Bansan: A board game inspired by local market cultures in Malaysia

🥕 On your market, set, go!

Purchase Bansan (RM168) from Arts-ED in Malaysia or order internationally from our partner Kohii.

🥦 About Bansan

For 1-5 players, aged 10 years old and up.
Gameplay duration approximately 50 mins. 

Game design by Goh Choon Ean
with a solo mode by Evan Cheah.
Art direction and illustration by Charis Loke.
Production design by Law Hwa Siang.
Content research by Ooi Win Wen and Chen Yoke Pin
Marketing and publicity by Stephanie Kee.
Co-produced by Chen Yoke Pin and Goh Choon Ean.

*****

Bansan (萬山, meaning ‘local wet market’ in the Northern Peninsular Hokkien dialect) is a board game inspired by the multisensory experience of a bustling Malaysian market. Players become market vendors who juggle multiple roles—deal with wholesalers and customers, buy and sell ingredients, cook and serve authentic Malaysian food—“bao ka liao”! Navigate the intricate relationships of a local market as you interact with fellow vendors, customers, wholesalers, and municipal council officers. Taste the chaos and excitement of a pasar as festivals, government policies, and other events come into play!

As seen or heard on

🥕 Jom ke pasar: let’s connect!

Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Board Game Geek for updates, play sessions, and public events! For media requests, bulk orders, and distribution and sales arrangements, please reach out at bansanboardgame@gmail.com.

In the Bansan box

How to Play

The gameplay follows the flow of produce in a Malaysian wet market. You obtain goods from wholesalers to stock your stalls, buy produce to cook and sell local dishes, and manage the waste generated in the market from your activities. 

On your turn, you choose a number of actions in order to optimize how much income you make. The vendor who generates the most money at the end of the game wins. Fellow vendors as well as 40 Malaysian-flavoured events and 54 recipes make a different game experience each time and can either help or disrupt your strategies of becoming the best Bos Bansan!

Review and rate Bansan on Board Game Geek and download the Rulebook as well as the FAQ for further instructions.

Alternatively, the Bansan Rulebook and Bansan Rules FAQ can also be downloaded from our Google Drive.

Events

✨ Bansan On The Road!

Brace yourselves, Bansan enthusiasts — we're hitting the road and taking the vibrant world of Bansan on tour! Embark on an exhilarating journey across 12 locations with the Bansan team as we make our way to Kuala Lumpur, Melaka, and Singapore from our launch in July to the coming months. Free admission—just walk in!

Upcoming events:

✨ Bansan: Rasa-Rasa Pasar Experiential Programme

Immerse yourself in the pasar culture in the game and in real life! Bansan: Rasa-Rasa Pasar is a specially curated experiential programme that includes playing a game of Bansan and a three-hour market exploration activity to get to know a local market. Through this programme, you will interact with and interview market vendors and customers, and create stories about the people, food and practices at the local markets. Building on those stories, you can design your very own Bansan cards and share your collected stories with friends and family!

Watch this reel for an example of our Rasa-Rasa Pasar @ Chowrasta Market, Penang!

A marble table. On it various waste materials and objects from the local market are spread: fruit netting, cardboard, onion skin, leaves, egg cartons. A gel plate, lino inks, and sketchbook lie under the market items.

Impressions of the Market

Bansan combines digital illustration and printmaking in its vibrant visuals. To layer in a feel of pasar shapes and textures, artist Charis Loke collected discarded produce and waste materials from several markets. Using gel plate printing with lino ink, she recorded silhouettes and impressions of these objects: cardboard, chicken wings, fish tails, fruit wrappers, noodles, and more. These prints became patterns and backgrounds in Produce and Stall cards and are also found in the box inlays.

Other game components include Event cards that resemble old calendar pages and player screens designed as Wallets used by different market characters.

The letters BANSAN along with items used to write each of them respectively: cinnamon stick, fish tail, tofu puff, coconut husk, okra, chicken wing.

Making a Mark

The Bansan logotype draws inspiration from the handwritten letters of the market vendors. Due to the fast-paced environment, price menus are often quickly written on PVC or cardboard with markers, resulting in unrefined and irregular letters. Inspired by Charis' approach of using produce to ‘print’ the illustration, hrftype (Sueh Li and Louie Lee) used ingredients from each produce categories to 'write' each letter. To achieve the desired effect of a thick marker pen stroke, they fashioned a brush from coconut husk and even trimmed some produce into square-tipped shapes. The okra lettering was also expanded and digitized into a functional typeface, applied as a display title font for the Market Stalls and Produce Cards.

Who We Are

Arts-ED and LUMA are the same folks who brought you Kaki Lima, the board game about pedestrians navigating and negotiating the use of public five-foot ways in George Town. We’ve been developing Bansan for several years now and are excited to finally release it in July 2023.

Bansan’s development is generously supported in part by the Krishen Jit Fund.

 

Kaki Lima board game components