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.

On the main board where you raid by placing pawns, you start on the coast and expand inland. A new pawn can only be placed in an empty space next to a landing site or another pawn, either your own or an opponent’s. You are working together on this raid after all. It’s just that you don’t share the loot. For some of the items, you claim one when you place a pawn on it. For some, you claim when when you place a pawn next to it. For watchtowers, you need your pawns to connect two of them in order to claim a pair of items. 

On your personal board there are some preset structures you can build. You need to place specific items next to them to complete construction and score points. These structures are basically objectives you are trying to fulfil. Throughout the game there will be a selection of objectives you can claim to place on your board. They work in a similar way, except if you fail at these voluntarily claimed objectives you will be penalised. 

The palace requires many items to build

An item placed on your board can count for multiple adjacent objectives. Make use of this well and you will be much more efficient in scoring 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. 

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.

Coffee Rush

Coffee Rush is a family game from Korea about running a busy coffee bar. Customers order drinks, you collect the right ingredients to make those drinks, and hopefully you can serve them their drinks before they lose patience waiting and storm off. You will get more and more customers and inevitably someone will eventually have too many upset customers. That’s when the game ends and you compare points to see who wins. This is a game about people who have not had their morning coffee attacking you like zombies until eventually one of you gets overrun by the horde. The game can also end when the card deck runs out, but that would not be as cinematic. 

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. 

Who ordered caramel caffe latte? 

Whenever you have three or more completed orders, you can trade them in (they are worth 1 point each) for an upgrade. An upgrade is worth 2 points, so doing this means you are sacrificing 1 point. Upgrades give you new powers, for example collecting more ingredients and being able to move diagonally. 

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. 

2025 Malaysia DNP Game Design Competition results

The results of the competition were announced on Malaysia Day - 16 Sep 2025: 

Winner: Ray Tan - Teh Tarik Game (video) (rulebook)

1st runner-up: Jason Sondoh - Kandar Klash! (video) (rulebook)

2nd runner-up: Anas Maghfur - Batik (video) (rulebook)

Other finalists: 

• Awake En - Botanical Grabber (video) (rulebook)
• Lim Feng Keat - Gotong-Royong (video) (rulebook)
• Tang Hoe Ching - Malashion (video) (rulebook)
• Rasis - Rentak Wau! (video) (rulebook)
• Jeixel Heng - Twin Towers (video) (rulebook)
• Kenny Goh - JAM! (video) (rulebook)

The winner will choose a cash prize or a publishing contract with the competition sponsor Roll Rebellion. Of course the latter is subject to the discussion between contestant and publisher. I am looking forward very much to see Teh Tarik Game turn into a final product, a published game. Of the other finalists, several have been identified by the judges as potential publishing projects. This is outside of the scope of the competition, so these will be discussions the judges (in their respective roles as publishers) will have with the designers they are interested in. It is interesting to see that different publishers have different games they are keen to explore publishing. I am excited to see by this time next year how many of our finalist designs will make it to becoming a published game. These would be games I have played a small part in incubating. The designer and publisher would be the father and mother, and I would be, maybe not the midwife, but just the fun uncle. 

Our objective in running the DNP competition is to cultivate good game design in Malaysia. It is great to see that we are off to a good start! 

Winner: Teh Tarik Game by Ray Tan

Teh Tarik Game by Ray Tan is played with exactly two teams of two, and teammates sit across the table from each other. Each team has exactly two opportunities to complete a teh tarik (bubbly milk tea) in the whole game. Each card in your cup scores 1 point. However, during the game you may spill tea too, either because you are unable to play a card on your turn, or you decide not to use your teh tarik card yet. When you spill tea, each card is negative 1 point. 

Each team has one cup, and when you start making tea, cards must be played in ascending order. The nasty part of this game is you can play a card in your opponent's cup. Yes, you are potentially giving them a point, but most likely you will be messing with them and limiting their plays. Some cards allow you to change the number requirement to the opposite direction, e.g. play in descending order instead. This can help you get more cards played to your cup, and thus score more points.   

1st runner-up: Kandar Klash! by Jason Sondoh

Kandar Klash! by Jason Sondoh is a real-time game and requires some spatial skills. Every round an order is revealed, and everyone tries to complete that order as quickly as possible. 

Everyone has the same set of 6 cards. You must arrange them to create the pattern shown on the order card. Ideally you do so with as few of your 6 cards as possible. If you are quick enough, you score 1 point plus 1 point per leftover card in hand. If you are too slow, you get nothing. If you are quick, but you make a mistake, you are penalised instead.   

2nd runner-up: Batik by Anas Maghfur

Batik from Anas Maghfur is a game of pattern recognition. Cards are double sided, with one side being a batik pattern, and the other being an objective you can try to fulfil and score points for. On your turn, you normally draw a card (deciding up front whether to make it an objective or batik), or play a batik to the table. 

At any time, including on other players' turns, if one of your objectives is fulfilled, you may declare so and play that objective before you. One interesting mechanism in the game is each completed objective can be tapped once per game to give you an extra play action on your turn. This can be crucial in completing some of the high-valued objectives. 

Details on the other finalists are in my recent blog post. 

Keretapi Sarong event 2025

The Keretapi Sarong event by Locco was held on Sat 13 Sep 2025. This was not a boardgame specific event, but for the past few times this festival was held, they've always invited local game designers and publishers to showcase their work. Supporting local! The concept of this festival is unusual. They don't announce the venue beforehand. They just tell you you should come wearing a sarong, and you are to take the train (or light rail etc). The venue is, of course, somewhere you can get to by train. It is announced only in the morning of the actual day. For us exhibitors they do tell us much earlier, because we need to be there early to set up and prepare. 

I arrived around 8:30am that day. Rizal from 1+1 Studio and I were the earliest in our group to arrive. People from the other stalls nearby were all earlier than us. They had more setup work to do, so they had to be earlier. 

Four of us local publishers were there this time: Cili Padi Games, 1+1 Studio, Meja Belakang and nPips Games. I helped some of my friends who weren't there by bringing their games. All of these are Malaysian designed games. 

Jon's Furmation of Rome

Haireey brought a prototype for playtesting

Pinocchio worked very well for this crowd, which was a non gamer crowd. I can get people to start playing Pinocchio without sitting through the rule explanation. I get them to start playing, and I teach them the rules as and when they are needed. I find that this is the best way to teach games to non gamers. 

Rizal's Duo Quest was the best selling title that day. It was in play almost the whole day. One particular group even opted for a module which required them to move about and dance to complete missions. Our stall was very happening! 

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. I now only have one last copy with me. The second edition is work-in-progress now. The art is done (only minor adjustments). The new rulebooks too. No change in gameplay or components. The print files have been submitted to the manufacturer Magicraft, and the e-proofing is now done too. So the next step is scheduling for printing. 

This group had much fun with Pinocchio. That day, in addition to sarong, some people wore other traditional costumes. I even saw some wearing the traditional Kadazan costume from Sabah. 

It was mostly a cloudy day, but in the afternoon we had a long stretch of light rain. We hurriedly moved our games deeper into our tent to protect them from getting wet. Thankfully there was no wind, and the rain wasn't heavy. Our tent wasn't very big, so when there was rain and we needed to avoid the rain, our usable space became quite small. 

Haireey from Meja Belakang 

Rizal from 1+1 Studios teaching Duo Quest

During the drizzle the crowd thinned, and we could take a break.

The venue was TRX - Tun Razak Exchange

The crowd at the festival was huge. Our tables were fully occupied most of the time. Sales was not very good unfortunately. This was not primarily a boardgame event, and the crowd was not one prepared to buy. They were there to play and have fun, and maybe spend some money on food. It was a festival more of big brand vendors giving away gifts and samples, than small businesses selling their wares. Still, to grow the boardgame industry in Malaysia, we do need to participate in events like this to introduce boardgames to people who don't know about them. There's still a lot of work to do! Let's go Malaysian boardgames! 

Hadara

Hadara is is civilisation building game. It is a tableau game in which you collect cards, which represent various types of citizens. There are cards in five different colours, and they have different characteristics. They form different aspects of your empire, like military, economy and agriculture. 

The game is played over three eras, and there are two distinct halves per era. In the first half, you will draw two cards and pick one. You do this for each of the five colours. When you pick a card, you may buy it to add it to your empire, or you discard it for money. The card not picked goes to the board, and it will be used in the second half of the era. The way you choose cards is different in the second half. Players take turns choosing a top card from one of the five face-up stacks. You may buy that card, or you discard it for money. Just like in the first half. 

When buying yellow, red, blue or green cards, generally they let you advance on the corresponding track on your player board. Yellow means economy. This helps you make money, which you will need for buying cards. Red is military. If you have enough military strength, you can conquer new lands to establish colonies. Blue is culture. If you have enough of that, you get to build nice statues. Green is agriculture. You need to produce enough food to feed your population. Otherwise you will be forced to discard cards. This is checked at harvest time. 

You can buy medals to score points. Gold medals give you points for every complete set of five different colours. Silver medals give you points based on your position on the track of a single colour. So one is breadth and the other is depth. You need weigh these options carefully and choose wisely. 

These are colonies. They are worth points and also give other benefits. You have opportunities to establish colonies only at specific times. If you want to grab more land, you need to increase your military might in time. There is some time pressure here. 

It is beneficial to have many cards of the same colour, because each card gives you a discount for future cards. Cards in the second and third eras become more expensive, so the discounts help. Purple cards do not have a corresponding purple track, but they give various benefits, including extra scoring opportunities. 

Hadara is a simple civilisation themed game. Having played the game, I don't find it particularly outstanding, because I don't find any new-to-me ideas. However if I think deeper about this, Hadara is actually somewhat similar to 7 Wonders, which I enjoy. They are both about collecting cards in different colours, and the different colours are different aspects of your empire. 

Happy Malaysia Day!

 

Happy Malaysia Day! 

This is artwork from my upcoming game Malaysian Holidays, by Lim Chi Qing of Sunny Day. Malaysian Holidays will be published by Specky Studio.

Darwin's Journey

Darwin's Journey is a heavy strategy game from Simone Luciani (Barrage, Grand Austria Hotel, Tzolk'in) and Nestore Mangone (Stupor Mundi, Newton). It is a Eurogame which uses worker placement as the core mechanism. I used to be a diehard fan of heavy Eurogames. I thought that was the ultimate evolution form of boardgamers. Now I view heavy Eurogames quite differently. I tend to be skeptical, fearing disappointment. I don't want to play yet another convoluted resource conversion exercise, which is just a lot of work. It's not my kind of fun anymore. Darwin's Journey is a heavy Eurogame that took me by surprise. The moment I finished my first game, I wanted to play again. I was eager to explore it more. 

One thing a little different about the workers in this worker placement game is they are all knowledge workers. They will gain knowledge in different areas (represented by seals in different colours). Some actions can only be performed by workers with specific knowledge, for example a worker with two green seals and one blue seal. So upskilling your workers is something you have to plan for. When their skill levels reach certain thresholds, you gain some benefits. Gosh this sounds like the kind of thing I say to bosses in my day job being a corporate trainer.

Your big picture goal in the game is to develop the Theory of Evolution. You sail, you explore the Galapagos islands, you collect animal and plant samples. Managing your funds is important. You can make money by submitting samples to the museum. You need money for placing workers. Some spots allow multiple players to place workers, but only the first worker is placed for free. The rest all need to pay. Money is tight. Another thing which you will spend money on is unlocking new worker placement spots. During game setup, some spots are set up but are locked. These are more powerful spots. If you are first to unlock a spot, you marker it with your colour. This spot belongs to you and you can always use it for free, but if anyone else wants to use it, they have to pay you. Money again. Yes, scientific research requires much funding. 

This marks the journey of HMS Beagle, the ship Darwin was on. The game is played over five rounds, and at the end of each round, the HMS Beagle advances to the next checkpoint. Each player has his own ship. You can try to keep up with the HMS Beagle, or even overtake it. At the end of every round you can score points based on a specific criteria. The reason you want to stick close to Darwin is these bonus points are reduced if you are not with him or ahead of him. The three islands are where you can send explorers to collect animal and plant samples and other benefits. 

This 4x4 grid is the museum, with 16 spots for specimens. When you find a specimen and deliver it to the museum you can earn both money and knowledge, based on the row and column of that new specimen. Every still empty space in the same row or column gives you money. Every filled space gives you knowledge. At the end of the game, one large chunk of points comes from your progress in developing the Theory of Evolution. This is calculated based on the number of completed rows at the museum and your knowledge level. 

There are only five rounds in the game, and that feels so few! I couldn't wait to play the game again because I felt I had done too little, achieved too little. The game is a huge space with much to be done. When you make good progress in certain areas, they help you progress in other areas too. Many parts of the game are linked. I looked at my progress at the end of my first game and I said this sucked. I didn't know what kind of end-game score was considered good in a game of Darwin's Journey, but I could sense my score was atrocious. It was like going to a library and only browsing the children's section. Come on, I can do better than that! 

The fun part of the game is how to maximise your actions. You only have a handful of actions. The HMS Beagle advances every round, and this is a huge psychological pressure. How are you going to keep up? Should you try to? Or should you let go of this and focus on other ways of scoring points? It is impossible to do everything so you have to choose. You try to make your actions contribute towards multiple goals. For example one action in the game is to write letters. When you do this, you need to compete with others, but potentially you will get benefits at the end of every round. This indirectly saves some actions for you, because these benefits are automatic and do not require taking an action. Some actions in the game allow you to do more if you are willing to pay. If you can make sure you have some spare cash, you'll be performing two tasks with one action. There are missions in the game. If you complete them, they give you benefits in various areas, which is like allowing you to perform extra actions. There is so much work to do, and you want to align everything well so that you maximise your output. It is a challenge, and it is satisfying to pull off. Darwin's Journey is complex and takes time to learn, but it is a fun journey of discovery. 

Prowl: Clans & Cunning

Prowl: Clans & Cunning is a game from Singapore, designed by Russell Wee and published by Playlogue. It is a card game set in a fantastical Japanese Warring States period. There are four factions in the game and you secretly support one of them. During the game you influence the strengths of the factions. At the end of the game, if the faction you support is the strongest, you win. 

During game setup the relative strengths of the four factions are randomly determined. Everyone draws six cards. The cards come in four suits matching the four factions. Each card is a fighter with its own power. During the game you do not draw cards. These six cards are all you have. 

Of these six cards, you start off picking one of them to become the faction you support. You place that card face-down before you, keeping it secret. Now you only have five cards left. Each turn you must play a card to perform an action. You will only have 5 actions in the whole game. There are three types of action. The basic one is playing a card and using its power. There are two parts to the card power, and you can use them in any order. You get to strengthen the faction of the card, i.e. increasing its rank. You also use the power described by the card text. These powers vary greatly, and there is a theme to each of the four factions. 

The second action type is swapping your faction card. Play your card face-down to become your new faction card, and reveal then discard the old faction card. The third action type is accusing an opponent of supporting a specific faction. When you do this, you discard a card face-up without strengthening the faction or using the card power. The opponent being accused must answer truthfully. If you guess right, you may choose to steal the king token (a tiebreaker token), or you may force your opponent to change his faction card next round. 

Throughout the game you will try to manipulate the relative strengths of the factions, hopefully making your faction the strongest. If you are able to guess your opponents' factions, it can help tremendously. It is possible that multiple players support the same faction. If you see that someone seems to be helping your faction win, chances are he's on the same side. However, there can only be one winner. This is when the competition for the king token (the tiebreaker) becomes important. One twist is, in this situation, if your shared faction is the strongest but neither of you have the king token, both of you will lose, and victory goes to the next strongest faction. If you feel confident about that opponent supporting the same faction as you, you can accuse him and force him to change his faction card. But then if he is smart, maybe he will have a card of that same faction on standby for exactly this play. 

To be honest I didn't have high expectations when I listened to the game overview. Even after reading the rules, I wasn't convinced this would be interesting. Nothing in the rules pops out to say "interesting mechanism". It all seems to be something I've seen somewhere else before. Only by sitting down to play the game I discovered how delicious it is. This is a short game, short enough to feel like a microgame. You only have 5 actions, so every action feels important. This is a compact game, as in you have few decisions to make, but there are many considerations behind each decision. There are multiple possibilities to contemplate. Even that first decision during setup is not easy - which faction to support. When you choose a card to be your faction, you are already sacrificing its strength. That's one card fewer you can use for strengthening the faction. The faction being secret is clever. You do have to be careful not to be too blatantly supporting a specific faction, because there are consequences. Or maybe you are bluffing? Or you pretend to be bluffing?

This is a card with a quirky power. You give it to a target player, and he must then discard a card. If you think deeper about this, this can be a powerful play in the second last round, potentially disrupting someone else's perfect plan. Often players will keep a strong card as the last card, so that they can make a solid final push. If you play this Untrained Acolyte on them, you not only spoil their plans, you now also know exactly what card they have in hand for the final turn. 

The cards are large, showcasing the art

I had thought Prowl would be a simple light game, but it turned out to be a compact, clever and thinky microgame. Few actions, but there are mind games and plenty of tactics to explore.