This game My Grand View Garden (我的大观园) is made by the Dream of the Red Chamber Society of University Malaya. I recently met a teacher Pey Ling who specialises in the four major Chinese literary works and runs courses analysing them. She is planning to great boardgames for them, to make her lessons more interesting to her students. She contacted me after reading about my blog post on my prototype for Dream of the Red Chamber. She was interested to meet up and exchange ideas. She had a copy of My Grand View Garden, which she hadn't had the chance to play till then, and we gave it a go when we met up.
This game has already been produced properly. I am not sure how many copies. It has a proper box and production components. The game is in Chinese and Malay. No English. This is a Malaysianised version of Dream of the Red Chamber. The characters are in Baba and Nyonya costume instead of traditional Chinese costume. The Baba and Nyonya are Chinese who came to Malaysia centuries ago and have since developed a unique culture. Most of them are in Melaka.
The game is a simplified version of Monopoly. Up to four players can play. You start with some money. You roll dice to move your pawn. You will have opportunities to buy land, build houses and collect rent. The game ends when one player goes bankrupt. Whoever is richest by then wins. Alternatively you can agree to play for a fixed amount of time.
The board is double-sided. One side is Chinese and the other Malay. It's not actually a board. It's poster paper. Most spaces feature specific buildings from the book, which is nice. Some spaces trigger mini games. You can test one another's knowledge about the novel. One mini game even requires singing.
The two types of cards are fate cards (pink) and chance cards (blue). If you land on a fate or chance space, you draw a card and do what it says. The fate cards feature many characters in the book. This is one way you learn about and discuss the book.
The chance cards feature other elements in the book, for example objects and poetry.
Each space is numbered (in Chinese), in the top left corner. This is helpful when you play the game. The land titles, houses and rent work differently from Monopoly. When you land on an opponent's property, the rent you have to pay is the same as the price of the property. So your return on investment is fantastic. The rulebook is not precise about how all this is handled, but we interpreted it this way.
We had a group of players with very different experiences. Other than me, we had one highly experienced gamer, one moderately experienced gamer, and one non-gamer. For those of us experienced with modern boardgames, My Grand View Garden is clearly designed by inexperienced game designers. And that is no surprise. The society is of people who study literature, not people who study game design. We shared with Pey Ling our suggestions for the game, so that she could give this feedback to the society. One problem we found was people went bankrupt too easily. We didn't start with much money, and just a few bad events can make you lose all your money.
These are the land title cards. Gameplay aside, the game does contain many elements from the novel, and thus can be a useful tool to learn about the story and trigger discussion about the characters.
These dice are not for movement. These represent the houses you build on your land. When you build your first house, you place one die showing the house. When you build more, you turn the die to the appropriate number.
One gameplay suggestion we gave was removing this fate card on the right. The card effect is to draw another fate card. From the gameplay perspective, there is no meaning or value. I am not familiar with this character on the card though. Maybe there is meaning behind this.
It is encouraging to see people interested in creating boardgames. It means there is more and more awareness in Malaysia.
On a separate occasion, I-Van (HR Game), Jon (King & Peasant) and I had a chat with a history lecturer who is thinking of asking her students to create a boardgame as their assignment. Now you can easily use AI to write long essays for you. Assignments in the form of essays may not be very effective. It is not easy to get students interested to properly do their research. So creating a boardgame might be a more engaging way to get students interested in the subject matter.
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