designer diary: Malaysian Holidays

Malaysia is a country which has many public holidays. We have three major ethnicities and many minor ones. We have different religions and traditions. We have national holidays as well as many state specific holidays. Every year towards the end of the year, I see infographics on social media helping people strategise when to apply for annual leave in the following year. For example if a public holiday falls on a Thursday, your strategy will be to take the Friday off, so that you have a stretch of four days to rest or go holidaying. If a public holiday falls on a Monday or a Friday, you can plan for a short getaway since you will have a long weekend. It was this kind of strategy guide that inspired me to make Malaysian Holidays. I wanted to design a game which the common Malaysian (i.e. non-gamers) can play. I wanted to look for a theme which most people can relate to and like. Public holidays and going on trips are something that unites everyone. 

Malaysian Holidays is a simple set collection game. Most of the cards in the game are public holidays. Each card is set to be a specific day of the week, and you need to collect consecutive days in order to go on holidays. That means you want to go on holidays without even needing to apply for annual leave. For example you try to collect cards Monday to Friday, or cards Wednesday to Friday. Once you have a set, you get to go on a trip! In game terms this means discarding your set to score points. The first version of the rules featured a card drafting mechanism which is pretty straightforward. If you are a boardgamer, you would have seen something similar elsewhere. However upon playtesting it I quickly discovered that this was a little overwhelming for non-gamers. They felt a little lost when I explained the game, and they got confused during play too. In the original rules, everyone draws two cards at the start of a round. You give one to the HR Manager and then the other will become available for drafting. Everyone reveals their card at the same time. The start player of the round gets first pick, and he must pick someone else's card. Whoever's card gets picked will go next. Eventually everyone will claim one card. The last player to claim a card has no choice. He will be start player next round. If you are a gamer, you probably have seen this somewhere else. The idea is I want people to offer good cards, because the more attractive your card is, the higher the likelihood that it gets picked and you go next. The intention was good, but many non-gamers found this confusing. I needed to simplify the mechanism. Eventually I just let players take turns being start player. Also all cards being offered are just placed at the centre of the table. From the start player and going clockwise, everyone picks a card. This is much easier to learn, and it still works well. 

My prototype of Malaysian Holidays

In Malaysia, if a public holiday falls on a Sunday, the subsequent Monday will be declared a replacement holiday. To represent this in the game, I have Sunday cards, and you get to use them like Monday cards. From the perspective of clean game design, I am adding rules overhead for the sake of the theme, which is a bad thing. However I feel this is worth the additional effort to create a fun experience for players. It is something they can relate to, so it is not a difficult rule to remember. There are no Saturday cards in the game. This is deliberate. If a public holiday falls on a Saturday, there is no replacement holiday on Monday or Friday. Saturdays are the worst day for public holidays. So no Saturdays! 

Malaysia has both national and state holidays. Some state holidays are observed only in one or two states, some in several more. Some national holidays apply to every state except a few. All of these are represented in the game. If you want to win, state holidays are generally inferior to national holidays. Let's say I have collected Monday to Friday, but my Monday is a Penang state holiday, and my Friday is a Johor state holiday. I can't trade this set in to go on holidays. I either work in Penang, or I work in Johor. It is not possible that I make use of both the state holidays when they are for different states. 

There is a total of 28 national and state holidays in Malaysia. To simplify matters, I count all the Sultan / governor birthdays as one. Every state has one. When working on Malaysian Holidays, I learned about several state holidays I had not known about before. I have never lived in those states. 28 cards is not enough for this game to work. In the first prototype, I had 36 holiday cards. Some major holidays like Hari Raya Puasa and Chinese New Year appeared twice. I found that the draw deck ran out too frequently, which was annoying. Eventually I modified the game to have 64 holiday cards. All holidays appear more than once, but they would be on different days. For example one Wesak Day card is a Sunday, and the other a Wednesday. The only exception is Good Friday. Both copies are on Friday, of course. 

Do you know that under Malaysian law only five public holidays are mandated off days? And these don't include the big ones like Hari Raya Puasa and Chinese New Year? The real big five are: New Year's Day, Malaysia Day, Merdeka Day, Labour Day and Sultan or Governor's Birthday. In Malaysian Holidays, these five occur three times, while the others only twice. 

I want to convey the Malaysian work culture through this game. The original inspiration is a very salaryman thing - a strategy guide for applying for annual leave. The festivals and holidays themselves already convey the multicultural society of Malaysia. What I also want to inject is some humour related to the typical salaryman mentality. There are two special holiday cards which are called MC. In Malaysia, MC means medical certificate, and it refers to sick leave. These MC cards are jokers, and you can treat them as any day of the week. That means they are the most powerful holidays in the game. In Malaysia there are employees with this mindset: sick leave is annual leave, and you want to fully utilise it and not waste it. 

There is one type of card in the game called memos. These are attack cards which add some player interaction. Memos are issued by the HR Manager, and they are used for discarding someone else's holiday card. That means cancelling someone's rest day. For example you still have to go to work on Christmas Day because of a system go-live. Yeah... no one likes the HR Manager.

When I playtested with Benz, Ruby and Edwin, they all wanted to go to Japan for holidays

Half the holiday destinations in the game are local, and the other half are overseas. During game development, Specky Studio and I discussed whether to change this. My originally intended target audience is Malaysians, so the holiday destinations are places which we Malaysians frequently visit. There are local attractions like Mount Kinabalu, Genting Highlands, Melaka and Pulau Redang, and also countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Japan and China. The reason we considered adjusting this was if we wanted to use the game to specifically promote Malaysian tourism and culture, then it might be more appropriate for all the holiday destinations to be local. This can help encourage local tourism, and if a foreign traveller buys a copy of the game, it would be a more meaningful souvenir, highlighting all Malaysian tourist attractions. Eventually we decided to stick to the original concept, so you will see other countries in Malaysian Holidays. 

One very encouraging sign during the development of the game was how well received the theme was. My target audience for the game is non-gamers and casual gamers. Often when I managed to find such players to playtest the game, they instantly liked the game. One particularly memorable incident was when I met a local book publisher to pitch another game. I brought my repertoire of both published games and works in progress, to show them that I was a serious designer. Malaysian Holidays was just one of many games to be mentioned in passing. I did not plan to show it to them. At the time my prototype copy was packed in a recycled box originally for meal supplements. I only had a piece of paper glued to the box, and on it I had hand-written "Malaysian Holidays". It was just this "Malaysian Holidays" that caught the attention of the folks I met that day. They asked me what that was. I ended up playing the game with them. Malaysians really like public holidays. 

And now I am holding this game in my hand. It is an amazing feeling physically holding the final product. 

Game in play

Holiday cards

Local destination cards (1 point)

Overseas destination cards (2 points)

This is my favourite memo card. I read it, and I giggle to myself. Yeah, I laugh at my own jokes. 

The art of Malaysian Holidays is done by Lim Chi Qing of Sunny Day. I love her style and she has presented Malaysian culture beautifully. Most of my games are published under my own indie publishing house Cili Padi Games. This is my second game published through someone else. My first such game was Dancing Queen with Matagot. I first released Dancing Queen myself under Cili Padi Games, and only after publication I managed to connect with Matagot to have an international edition published by them. The Malaysian Holidays publishing project was under Specky Studio right from the start. They specialise in using games in education, and they make games that can be used for educational purposes. They are connected to many schools and teachers. Malaysian Holidays contains many cultural and historical elements. There are many aspects that can be used in education. One important reason that Specky Studio wants to release the game in 2026 is this is Visit Malaysia Year! This is a great way to share Malaysian festivities and culture with the world. 28 illustrations of holidays celebrated in Malaysia, and 14 illustrations of travel destinations. I hope you will enjoy Malaysian Holidays too!

Now I imagine East Malaysians when you start reading this blog post you are already grumbling about the box cover of the game. Why is it only showing Peninsular Malaysia? Well the reason is that cover you see at the top is just half the cover. The box design for Malaysian Holidays has two covers, on opposite sides of the box. So East Malaysia is on the other side. Hey, I'm an East Malaysian, I certainly wouldn't allow East Malaysia to be short changed.