EXCERPT: Congrats to a Malaysian-designed game winning BGG’s 2021 9-card PNP contest. Cheers all to Dancing Queen!

Apology for interrupting your Sunday night but I was excited when told a good mate of ours, Hiew Chok Sien (known as hecose in Boardgamegeek) has just won the Best Overall Game in Boardgamegeek‘s recently concluded 9-card PnP Design Contest!

A total of 73 PNP game designs were submitted – and as far as I know, hecose’s entry Dancing Queen is the only one from Malaysia – and among this pool of contenders, Dancing Queen managed to pull away with the following wins!

• BEST OVERALL GAME
• Best Two-Player Game
• Best Rule Book
• Best New Designer

When I started designing this game, I had Love Letter as my muse. It is a microgame with only 16 cards, and it is a design I greatly admire. Dancing Queen turned out to be something rather different, but I tried to apply a number of guiding principles I learned from Love Letter. Every card has a purpose. No card is wasted.

Chok Sien / hecose

A huge Congrats to a fellow Malaysian boardgamer!

While this is Chok Sien’s first submission to any game design competition. Chok Sien’s no newbie to the local boardgame scene. In fact, he started boardgaming – and blogging about boardgaming – even earlier than me! A fitting achievement to an impressive boardgame journey.

We’d also just recently invited Chok Sien to be a contributing author to our humble blog and he has just posted his first post yesterday! What a coincidence! Or perhaps we are acquiring the foresight of the Bene Gesserit.

This is certainly a good start to Chok Sien’s boardgame design aspirations and while my lips are sealed, I’ve been privvy to some of the ideas he has been germinating for a few other designs of his. We are certainly excited to hear more of his future undertakings in the game design space! And without saying too much, let’s say you should keep your eyes and ears peeled to this site. 😛

For more info on Dancing Queen and a link to play it on Tabletopia or Tabletop Simulator, head over to Chok Sien’s blog post here.

Disclosure: Chok Sien is a partner in another related venture of ours Play with Purpose (Malaysia).