boardgaming in photos: Rumble Nation, dnup

I played the physical version of Rumble Nation. This is a minimalistic area majority game. I normally dislike area majority games, but this one is just so clever. It's a game from Japan, and the setting is Japan too. 

You roll three dice to determine what options you have on your turn. You must use two of the dice to choose the region you will place your cubes, and the third dice determines how many cubes you will place. You are somewhat restricted in what you can do, but you do have meaningful choices throughout the game. I played this in KK with Buddhima and Jon. This was Buddhima's copy. 

Now that I have added Malaysian Holidays to my list of published games, I need to update this group photo. My next game Pilgrim Poker is coming out soon too, so this group photo will need to be updated again soon. 

I played the physical version of dnup. I must say it is much better playing this in person compared to playing in online async mode. This doesn't work so well in async because you don't remember well what has been played before. You break your session down to many small turns over several days. dnup is much more fun with table talk and discussions. You are able to better gang up on the leader. 

Reference card showing the four options on your turn

Notice the cards are rounded only at two corners

That day we playtested Buddhima's upcoming game called Change. I have played this before and this was a game I already wanted to buy after the first try. Buddhima has been a little worried about the timing of publication for his game, because it shares a similarity with SCOUT, dnup and Panda Spin. It too has cards which have different numbers at the two ends. You will also rotate your cards and change their values. After dnup, we played Change, and I am confident it delivers a different play experience compared to other games which shares this rotate concept. It requires a different strategy. 

This is Jon's worker placement game, about Grab Food and Lalamove delivery services. You prepare and deliver food, or you deliver items. In game design Jon is heading towards slightly more complex games. Not yet heavy games, but around light-medium to medium weight. 

One challenge Jon presents in this game is storage for goods. You can exceed storage temporarily within a round, but you need enough storage space to be able to carry over goods to the next round. To increase storage you must recruit, and once you recruit, your salary cost increases permanently. 

This is the worst starting hand in Mahjong Rummy. I don't have a passport - a straight flush meld of at least 3 tiles. Without a passport I can't play. I have already lost in the first round of play. Now that's player elimination. I can heap on tons of complaints as a modern gamer, but this is just a traditional gambling game and people have fun with it. There is some skill involved but it is mostly luck. You play this to spend time with family and friends, not for good game design. 

Now that younger daughter Chen Rui is back in Malaysia for her summer break, we have started playing our Regicide Legacy campaign. We are on Mission 9 out of 12 now. It has been an interesting ride so far. I am amazed by the amount of work they have put into creating this campaign. There is so much art created, and much of it is only used in one mission. If you beat the mission on your first try, you will use this art only once. Playing the campaign is playing many variants of Regicide. There is a story which unfolds as you progress. Your deck changes. You get to play with different powers. You fight different bosses. Some of the missions took us many attempts to beat, we also managed some with just one attempt. 

I have played a second game of Quartermaster General: East Front. This time I played the Soviet Union and Han the Axis. Han managed to get to Moscow, and even Vologda. At one point (above) I managed to encircle his forces, cutting off his supply lines. I gradually pushed back, but by game end I did not manage to reach Berlin. We were tied in points, and I lost on tiebreaker. What a close game! 

We played Soothsayers again. It's July now, and I'm still pretty confident this will be my favourite new-to-me game in 2026. 

I only recently discovered that the art is from a real tarot card deck, and not art created specifically for the game using the style of tarot cards. 

We played Madeira. I did horribly because I have forgotten many of the rules and I didn't relearn it properly. I want to blame BGA for making playing blindly too easy, but I know it is my own fault. 

I had a session with Jon, Ji Li and Buddhima. It's great to meet up in person to play. Nowadays I play more games online than in person. I should do physical sessions more. 

For probably less than 24 hours, the designer diary of Malaysian Holidays was on the front page of BGG. Of course I took a screenshot. 

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. 

Yuhang boardgame retreat June 2026

The retreat didn't actually have a name. I call it the Yuhang retreat simply because it was organised by Yuhang. This was a private event of a group of boardgamers in Kuala Lumpur coming together for 3 days of gaming, staying at an Airbnb at Taman OUG. I didn't know Yuhang well before this. It was Jon who asked me whether I wanted to join. It was only after I had signed up that I found out I know several of the others who were going, like Julian and Tim. 

We started Friday afternoon. Some already checked in by 3pm. I went in the evening. The original idea was all of us would stay at the Airbnb, so it would be three days of just boardgames, eat and sleep (and shower). However some of us (including me) decided to go home for the shower and the sleep. My home was only 20 minutes away. We went out for some meals, and ordered delivery for others. The latest I stayed up was about 2.30am. Some of them played till 5am. I don't have that kind of stamina anymore. In the mornings we started around 10am, and some started around noon. 

I realised I hadn't played High Society after so many years in the hobby. This is a well regarded game from Reiner Knizia. 

We brought out Splotter's Horseless Carriage. I own a copy but I have only played it once before. It was a three player game. I think this game is best with five. At the retreat we did a four player game, using Julian's copy. I had forgotten many of the rules, so he did the teaching. Look at all these folks looking so serious staring at their car factories. You know this is a tough game. 

My factory

Julian had some 3D printed accessories which were very helpful. The slots for the white bars help secure them, in case the players accidentally knock these boards. 

Game in progress

In this particular game we had much demand for sedans, and some for pickups. We had very little demand for sports cars. 

I made a mistake when expanding my factory. I had one mainline producing sedans. I wanted to set up another so that I could produce and sell more cars. I think this is the minimum if you want to be in contention to win. It is something you need to plan for far ahead. If you look at the expansion board at the lower left, you will notice that the entrance is facing right. I had wanted to place another mainline in the lower right area, so that it could be connected to both the group of darkest grey tiles and also the group of light grey tiles. This way, the new mainline would meet many of the requirements expected by consumers. However my poor expansion tile placement from earlier on stopped me from adding the next expansion tile here. The doorway facing right prevented me from attaching an expansion tile here. I gave up, and I placed a ton of planning tiles on the right, on the other expansion tile I didn't have any use for now. This gave me an advantage in choosing turn order. I couldn't do much else with that expansion on the right anyway, so I might as well utilise it. 

We had more demand than we could fulfil. I think that means we were not doing a good job. Most of the demand was either very cheap cars or very expensive cars. 

Julian has this nice 3D-printed tray which I find super convenient. 

Late in the game, I was on my way to come last when I realised I might be able to redeem myself a little bit. At the time Jon was still behind me, but he was catching up. I added a mainline to produce pickups at the top left. I fought for turn order so that at least for one round I had access to all the highest techs at the time, and I could make an up-to-par pickup. This didn't earn me much money (i.e. points) since it was quite late in the game, but at least it helped me hang on to third place. Barely. Sorry Jon. Lesson learnt - don't give up easily. 

If you look closely at the photo above, you will find another bad mistake. In Horseless Carriage, those tiny arrows are important and you want to leave space to place them next to car part producing tiles. One car part you produce can give you several features, if you have access to the tech. However for each feature you must be able to place the matching arrow. I had not planned for this well, and later in the game when I was able to access the higher techs, I could not place the arrows, so I missed the opportunity to improve my cars. 

Joon Lam (blue) and Julian (red) had a close fight, and so did Jon (green) and I (yellow). Jon and I were far behind the other two. 

Julian, Joon Lam, me, Jon

We had friends who came for only part of the retreat. In total we had maybe 18 attendees, and at any one time I think the highest player count we had was around 14, i.e. three tables. 

I did not play this. I just saw others playing it. I think Marc brought this. He and Joanne came all the way from Johor to join the retreat. 

So colourful. 

A jigsaw puzzle! 

Captain Sonar was a game I brought. I have wanted to play this again for some time but it has been hard to find the right occasion and to get enough players. I'm glad I got to experience the excitement again. 

Some of the whiteboard markers that came with the game had dried up. Thankfully I brought along some extras. I was the radio operator on my team, and I thought I did pretty well figuring out the position of the enemy submarine. However when they used silenced movement, it threw me off and I got confused. At one point I thought they were at the exact same position as us. I couldn't ask my captain to shoot, because the torpedo would damage us as well. The opponent sub managed to track us, and soon destroyed us. 

This is Jon's prototype - Foundations of Rome. I have seen this game go through several iterations. It is like watching your friend's child grow up. I keep telling him this game is better than Castle Combo. He started designing this game before Castle Combo was released. These two games look similar, because you are also playing cards into a 3x3 grid. I found Castle Combo so so. Nothing really grabs me. I like that in Foundation of Rome you need to plan carefully how to upgrade your buildings. If planned well, they give you great rewards. You will be placing people on the buildings. People are one of the ways you score points. 

Foundations of Rome (prototype)

I played a physical copy of Castle Combo for the first time. Prior to this I have played it several times on BoardGameArena.com. 

I went for the money bag strategy, collecting many such bags, and trying to amass a healthy amount of money. Castle Combo is hugely popular now. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It's a simple and accessible tableau-building game. I am not keen about it because it doesn't offer me anything particularly new or interesting. Jon loves this game. I realise Jon and I disagree on so many games. Maybe we chat often so we discover many games we disagree on. We do agree on many games too. Or maybe I'm just a hard-to-please. 

Another one of Jon's prototypes I played was On Three. This is a two-player game which uses poker hands. I really like it. It's thinky and compact, and it uses just a normal deck of playing cards. I told Jon this is his Regicide. 

Samurai Spirit was another game I brought. I have fond memories of it. It is a challenging cooperative game. We did a six-player game. We made it to round 3, but unfortunately we lost because we were short of one doll icon. All the villager families were killed by the bandits. Tragic!

Joon Lam asked me whether I brought my prototype Pilgrim Poker. I did. I didn't intend to push for getting it played. I wanted it to be there on standby. If the opportunity arose and people wanted to take a break from heavy games to play a light one, I could bring it out. I hadn't expected that it would be specifically requested. 

We had great fun with it. In one particular round, I saw that Julian had a 13 (the highest card), and Joon Lam a 12. This would be difficult for me to win. The other cards were middling. Julian issued a Side Bet against Joon Lam. That made me go hmmmm.... Julian didn't know he had the 13. The only reason I could think of for him to go against such a strong card was I must be holding the special card (4 - Zhu Bajie) which made the lowest card win instead of the highest. Only then would the 12 be a weak card. This round we did several times of Side Bets and Raises. Eventually both Julian and Joon Lam folded. I had raised the bet amount to $10 (the max). I also had a Side Bet against Chan, at $10 as well. Now Chan had a special card too (10 - Sun Wukong). He did not fold. Win or lose, his bet would be doubled. I felt confident I could beat him, because I was pretty sure I had the 4. When it was time to reveal our cards, I was stunned. I did not have the 4! I had a 12. I panicked for a split second because this was out of my expectation. Then I felt relief. I still won because 12 beat 10, and I won a lot of money from Chan because of his special character. He had to pay me extra. That was a painful loss for him. 

We discussed after that round ended. Julian explained that he was just bluffing when he initiated a Side Bet against Joon Lam. At the time, both of them were leading, and both had a lot of money. So for Julian to issue a $10 Side Bet against Joon Lam wasn't a big deal. Julian wanted to intimidate and confuse Joon Lam. I'm happy that hardcore gamers enjoy Pilgrim Poker. I try to make my games accessible to the casual crowd, and sometimes this means sacrificing gamers. So I am glad my game is interesting enough for them too. 

Lifeboats is one of the most colourful games I played at the retreat. 

This is a noisy game with much politicking. I will write more about it in a separate post. 

Julian is a big fan of Obsession. He has a very nice insert set for it too. I am amazed by how well designed these 3D-printed custom inserts are. 

Sticheln (1993) is a trick-taking game that's more than 30 years old. I've always enjoyed it. I think the latest version is called Stick 'Em. There is also a version called Picante. It introduces some interesting twists, and they make the gameplay highly strategic. At the start of every round, everyone chooses a pain colour. During the game, every card you win gets you only one point. Every card in your pain colour that you win costs you points, based on its card value. This can be very painful. With four players, the card value goes up to 12. Winning one 12 in your pain colour will cause you to lose 12 points. You will need to win three tricks to recover from that. So you play this game very carefully, doing your best not to win cards in your pain colour. This can be difficult, because of another unusual rule. For every trick, any colour which is not the lead colour is a trump colour. That means if someone leads a trick with your pain colour, you'd better have a small card in your pain colour so that you can avoid winning this trick. Or you hope someone else who has a different pain colour wants to win it for himself and will play a card of a different colour. The tactics in Sticheln take a little while to get used to, and you will experience pain in the process (my friends can attest to it). The game looks simple, but the implications of these little twists are many. 

When they played the game, the first comment was this was obviously a pretty old copy. Some of the card edges had yellowing. Not exactly in bad shape, but the signs of age showed. 

Xiu Yi, Yuhang and Chan. Some of them declared this the best trick-taking game they have ever played. I'm glad I introduced the game to them. We played this on the very last day of the retreat, when we had a smaller group. We were too tired to play any more heavy games. 

One other game that was a pleasant surprise for me was Rajas of the Ganges. This is a pretty well known game, and I certainly have heard of it before. I did not have much interest to try it, because it sounded like just another worker placement game. Now that I have played it, yes, indeed it is a worker placement game, and it doesn't have any mechanism which is particularly innovative. However I found myself enjoying it a lot. I will need to think about why before I write more about this game. 

I played 13 new-to-me games throughout the retreat. I will later write about them all. Gosh this one retreat is giving me a lot of homework. 

This is the kind of retreat that makes you feel you are 30 years younger and still doing crazy stuff with your immature schoolmates. We were still in Kuala Lumpur and not some remote mountain, but the three days away from all other activities and worries, being able to spend time with friends who are equally mad about boardgames, playing and discussing and laughing, have been wonderful.