Asian Board Games Festival - Malaysia 2026 is happening Fri 7 Aug 2026 to Sun 9 Aug 2026 in Penang. Cili Padi Games will be there. This time I will have two new games, Pilgrim Poker and Malaysian Holidays. Pilgrim Poker will be available at the Cili Padi Games booth, and Malaysian Holidays at the Specky Studio booth. Come play with me if you are in town!  

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

Haratama is a trick-taking game from Japan with a horror theme and great art. Every round, three card values are randomly drawn to become the penalty values for the round. That means if you win these cards you will be penalised. This is a game about scoring as few points as possible. Points are bad.  Most standard trick-taking rules apply. You must follow suit if you can. There is a

  I have been playing many trick-taking games lately. I am not specifically a fan of the genre, but I don't dislike it either. If anyone suggests a trick-taking game, I'm usually happy to play. Torchlit is a trick-taking game which emphasises making predictions. Based on your starting hand, you secretly choose one card as your torch. This number is your prediction about how

Railroad Tiles is from the same designer duo who also brought us Railroad Ink and Dragon Castle. A quick way to describe the game is advanced Carcassonne. This is a tile laying game, and you get to place meeples. But this is not a fair way to introduce the game at all. Say this to people who already like Carcassonne to hook them. This game has its own place and in many ways is

I am expecting my next game from Cili Padi Games, Pilgrim Poker, to be released at the Asian Board Games Festival in Penang, 7 - 9 Aug 2026. I am very excited about this project. This is the first time I am using a Chinese story as my theme.  This is the box cover. Certainly a bold concept from my artist Edwin. I did have some concerns when he first showed me the concept art. I was

Bean to Bar is not your typical Japanese game. When I hear Japanese game, by default I imagine a short, minimalistic and clever card game with few components. Bean to Bar is a complex and heavy Euro style game with many more stuff than just cards. It is a game about making and selling chocolate. You build and run an artisan chocolate empire.  In the game you need to

National Economy is a game from Japan. It is a worker placement card game. It is pretty compact. There are many elements which at first made me think - isn't this just like Agricola? As I played, I soon discovered it is more than that, and less than that at the same time. All in all, a different beast, despite several familiar concepts.  The game is played over 9 rounds. You start

The Kejap Food Game is not available for sale. You can get this as a free gift if you visit Kejap Food (a Malaysian fast food chain) and buy MYR 30 or more of food. While stocks last, of course. This is a simple, real-time game that is played in five minutes. It is a cooperative game. You work together to serve as many customers as you can within the time limit. Before a game starts,

   Rajas of the Ganges is a 2017 game from Inka and Markus Brand, who made the Exit series. It was nominated for and won several awards. It was well received by gamers. I wasn't very interested to try it when it was hot, because it sounded like just another worker placement game, with dice. It was suggested at a recent game retreat, so I joined the game. It turned out to be much more

I visited Kyushu, Japan on a family holiday. Needless to say, being a gamer, I looked up boardgame stores to visit well before the trip, and also took the opportunity to look for games at bookstores, 100 yen shops and such when I was there. I found some games at Don Quijote. Don Quijote is a discount store which sells lots and lots of different stuff. Most of the games I found seemed to be

Dirty Work is a party game from Thailand. This is a simultaneous action selection game, and it is very much about guessing your opponents’ intentions. You are all miners mining gold, contributing to a stash of gold, one nugget at a time. Sooner or later someone will be tempted to steal from the stash. However such thieves can be caught by miners who decide to play guard. So these are the

LUZ is a trick-taking game. The twist here is you can’t see your own cards. You don’t know exactly what cards you have, but you can see everyone else’s cards. However you know the suits of your cards, because the cards have different coloured backs following their suits. At the start of a round, based on knowing everyone else’s cards and the suits of your own, you must predict

DETROIT is a lovely little two player game from Japan. You compete to build three cars. You share a factory floor, where some spaces are common while some are for you only. You have six game pieces, and you need to move them all through the assembly line, in the process combining the top and bottom pairs to form complete cars. Whoever does so first wins. On your turn you roll four dice,

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

Boomerang: Australia works very much like 7 Wonders and Sushi Go. You start with a hand of cards. You pick one and pass the rest left. You keep doing this, and eventually all the cards will be claimed, and you score points based on your set of cards. This is a simple core mechanism. How the game differs from others is how the scoring works.  Every card has several

High Society is a Reiner Knizia game from 1995. I have heard of it so many times that I feel like I have played it before. This is one of the classics from Reiner Knizia that always comes back in print.   This is an auction game. Everyone starts with the same set of money cards, each a different denomination, from $1 to $25. That’s all the money you will have

Legions is a 2-player card game set in the world of Abyss. There are five regions between the two players, and you play cards to compete for dominance in each of these regions. There are two ways you can win. If you manage to capture five banners, you win immediately. Banners only appear on some cards, and it is not easy to achieve this victory condition. If no one achieves this by the

Here's another teaser for my upcoming game Pilgrim Poker. These are the four main characters in the story of Journey to the West. Modern day Master Tang Sanzang sits on a gaming chair and plays a handheld gaming device. I like his intensity. I find it funny. Modern day eldest disciple Sun Wukong is a delivery boy. His Somersault Cloud is transformed into a motorbike. I think it's an

I was back in my hometown of Kota Kinabalu (we call it KK) for the Sabah National Tabletop Con over the weekend of 20-21 Jun 2026. This was my first time exhibiting in my hometown, so it was a meaningful event. This same event was held last year, but unfortunately I couldn't attend. This year it was held at the Sabah Art Gallery. We had many exhibitors from Malaysia and Singapore,