How Malaysian Tabletop Studios Are Turning Local Folklore Into Global Card Games

If you're building a portfolio aimed at the TCG and tabletop market, this is a market signal worth noticing — small studios are quietly commissioning illustrators who can capture culturally specific imagery without losing readability at card scale.

The games worth pulling apart

The Faculty of Fun team — businessman Logan Ghanesh, lawyer Amarveen Malairaja, photographer Ravin Shanmugarajan, and 32-year-old veterinarian Nyanavelan Sivapalan — already have a hit with Nasi Lemak: The Game, a two-to-five-player card game where players compete as stall owners, collecting ingredients and sabotaging opponents as they race to complete five packs of nasi lemak before the deck runs out. Their follow-up, Roti Canai: The Game, is another two-to-five-player card game built around dice rolls, customer orders, and bluffing. According to the report, the team has said the goal with both food-themed games is to make something simple and relatable to Malaysians while giving foreigners an accessible entry point into the culture.

Separately, 38-year-old educator and Specky Studio co-founder/CEO Buddhima Tham has built his catalog around learning-through-play. Pick Eat is a nutrition-themed card game where players combine food cards into the healthiest meal, a concept born during the Covid-19 Movement Control Order when raw food supply chains were disrupted. His Chinese Flower Card draws from the 24 Solar Terms, asking players to collect season-based flower cards for the highest-scoring set. Their work has been showing up at events like Any Games Con, the Asian Board Games Festival, and the recent All Aboard showcase.

What this tells you about the brief

Here's the part I'd flag if we were sitting across from each other at a portfolio review: every one of these games leans on artwork to do the heavy lifting before a single rule is read. A player in Tokyo or Toronto has to recognize a wok, a banana leaf, or a specific festival motif at thumbnail size. If your piece falls apart at two inches, the box never makes it past the shelf.

That's why these regional creators are worth paying attention to. They're not hiring generic fantasy illustrators — they're commissioning art that has to read instantly as Malaysian, and that's a very specific brief. Strong silhouette, locally grounded iconography, color palettes that pop against busy convention tables, and characters whose food, clothing, and props tell the whole story. It's the same problem every TCG brief eventually lands on, just with a culturally specific lens.

What to do this week

If you're serious about the tabletop market, don't wait for a global publisher to find you. Pick up Nasi Lemak: The Game, Roti Canai, Pick Eat, or Chinese Flower Card if you can get your hands on any of them, and study the art direction the way you'd study a Magic: The Gathering set. Notice how the food is illustrated. Notice where the silhouette stays clean and where it gets muddy. Notice which pieces survive at card scale and which only work on the box.

Then do the uncomfortable thing: shrink your own portfolio pieces down to playing-card size and ask whether your glazing, your gradients, your fine linework survive the transition. If they don't, you've just found your next study. That's where the growth lives — and it's exactly what a commissioning editor at any of these small studios is quietly hoping you'll show up with.