Tuesday, 30 September 2025
boardgaming in photos: OnStage, Biblios, Cafe, Sky Team
Friday, 26 September 2025
Oriflamme
There is a fair bit of guessing the intentions of your opponents in this game. On average, a face-down card earns one point per round. You need to do better than that to defeat your opponents. It is through making the right guesses and the right attacks that will get you ahead.
Oriflamme is a light and quick game. It is a melee and it is everyone for himself.
Tuesday, 23 September 2025
Looot
Looot is a game about Vikings looting goods and bringing them back to build their own villages. Players are all in the same raiding party, but you are from different villages so whatever you manage to grab first is for your own village only. You have your own player board on which you place the items you bring back. While you raid, you can claim objective tiles to place on your board. If you manage to surround them with the right items, you will get to score them. However if you fail you will lose points.
One interesting aspect of the objectives is they increase the values of items you collect. All item types have a default value, and they are scored at game end. If you find that you are collecting many of a particular item, you probably want to get objectives which increase the value of that item. Gourmet class mutton anyone?
You have several single use powers, e.g. allowing you to place a pawn in an occupied space, or claiming two items instead of one. These can be life savers in case you get stuck in a bad situation.
Looot offers a pleasant play experience. It can totally be rethemed to kids raiding a candy house. You have goodies all over the place up for grabs. There is a fair bit of planning involved. You want to claim as many objectives as possible so that you’ll score more points. It is a fun spatial puzzle trying to maximise the items you loot to fulfil multiple objectives. Claiming objectives is also about risk management. In case you fail, you will lose points, and that can be painful. You have to watch out for yours and your opponents’ pawns running out. That is when the game ends and you don’t want to be caught unprepared. I enjoy the market manipulation aspect of the game. Boosting the value of items you collect can be highly lucrative.
Saturday, 20 September 2025
Malaysian Holidays postcards are released!
My fifth published game will be Malaysian Holidays, and this is a collaboration project between Cili Padi Games and Specky Studio. This time I am just the designer, and they are the publisher.
The whole idea for this game came from two things. First, I had wanted to design a game which could be widely accepted in Malaysia, i.e. something which non-gamers would like. I wanted to find a topic which many people would find interesting. Gameplay needed to be simple and easy to grasp. If I wanted to make a game sell well in Malaysia, this was the kind of target audience I should aim for - the non-gamer. The second thing was what made me pick this topic for such a game. On social media I sometimes see people plan for holidays for the following year. They check which days of the week the public holidays fall on, and identify long weekends, and also potential long stretches of holidays that can be created by taking one or two days of leave. For example if a public holiday is on a Tuesday, you can take the Monday off to create a four-day stretch. Malaysians like to make use of these long stretches to go back to their hometowns, or to go somewhere else for holidays. We have many public holidays, because we are a multicultural country. We love our public holidays. Every time the national football (soccer) team wins some tournament, or a national badminton player wins some trophy, people will start asking whether the prime minister will announce a special holiday. I'm sure fellow Malaysians can relate to this. All this led me to decide to turn Malaysian public holidays into a game.
The design and development journey has been promising and encouraging. Non gamers and casual gamers quickly get hooked. Once when I visited an educational books publisher to pitch one of my other games, I brought several of my other prototypes for showcasing my portfolio. When they saw my crude prototype box, which was a brown cardboard box for food sachets and only had "Malaysian Holidays" hand-written on a plain white sticker, they picked it up and asked what's this? And we ended up playing it immediately. Malaysians love public holidays! It's in our DNA! That lousy box had no art at all.
After Buddhima from Specky Studio and I agreed on our mode of cooperation, he engaged Lim Chi Qing from Sunny Day to create the art for the game. This is a project which needs a lot of art. We feel that every public holiday in the game should have its own art. So this was a lot of work, truly a labour of love. I really like the art style Chi Qing used. The game itself is not yet published, but the art is now made into postcards, and they are now available. If you want to order some, please reach out to Specky Studio: link.
Friday, 19 September 2025
Coffee Rush
Everyone has a player board where your orders are tracked. New orders are added to the top row. When you complete an order, it is removed from the waiting zone and put face-down in a score pile. Every round outstanding orders are shifted one row down. If an order is shifted beyond the bottom row, it means the customer loses patience and walks away, while giving you a one star review on Google Maps. You lose 1 point.
You get new orders when either of the players before you in turn order completes their orders. You get a new order for every order they complete. This is why the orders keep piling up. The tension keeps rising as you play.
On your turn you move one of your pawns up to three steps on the ingredients board. You can pass through other pawns but may not stop in the same space as another pawn. You collect ingredients for every space you enter, and you can place them in any of your three cups. This is how you complete orders.
Coffee Rush is easy to get into and immediately relatable. There is some competition and blocking on the ingredients board, but it is not vicious. You are busy enough handling your own customers so you probably won’t bother with blocking others much. Anyhow you can only block the final landing space. Others can still pass through your space. The more effective way of attacking your opponents is probably completing multiple orders at the same time and giving them more orders than they can handle. Still, they just might manage, and score points for those orders.
This is a nice game to play with casual gamers and it will also work as a gateway game.