by Chok-Sien Hiew

My name is Chok-Sien, and I am an indie designer from Malaysia. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, released in 2024, is my third title. Here's a short but not entirely accurate description: In the game, you play a Blackjack-style hand together. However, this is not a press-your-luck game; it is a game about managing luck by manipulating your opponents.

In more detail, this is how the game works. Every round players take turns revealing a card. As long as the sum does not reach 12, you gain gold. The gold reward increases as more cards are revealed. Eventually the table will bust, and the player who revealed that last card loses gold instead.

Revealing cards is not random. Everyone has three face-down cards before them which they have seen and arranged in ascending order. The twist is that when revealing a card, you may not reveal one of your own. The card must be someone else's or from the deck. You have some information because you have seen a subset of cards, and you know your opponents' cards are in ascending order. Also, maybe they will be willing to tell you which numbers they have...but can you trust them?

Here is the story of this non-press-your-luck game.


From Howl to Abu

The design journey of Ali Baba started with the mechanisms. It did not have a theme at first. For my first prototype, I slapped on a Studio Ghibli theme, with Howl, Sophie, Chihiro, and Totoro making appearances. The bomb — a card that makes you go bust immediately regardless of the current sum — was No Face.

I spent a year developing the game using the Ghibli theme. At the time the game was called "Catch 22" because you went bust when exceeding 22. (I wanted the design to be "better" than Blackjack, thus 22 instead of 21.) The Ghibli character drawings I found and used were cute, but this theme made no sense in terms of gameplay, so I knew I needed a more appropriate theme. One suggestion I received was Jack and the Beanstalk. The game could be about Jack stealing treasures from the giant's castle, and he must do it quickly before the giant returns.

Eventually, I picked Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, but you don't play Ali Baba; you play his cousins. You have been pestering him about how he got filthy rich, so he told you about the secret cave. Now it is your turn to steal treasures, but be quick and don't get caught when the thieves return.

Using the Ali Baba theme meant adding many elements from the Arabian Nights fairy tales. At one point, I had a monkey that looked much like Abu in the Disney movie Aladdin. I still have that monkey in the final version, but it has been tweaked, and I call him Saladin.

This was the first prototype
In the next prototype, I used images from the Internet
My daughter did this version for me
I quite like the Boss she drew
This is the final art done by my friend Edwin Chong, who also did the art for my other games
Keeping It Spicy

One key element I wanted to have in the game was the excitement when drawing a card. All game cards are numbers except for three special cards. One of the special cards is the Boss (formerly the bomb). You can go bust even when you are the start player of a round if you happen to reveal the Boss. (The Boss of the thieves has a stomach upset, so they are home early because they need to use the toilet.) If any player gets the Boss as one of their three hand cards, they must be place it face down on the left, i.e., where the smallest number normally would be. This creates a dilemma for all players as the seemingly safest card on the left might be the Boss.


I added a x2 card, and its value is twice that of the previous card revealed. It is usually bad news if you reveal this card. However, sometimes it can be a life saver. If the previous card is a 0 — yes, there are 0s — then 0x2 is still 0. You are still safe.

Keeping It Simple

One thing I learned from this design journey was how to cut unnecessary complexity to make the play experience smooth and easy. In my earliest version, the gold claimed by players doubled every turn: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. Things became tedious when we needed to make change thanks to a lot of work handling coins. I changed the rewards to 1, 3, 5, 10, 20, 30, 50 etc., which was much easier to manage.

Initially, the sum not to exceed was 22. I made all my cards even numbers because having only even numbers made calculations easier. I thought I was being clever, and it took me a long time to realize I had been unnecessarily fixated on the number 22. If all the numbers were even, I could halve them all and make the math simpler, so the limit of 22 became 11.

Coincidentally, this worked well for my Ali Baba setting. Instead of saying 11 was the number not to exceed, I now said the thieves came back at midnight. "Don't exceed 11" is the same thing as "don't reach 12", but 12:00 midnight makes the story so much easier to remember.


Emergent Gameplay and Experiences

One player dynamic emerged as I developed the game that I had not deliberately planned: Players ganged up on the leader. They learned when to share information to their own advantage. Collectively the players do know a lot of information. What information you share can affect how others play, and ultimately that affects you. Deceit can also come into play. When one player is clearly leading, the others help one another by saying which numbers they have so that they can survive their turns, and when it comes to the leading player's turn, they will be on the brink of going bust. When another player becomes the leading player, the dynamics change.

One complaint that many playtesters had was that the player revealing the fourth card was usually who went bust. In a four-player game, that was horrible because the same guy would always be going bust, which meant the play experience would be poor for them.

I spent much time agonizing over this. In the end, I didn't make any change to deliberately prevent this situation. I knew the reason this happened was that when players hadn't yet grasped the tactics, they were reluctant to share information, and with limited information and safe playing, often the fourth player would be going bust. Only when players understood the usefulness of sharing information and when they learned how to do that skillfully would they have more control in the game. They would be able to manipulate how a round went, as opposed to being subject to the whims of luck.

I knew the game mechanism was sound, but it took time for players to discover the tactics, and only then would they fully enjoy the game. This was a dilemma for me as a game publisher. If the first play experience of a new player was poor, they probably wouldn't buy the game or tell their friends about it. In the end, I decided not to make an arbitrary patch or rule to fix this situation because it would be artificial; instead I dropped hints in the rulebook and game description to help new players discover the tactics. I believe that a big part of enjoying a game is exploring the strategies yourself.

A player experience I deliberately engineered was the curiosity of what would have happened had I made a different choice. In life we sometimes wonder about that, too. What if we had taken a different path in life?

In Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, you regularly make decisions with limited information. Sometimes you are doomed no matter what you do, and sometimes you are safe either way — but you don't know that at the time you are making the decision. Sometimes, your choice does determine whether you win a handsome reward or lose your hard-earned gold. When players go bust, before setting up the next round, they often want to reveal the other card they could have chosen just to see whether they would have survived had they made a different pick. Also to see whether their friends lied to them about what the cards are. Even when they do survive, they are curious, too, whether picking the other card would have been bad. It's a great feeling to know you've narrowly avoided disaster.

One other unplanned effect was discovered only after I received the shipment of games. My game box is unusually thick for a small box card game, and it needs to be that thick because I have fourteen punch boards for the 84 coins in the game. After punching out all of those coins, the box has free space in it, and when I pack away the game, I place the game cards at the bottom of the box, then all the coins on top of the cards before closing the lid. When I open the lid, I am greeted by a chest of gold coins. That is a wonderful feeling.


Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is now released in Malaysia and also available online through publisher Cili Padi Games.

Chok-Sien Hiew