychology. The powers of the characters do encourage you to play in certain ways, for example the Freed Slave scores 1 point for every other character of a higher rank, and he does this every round. If I have the Freed Slave, I'd want to keep playing characters of higher ranks. By watching your opponents' dens you can guess which characters they might want to play. 

The loot tokens is something that motivates players too. How desperate are you to take the lucrative tokens, or to avoid the penalties? How desperate do you think your opponents are? In this game there is some basis for making guesses. You certainly can count cards too. 

My play experience for Libertalia was so-so partly because I have played many other similar games. I do tend to like game with cards with interesting powers and interactions. Libertalia has these. A second reason I didn't enjoy my play fully was I played this in async mode. Table talk and continuity are missing when playing in this mode. The third reason was the penalties at the end of every round. I think I was the victim of these penalties less than others, but still they made me a little uncomfortable. However I acknowledge that they are a good design. Pain avoidance is a strong motivation. Libertalia is almost a party game. You can play with up to 6 players, and at the highest player count this will be a little chaotic. However this game is not exactly simple. It is a light-to-medium weight game. It is a light strategy game. 

Spots

Who else has watched the Disney cartoon 101 Dalmatians as a kid? Spots is a light dice game about dalmatians! Well, maybe not specifically dalmatians. Just dogs with spots. Many of the dogs in this game don't actually look like dalmatians. This is a game with a bit of push-your-luck, in which you race to fill six dog cards with dice of the right number of pips. 

You start with two dog cards. Each dog card has 2 to 4 spaces for dice, and they are in red. In each space you can only place a die of the specific value shown. A dog is not done when you fill all the spaces. There is one more step you need to do. You must perform an action to flip the dog card to the blue side. When a dog is still on the grey side, you may lose the dice on it, i.e. your progress can be completely undone. 

At the start of a game you will set up six action cards. The box comes with more than six action cards and you can play with different combinations. Players take turns using an action card. An action card that is used becomes temporarily unavailable. Only when five cards have been used will they all be reset and become available again. 

Every player has a backyard. Your backyard is where you get to bury dice you can't place onto your dogs. As a general rule, when you roll dice, you must place them. If you can't place them on your dogs, you will be forced to bury them in your backyard. There is a limit. Your backyard cannot have dice totalling more than 7. If that happens, you go bust and lose all dice on grey-side dogs and your backyard. This is the push-your-luck aspect of the game. The higher your backyard dice total is, the higher your risk when you roll dice. The different action cards in the game let you do different things. Some let you roll more dice than others. Rolling more dice usually entails a higher risk, even though it can help you progress more quickly. 

One action card lets you roll two dice, and then you have the option of rolling one more. One action card lets you roll three dice, and then you can keep rolling one die at a time as many more times as you wish. One action card lets you roll dice in your backyard. There is one action which lets you draw an additional dog card. 

In this screenshot above, three of my grey dogs (upper half of the screenshot) are filled, but I still need to take an action to flip them to the blue side to secure them. If I fill my sixth and last dog, I will win immediately. Flipping dogs to the blue side is not necessary for winning. It's just protection against losing progress. At this point I need exactly one die showing 4. If I go bust at this point, I will reset all four of my grey dogs. 

The red bone is a treat. Treats are a type of resource you can earn, and you spend them to reroll dice. In Spots when you reroll you must reroll all dice. You can't lock some then reroll the others. It's all or nothing. 

The game comes with many action cards, and there are many combinations you can play with. There are some suggested combinations in the rulebook. This variety provides some replayability. 

Rolling dice is exciting. There is certainly luck in this game, but there are also ways to mitigate that. You can be strategic about how you play. Making sure you have some treats ready helps. You need to balance between going fast and taking risks. I had fun with the game even when playing in async mode. I think the game will be even more fun when playing a physical copy in person. You will feel the excitement on your opponents' turns too. This is a nice light game to play with non-gamers who are dog lovers. It is a relaxing filler for gamers. 

BGG Top 100

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to look at the current Top 100 games on www.BoardGameGeek.com and see how well I'm doing in playing them all. I realise I have never done this before in 19 years of blogging about boardgames. Certainly the Top 100 looks very different from 19 years ago. No more Tigris & Euphrates today. I don't actually browse the Top 100 list often now. However it was important to me when I first got into the hobby. I was curious about all these games which were ranked so high by players from all over the world. I remember being appalled that Axis & Allies wasn't on the list. It wasn't even in the Top 200. I had thought it was the pinnacle of boardgames. 

We should not simply take the BGG Top 100 as the best 100 boardgames in the world. It is an aggregation of what many boardgamers think. It is the product of how people use BGG, and it reflects specifically the tastes of people who bother to rate games on BGG. That means hobby gamers. When looking at the list, we should understand the context. Although it is not perfect, it is still a highly useful list for people who like this kind of games and want to explore other similar games.  

BGG Top 10 in Feb 2026

I have played 56 out of the top 100. Considering that several games have their revised editions and 2nd editions also in the top 100 as a separate entry (Agricola, Mansion of Madness, Great Western Trail, Eclipse, War of the Ring), I'd consider myself as having played 61. That's higher than I expected. I thought I was further behind. There are some games which have spin-offs and reimplementations. I probably can consider myself as having tried them. These are not clear cut though. Maybe they are different enough from the originals to be considered separate games. For example Endeavor Deep Sea, Great Western Trail: New Zealand, Gaia Project, Age of Innovation (can these two be considered Terra Mystica variants?), and The Crew: Mission Deep Sea. Maybe Wingspan Asia can be considered just an expansion. I have played Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, but not Gloomhaven or Frosthaven. I have more or less seen the system, and I am not particularly interested to try the other games in the family. Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth is based on 7 Wonders: Duel. I'm interested to try it if I have the opportunity, even though I have played 7 Wonders: Duel. 

One thing I notice about the top 100 is this is like Hollywood. So many games are spin-offs, variants and newer editions (remakes). How many Marvel movies can you watch before tiring of them? I wonder whether this should be interpreted as a sign of boardgame companies growing too big and losing the appetite for creative risks. Spin-offs and expansions are financially prudent. It's just that they are not so exciting for me. Or maybe we should see this in a more positive light. Publishers are making what their fans want. Perhaps this is mostly natural demand and supply. 

Here are some notable games I still have not played and I am somewhat interested in. I'm curious about Dune: Imperium and Dune: Imperium - Uprising. Two games in the top 10! Star Wars: Rebellion is also a top 10 game and it has been around for a while. Two others I'm interested in are Slay the Spire and Grand Austria Hotel. I can't say I'm keen enough to want to buy a copy so that I can play them. I find that I rarely buy heavy Eurogames now, or any heavy game. 

There are three games from the Clank! family in the top 100 and I have not played any of them. Cascadia is a popular game which I have not tried. There's also SETI, Kanban, Everdell. I have never played the classic Twilight Imperium. It's not a genre I'm keen about now. Crokinole has been in the top 100 for many years, and I have never come across a physical copy of the game. I guess it's not a thing in Malaysia. 

My 10's among the top 100 are Pandemic Legacy Season 1, Through the Ages, and Race for the Galaxy. My 9's are Agricola, Power Grid, Le Havre, Maracaibo, and Darwin's Journey. For any game in the top 100 which I rate a 7 or below, I'll have plenty of people who disagree. These are the games which didn't work so well for me. My 6's are Anachrony, Great Western Trail, The White Castle, and The Gallerist. I have only one 5 in the top 100 - Harmonies. 

Which are your favourite games in the top 100? Is your all-time favourite in the top 100? Mine is Innovation, and it is currently ranked 300+ on BGG. Which is your lowest rated game in the top 100? 

Dionysia

Dionysia is a microgame from Buttonshy Games. So you know what to expect. A game with exactly 18 cards which comes in a wallet that fits comfortably in your shirt pocket. 

Dionysia is a two player game in which you draft cards to make a play. Cards represent scenes. Your play has three acts, and each act must have three scenes. You take turns drafting a card from a market of three face up cards. The moment you take a card, you must decide which act to add it to. When you take the second card for an act, you must stack it above or below the first card, slightly offset so that the icons of every card are visible. This below is what your work-in-progress looks like. For the first two acts where I still had only one card, I didn't need to decide where to position them yet. I placed them this way because I wanted to remind myself this was one potential configuration I wanted to use.  

The top section of a card shows an ability and a scoring criteria. The bottom section shows two icons. When you complete your play, the icons will form a 6x3 grid. The scoring criteria of a card indicates a sequence of icons you need to have in your grid in order to score points. This sequence can go from left to right, or top to bottom. If the sequence occurs multiple times, you score every occurrence. 

The abilities of the cards let you do various things, like rearranging your cards. Often they also help you score points. Of the three cards you have in one act (i.e. one column), only the ability and the scoring criteria of the top card will take effect, because those of the other cards are covered up. When you add cards to your play, you have to decide which card to use as your top card, and which abilities and scoring criteria you have to forgo. Where you position your card affects how the icons appear on your grid eventually, which you must also consider because of the scoring criteria. 

This is what a completed play looks like. If you look at the three scoring criteria, you can see that sword-skull-skull appears twice, cup-skull-skull appears once, and skull-cup-skull appears twice. 

Dionysia is a game of drafting and tableau building. There are difficult choices to make when you build your own play. You need to choose the scoring criteria to use and the card abilities to use, while at the same time you need to build your grid of icons to match the criteria you have selected. You need to consider multiple requirements at the same time. And then there's also your opponent to worry about. Sometimes you may want to take a card for the sake of denying him. 

boardgaming in photos: Race for the Galaxy, El Grande, Nippon

I have been playing some Race for the Galaxy (just the base game) on BGA with Jon and Yasmin. This is the game I have the highest play count for, at 2200+ games. Most of these were played against bots on the iPad. However I did play many 2-player games with my wife Michelle, many years ago. It's nice to be playing a stretch with humans again. I find that I am more careful and deliberate compared to when I play with bots. This gives me a better appreciation of the game. It is a strange feeling playing with just the base game, now that I am so used to playing the first story arc with all three expansions. 

The user interface design in BGA is not as good as the iPad, but it is serviceable. 

Nippon is about the modernisation and industrialisation of Japan. A heavy Eurogame where money is tight and you have multiple things to worry about. As you play, you adjust how each aspect of your business conglomerate scores. You will want to do more of the stuff that will score more points for you. It's not easy to need to commit early which aspects to focus on. 

The good old El Grande! Published in 1995, this is one of the most popular Eurogames of its era. Unfortunately it has never been quite my thing. Normally I wouldn't suggest it, and I'll only play if others want to. With this recent play, it was a bit more chaotic than I remembered. I also find it quite tactical. There will be big opportunities popping up unexpectedly, and you will want to grab them. I once chose a card which forced everyone else to send all their cubes back to the provinces. Everyone must have hated me then. 

Viticulture - the wine-making game. A worker placement game where some spots are available only during summer, and some only during winter. 

This was still early game. I had planted vines, but not yet started harvesting or making wine.