TTGDMY playtesting

TTGDMY (Tabletop Game Designers Malaysia) has been busy attending events in June and July, and we only resumed regular playtesting in August. Vivae boardgame cafe (Ampang branch) invited us to have our session there on Merdeka Day, so we had the opportunity to playtest with the public. It's always useful to do playtesting with the end user. Usually at TTGDMY playtest sessions it's just us game designers helping one another with playtesting. 

I played several of my prototypes with this group above. I managed to play my upcoming game Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves with them too.

That day the prototype I most wanted to playtest was Taking Sides. This was a newer game I brought. I had the idea for the game some time ago and I did some initial brainstorming then, but it was only recently I resumed work and managed to get a prototype out with complete first draft rules. A week earlier when we had our first playtesting session of the month at Central Market, I had brought it out for the first round of testing. I quickly found a number of issues with it, and received much feedback from fellow designers. Issues and criticisms are great! They are much better than people politely and generically telling me yes nice keep it up, which basically means the game is not interesting at all. I was quite excited with the problems and quickly worked on them to create version 2. 

Taking Sides is, at least for now, a game for 3 to 8 players. The core idea is everyone must pick sides. You are with me, or you are against me. Every round, the players will split into two teams. Every player gets a character card, which has a strength value and a power. The teams add up their strengths, and the team with the higher strength total wins. The winning team gets to split the loot available that round. The twist comes from the powers of the characters, which can modify the strengths of the characters. This is not a team game. Every round you can pick a different team to be on. You choose who to partner with. Teams are temporary alliances. This is still an everyone for themselves game. 

When we playtested, my designer friends said this was a very Chok Sien game (Chok Sien is my given name). I wonder whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. It can be good in that I've developed a signature, a unique style that people can recognise. It can also be a bad sign if it means I've become restrained to only making a certain type of game. There is still a lot I need to learn and explore and I don't want to limit myself. 

That day I got to try a game from Faris about making batik. In Malaysia, batik is painted cloth which uses wax in the painting process. The batik game is a heavy Eurogame. Not many Malaysian designers make such games. 

The game is played over four rounds, and each round you get to perform four actions. The game felt complicated when I listened to the rules, but now that I have played it, I have a much better idea of the overall process. This is a game with polyominoes and a big part is about fitting them into grids. The polyominoes are batik cloths in different styles. In general, you collect batik, and then you place them in three different areas. As you fill the grids in these different areas, you will score points, increase your storage capacity, unlock workers (a resource type), gain new abilities, and also gain new ways of scoring points. 

This is the central game board. The seven rows are seven different action types you can perform. Within a round, you will choose four to perform. 

This is the player board. Part of it is your storage area. You also keep track of your special powers and extra scoring criteria here. You place polyominoes in the two grids to increase storage and to unlock workers. The polyominoes in the game reminds me of Uwe Rosenberg games. The overall game reminds me of Vital Lacerda designs. There are many interwoven parts and you need to know how to balance your progress in each area. I am keen to see how this game develops and to see the eventual final product. 

Another game I managed to try was the lion dance game from Darryl Tan. This was the champion in the ButtonShy global game design competition last year. It is great fun. It is a 2-player drafting game in which you draft cards from a central pool to build your own lion dance performance platform. The cards are pillars and you collect and order them to build your platform. The pillars have various powers and properties. There are a few different ways to score points. As you build your platform, your lion can start dancing on top of the pillars. The further it moves across the platform, the more points it will score. This is just one of the ways you score points. 

This is an 18 card game and it's pretty fast. The game ends when the pool runs out of cards. You want to score as many points as you can in all the categories, but it's not possible to work on everything. This is the delicious part of the game. You want to do just a bit more, but you only have that many turns. You have to make those difficult choices. What to work on, what to let go of. I find the game mechanisms quite fitting. This is not a mechanism-first game looking for a theme to paint on. 

ButtonShy will be publishing this game. Now Darryl is still doing development and tuning. He's also working on an expansion for it. The expansion will probably be released at the same time as the base game. This is also a game I am looking forward to. 

Meeples Cafe spring cleaning sale

Meeples Cafe in Kuala Lumpur is doing a spring cleaning sale, 8 - 19 Jan 2020.

boardgame locations in Malaysia

I recently discovered this list of locations related to boardgames. This includes boardgame and hobby shops, boardgame cafes. This may be handy if you are in Malaysia. https://foursquare.com/grayle/list/tabletop-gaming-stores--venues-in-malaysia

boardgaming in photos: gaming at Meeples Cafe and at work

15 Nov 2015. Shee Yun (10) saw Michelle and I preparing to play Russian Railroads. She seemed curious, so I asked whether she wanted to play. She said yes. This was my first time playing with three players. We used a different side of the board from the 2-player game. There were more work spaces we could use.

This time my strategy was centred around industrialisation. I had built all five factories (purple arrow-shaped tiles along the bottom edge of the player board). I had also activated my second industry marker - the purple hex-shaped wooden pawn. I didn't put much effort in railroad track building. The best I had was a grey track, i.e. Level 2.

The red, yellow and green pawns are player workers. The blue pawns are temporary workers you can fight for every round. The space you need to use to recruit them is on the left side of this photo - that space showing two blue men.

22 Nov 2015. Machi Koro Deluxe, which contains both the main expansions, Harbor and Millionaire's Row. The dice are different. The side showing a mountain means 1. There are renovation markers now. They are needed due to the powers of the cards in the Millionaire's Row expansion.

The Demolition Company is a card from the Millionaire's Row expansion. If your die roll activates it, you earn $8 but must demolish one of your landmark buildings. This is a building you need to be careful with, lest you demolish any expensive landmark building.

The Moving Company lets you, or rather, forces you to give a building to another player. This can be quite annoying to your opponents if you combo it with many Loan Offices. When you build a Loan Office (for free!), you gain $5, but each time it is activated, you need to pay $2. However if you conveniently give the Loan Office to an opponent, you will never need to pay the $2. The obligation is passed to your opponent. Evil! Both of these are from Millionaire's Row.

Look how much fun Chen Rui is having with these new evil cards in Millionaire's Row.

I have played many games of Machi Koro with my children. Since adding the Harbor expansion, I have never won. They like to gang up on me, but in this game there aren't that many ways you can collaborate. However I still do lose to them all the time. It was only after we added Millionaire's Row that I started winning again. Comparing the two expansions, I think Harbor is almost necessary if you want to play regularly. It makes the game more variable because of the market mechanism (not all buildings are available all the time). The added cards also mean more variety. Millionaire's Row adds some more cards, some of which are a little quirky. It feels less necessary, but if you've played a lot of Machi Koro, spicing it up now and then is always good. The way we played - mixing all cards in - may not be ideal, because there are probably too many card types, which makes collecting the same cards difficult. The cards may be a bit too diluted. I'm too lazy to sort out the cards though, so I'll probably continue to play this way. We still have lots of fun this way.

This was worth taking a photo. It had been such a long time since the previous time I won a game.

27 Dec 2015. The children suggested FITS, which I hadn't played for a long time.

The numbers not covered are worth victory points. The solid circles not covered will entail a penalty.

3 Jan 2016. I brought the family to Meeples Cafe. It had been a long time since our previous visit. Log from Meeples Cafe always keeps for me a complimentary copy of every issue of the Spielbox magazine. By then I had accumulated quite a stack. Our visit was a belated birthday celebration for Chen Rui, who is a December baby. It was very crowded when we got there. Thankfully we didn't go too late. Our table was one of the last few remaining.

The children wanted to play Cloud 9. We had played this before quite a few times. I don't insist on trying out new games, but I do try to avoid playing games we already own. We might as well play at home. Cloud 9 is an excellent family game. I recently tried its new incarnation Celestia. I prefer the older game, because it is simpler.

The children asked to play Dixit too. Now we do own this game, but their argument was the cards in this set was different from the ones we had. They did have a point, so we played. I (green) did very poorly. I think I came last.

Forbidden Island was another game the children suggested. We had played this quite a few times. We played twice this day, beating the easy difficulty level without breaking a sweat, but losing when we moved on to the normal difficulty level. It was quite exciting though, and in my opinion much more fun than the easy game.

This was the first game which we won.

This was the second game. The helicopter pad was in a far corner, on the right, which was a pain. It kept flooding, and we had to keep going back to pump the water away. The moment it sank, the game would be lost immediately because we would not be able to leave the island. In this photo it was flooded again, i.e. showing the blue side.

We lost the game. The water level reached the deadly stage before we could retrieve all four artifacts. The flooding had cut off our path, and we had to rely on special abilities or specific cards to get to the helipad.

The game we enjoyed most this trip was Coconuts. The idea is to use a catapult (in the shape of a monkey) to launch rubber coconuts into plastic cups. The game starts with many cups in the centre of the table. Whenever you successfully land a coconut in a cup, you claim that cup and place it on your player board. The goal is to claim 6 cups to build a pyramid. This game is harder than it looks. The catapults are not precise, and the rubber coconuts often bounce. Sometimes a coconut drops into a cup only to immediately bounce out. Sometimes it lands in a different cup after bouncing out. It's crazy!

Chen Rui taking aim.

Scoring is exhilarating.

17 Jan 2016. I played Zombie Tower 3D with the children.

21 Jan 2016. Teck Seng wanted to learn Catan, so I brought it to the office. Teaching and playing this game again reminded me how wonderful it is and why it has become a classic. In our game Eva and Teck Seng competed fiercely for the longest road trophy. On one of Eva's turns, she built three roads at one go to overtake Teck Seng and wrestle the trophy from him. Intense! I started upgrading my settlements to cities earlier than the rest, which helped me gather more resources. By the time the others started doing it, ore and grain became very scarce. I was fortunate to have started doing upgrades when supply was higher than demand.

I was green. I had two separate regions, and I never linked them up.

22 Jan 2016. I brought 10 Days in Asia to the office also upon a colleague's request. I told them this was geography mahjong. The game we played was very funny. Teck Seng and Xiaozhu played as a team. With two heads thinking, they should be doing better than the rest of us. However they kept making mistakes and tripping over each other that they ended up doing worse than everyone else. We kept hearing them exclaim oh no we should have played this card, or oh gosh we should have picked that card, or why did we place this card here? It was more entertaining than a comedy show.

We got to a point where three players were one card away from winning (excluding the duo of Teck Seng and Xiaozhu naturally). It was nail-biting. We exhausted the draw deck and had to reshuffle the discard piles to form a new draw deck. At that time I could sense I was not likely to win. I needed a China card or a Thailand card, but I hadn't seen them so far, so they must be in the hands of the other players. Sure enough, I later learned that Teck Seng and Xiaozhu had both the China cards, and Ruby the Thailand card. Ruby was the one who announced victory. However when she showed us her 10-day itinerary, we spotted a mistake. She had planned to take a train from Thailand to South Korea, but the train networks of these two countries didn't overlap. Ooops. Eventually we decided it was a tied game with no winner.

I realised I had taught one rule wrong. When you draw a card from the draw deck, if you don't like it, you can immediately discard it. I had taught my colleagues that they must replace it with another card in their hands. Sorry...

family boardgame outing: Meeples Cafe

Chen Rui (8) asked me to bring her to Meeples Cafe to play, so I planned an outing on a Sunday afternoon. We played for almost 5 hours straight, and we had a great time! I think we picked the right games too - all were very engaging. Michelle was initially planning to sit out for a few games, but ended up playing all the way.

18 Jan 2015. Cloud 9, a game about pushing your luck, hoping to score more points while risking what you have gained so far. We have played this before, we had fun revisiting. Chen Rui kept accidentally showing her cards to Michelle, because she sat next to her.

Shee Yun (9) holding donut-shaped cards from Baker's Dozen (a.k.a. Friday the 13th, Poison). You can see these cards are rather small. They are round too. A pain to shuffle.

Alhambra, Spiel des Jahres winner in 2003. On your turn you normally either collect currency cards, or spend them to buy a building to expand your palace. At certain points in the game you score points depending on how many buildings you have compared to other players in each of the six colours. Surprisingly our youngest player Chen Rui won this game. This is not exactly a simplistic or luck-heavy game. I think she won partly due to Michelle guiding her. She was quite lucky too in often having the right amounts to make precise payments, allowing her to take extra actions.

There are currencies in four colours. Vendors only accept specific currencies.

I didn't think much of Alhambra when I first played it many years ago, but this time I quite enjoyed it. It has some long-term strategy because of the area majority competition, but most of the time you make tactical decisions. The board situation (currency cards available, buildings available) keeps changing, and when a good opportunity presents itself, you usually want to grab it. You want to buy buildings while paying the exact price as often as possible, because of the extra action that gives you. Maybe it's because of this tactical nature, I could play in a relaxed manner.

This is Shee Yun's palace. Rather small (she came last), but she did have a very tidy wall almost fully enclosing her palace. She was only competitive in white buildings. She had four.

The final score. Chen Rui was yellow, I was green, Michelle red, Shee Yun white.

Pandemic: The Cure, a cooperative game about fighting diseases. Chen Rui was the one responsible to find the fourth and final cure, and she was relieved when she succeeded. The four infection dice on that card on the right means we have found all four cures and we have won.

Guillotine is a silly card game about chopping people's heads off during the French Revolution. I tried to avoid explaining the story in too much detail. We were just claiming cards worth points, not claiming heads worth points. On your turn you claim the first card in the queue, but before you do that you may play an action card, which usually either changes the order of the cards in the queue or does something for game-end scoring.

This can be a queue of customers waiting to be served too, instead of nobles queuing up to be beheaded.

Two of the characters I had claimed. Only some characters have text on them.

Playing Forbidden Island, a cooperative game too. We have played this before, a few times. This time we tried the normal difficulty, and we barely made it off the island with the four artifacts. If we had played just one notch harder, we would have lost. It was tense watching tile after tile get flooded and disappear beneath the waves, as we raced to collect the artifacts.

The island started with 24 tiles, and by now there were only 9 remaining, and 6 of these had started flooding (the blue ones).

Cartagena, a simple yet clever race game, one of Leo Colovini's best known works.

The objective is to get all six of your pirates (escaping prisoners actually) onto the boat at the end of the tunnel.

Chen Rui moving her pirates.

When you play a card, you move one of your pirates to the next empty spot with the same icon as the card. You don't get to draw cards for free. To draw a card, you need to move a pirate backwards to the nearest occupied spot, and then you draw cards depending on how many other pirates are occupying that spot. A spot can have at most three pirates. If the nearest spot behind a pirate is full, he will have to move further backwards.

The boat is getting crowded.