DNP Game Design Competition

In 2025 I am doing one thing I have never done before - organising a boardgame design competition. I am also one of the judges for this competition. Since getting into game design, I have participated in many game design competitions. However this is the first time I am on the organising team. This competition was initiated by local game designer Jon (King & Peasant, Furmation of Rome). In the past several years, there has been another game design competition held in Malaysia - MYBOGADECO (Malaysia Board Game Design Competition). I have participated before. This competition has been held three times. It won't be run this year, and Jon felt that was a shame. He said why not we do it ourselves. I said if he's going to do it, I'll support him. And that's how DNP (Design and Play) game design competition came about. Jon is driving this and doing most of the work. We had in-depth discussions and did planning together. I was mostly the sounding board. We have six judges. In addition to Jon and I, we have Chee Kong (Zodiac Go), Buddhima (My Rain Forest, Chinese Flower Card), Logan (Nasi Lemak), Haireey (Drama Pukul 7, Nak Makan Apa). I can't say that we the local game designers and publishers have big achievements we can boast about. What I can say of all of us is we have been through that journey of designing, playtesting, producing and marketing games. We don't have a lot, but we are willing to share what we have learned with fellow Malaysians who have interest to explore game design. 

Before we decided to do this, I asked Jon what our objective was. We spent some time discussing and agreeing on this. We should not be starting any project when the objective has not been clearly defined. Our objective is to encourage more people to get into game design. I want to discover game design talent. We want Malaysia to produce more games and better games. Game design and publishing in Malaysia is in its infancy. We don't have anything we can be particularly proud of that captures global attention. There is much space for growth. We are organising the competition under the MBD label.

MBD is  Malaysia Boardgame Design. This is a group started only earlier this year. The idea behind it is based to TBD - Taiwan Boardgame Design. It is about game designers working together, helping one another grow and learn, sharing knowledge and resources, and organising activities together. It is a way we coordinate and help one another. At the moment we are only a small informal group. We have not done any official registration. One thing we hope to do is to apply for a government grant to promote Malaysian game designs at the Essen game fair in 2026. 

As Jon and I planned, the two biggest challenges we expected were money and participants. Organising a game design competition in Malaysia is not profitable. There is little publicity to be gained. Any sponsor will just be doing charity work to support local game design. You don't really need a huge sum of money, but when you are giving money away, even with a small sum you'd wonder why you are parting with your money. Is it really worthwhile? Thankfully both the potential sponsors Jon approached were willing to support the competition. So money was settled. Jon and I had mentally prepared ourselves that we might have to fork out some money. The other big challenge is the number of participants. If we only have a handful of participants, we would not be achieving our goal. During the registration period (the month of May), Jon spent some money on Facebook to get the word out. We want people to know about this competition. We the judges also reached out to our respective circles to promote this competition. When registration closed at the end of May, we had 110 participants. This was amazing! It far exceeded my expectations. Earlier on when Jon and I discussed this, I asked if we had fewer than 20, would we still go ahead with it? I said we must set a go-no-go condition. This was the project manager in me talking. 

It is wonderful that we managed to get 110 participants. This also means the judges are going to have a lot of work. In the first stage of the competition participants must submit a rulebook and a short video giving an overview of the game. Every entry will be scored by at least three judges. That means every judge must score at least 55 entries. Eight participants will advance to the second stage (also the final stage). They are required to submit their physical game prototypes, and the judges will sit down to play these games. The deadline for Stage 1 is end of July. In the first half of August we the judges need to complete our scoring, so that the eight finalists will be able to ship their games to us before the end of August. The first half of September will be playtesting and judging of the finalist games. We plan to announce the results on 16 September, Malaysia Day. This is fitting, because the theme for the competition is Malaysia. 

There is a reason we chose Malaysia to be the theme for the competition. The prize for the competition is getting your game published. In case you don't want it, you can convert that to a cash prize of MYR 1000. We wanted to make sure the prize is attractive enough to make people want to spend the effort designing a game. It is motivating to have your game getting published for real. We chose Malaysia as the theme and as a requirement because if we were going to publish the winner, we wanted the game to be something Malaysians are familiar with and would accept easily. Being a publisher means making marketable products that many people want, not art pieces that only a handful of people appreciate. One other criteria for the game design is it must have at most 52 cards. This is to control production cost and manageability, and also a card game is generally simpler and easier to learn than a boardgame. 

After the registration deadline, we set up a WhatsApp group, inviting all participants. We encouraged them to share their ideas, their rulebooks, and to exchange ideas. Several have already shared their rulebooks and also obtained feedback. Writing rulebooks is difficult, more so than most people realise. People often complain when they read rulebooks, because they are impatient. They don't realise how much effort has gone into making the rulebook as easy to read as possible, and complete, and unambiguous. When learning to become a good game designer, engaging with fellow designers and learning from one another are immensely helpful. I hope this little community of game designers will continue to be active after the competition, and we can develop more and more game designers, and better game designs from Malaysia. 

2025 is the first time we are doing the DNP competition. I hope it creates a significant impact that continues to be felt after the competition. I hope this will continue year after year, and help Malaysia find its mark in game design.