7 Feb 2026. We had a playtesting session at Nasi Kandar Apollo on a Saturday afternoon. I didn’t manage to take photos of every game played, not even every game that I played. I did a rough playtest of one idea I came up with just the day before. I wanted to make a simple card game that can be played on a road trip, needing no table. Everyone has a stack of 5 cards. They are ordered. The highest number cycles back to the smallest. Your deck represents a circle of rooms you will be moving through. Your topmost card is the room you are in. To move to an adjacent room, you either move your top card to the bottom, or you move your bottom card to the top. That means you will move to the next smaller or higher number. I get this idea from Revolver Noir. Every round everybody moves once, and then the active player announces a number. Then everybody shows their room. If you are in a room of that number, the active player takes your card and scores a point for it. You draw a card and insert it at the right place. It’s very simple. The memory element is pretty heavy though. I’m not sure yet whether I will continue to work on this. I playtested this using just a normal deck of poker cards. 

 

 

This is Jon’s money laundering game. The idea is we all run illegal businesses, and we have to launder our dirty money in order to fully use it. Money is victory points. There will be police raids and if you don’t clean your money in time, you may lose your hard earned money. It’s dirty money, but still, it’s hard earned. 

 

 

Qing Ye lost lots of illicit goods several times, due to the unfortunate (for him) timing of the police raids. In this game you have to set up legitimate businesses in order to launder money. Not necessarily laundry shops. Restaurants work too. 

 

 

Faris brought one very pretty and complex-looking game, but I did not get to try it. All of us Malaysian designers are pinning our hopes on him to make it big in Eurogames internationally. He designed Philharmonix. 

 

 

This is Chee Kong’s Slow Life Academy. There are four tracks where you get to advance your markers, and only the players with the highest and second highest markers will score points. There is a value marker you need to advance too, and it determines how many points the leaders score. You have cards numbered from 0 to 3, and you play them simultaneously. Only the highest card gets to advance. If you win with the powerful 3, you only advance one step. However if you win with the lowly 1, you get to advance four steps. If you win with a 2, you advance two steps. I find this quite clever. When you play a 0, you won’t win, but you will advance the value marker. This can present a dilemma. If you give up on a track and don’t want to waste any of your higher cards, the 0 you play will help the winner score more points. 

 

Another fun twist is the tracks wrap around. If the value marker or any of the player markers exceed 8, they go back to 1. If you do too well, you may accidentally end up losing. If the value marker gets pushed too far, it resets to a low value. I find this game promising and I’m looking forward to it. 

 

 

Jon has complained to me several times that he’s not good at designing simple dumb games for the mass market. No it’s not the type of games that seasoned gamers like us enjoy, but I told him he could do it. And he did. This is his haunted house game. It’s a simple push-your-luck game. You flip over cards one by one and you try not to exceed 10 hearts. If you do, you gain nothing on your turn. You can stop drawing cards any time to take whatever you have so far. When the game ends, the player with the most cards wins. The player holding the fiery skull cannot win. If you go bust, you’ll take the fiery skull. Some cards when drawn make the player with the fiery skull lose a card, after which if anyone else has the most cards, the fiery skull is passed to him. The game is very simple and I think this will work well for the casual crowd. I must say I enjoy it too. 

 

 

This is Qing Ye’s Georgetown, about the various historical figures and organisations in Georgetown, Penang. You buy and sell goods, and manipulate the prices to your advantage. You build a tableau which helps you score points. It’s a light strategy game with fun combos. 

 

 

With Chinese New Year (Lunar New Year) coming up, some of us met up for a lousang. Lousang is a Malaysian / Singaporean Chinese thing. It’s a ritual where we wish for good fortune for the coming year. 

 

 

I playtested Pilgrim Poker with some of my BNI friends. They are trainers and coaches like me, and I did a sharing session about how I develop and playtest games. They found it fascinating. It was a good opportunity for me to playtest my game with people new to it. 

 

 

Jetta is a trainer friend from Hong Kong. I visited him in Hong Kong late last year, and I didn’t expect we would meet again so soon, this time in Malaysia. He had a training job here. 

 

 

Jetta likes real-time games. I showed him Escape: The Curse of the Temple. We only did the basic game for our very first game, and we lost rather horribly. I thought we’d do okay since we were both seasoned gamers, and I had played the game before. It was fun to lose. This photo above was for a later game after we added the curses and the treasures. We won this one. 

 

 

 

I showed Jetta Take Time. It’s a little easier as a 2-player game. I enjoy it more with four because it’s more challenging. Still we didn’t always win, even at Level 1. I should play this like a campaign. Find three other people who will accompany me to do this whole thing over several sessions, all 40 challenges from Level 1 to 10. 

 

 

When we played Cat Between Us, we had a perfect tied game. For three consecutive rounds both of us had perfect scores (or purrfect scores), landing exactly where the cat was. So it was a perfect tie. Maybe this game is a bit easier to play with two players too.