Wongamania - A new offering on my retail page.

Careful observers would have noticed that there is a new product on my retail page.

Wongamania

It's not easy to design and market a game. I tried this myself and I still have a role-playing game on sale on Amazon. Achieving a large print-run can cost tens of thousands of dollars even with the support from government agencies. Being in the gaming community, I know a friends who tried with different degrees of personal success.

Wongamania, a brainchild of Xeo Lye whose blog can be found here,  is an investment game where the aim is to achieve financial independence by accumulating enough money to buy a series of trust funds, all this while you have to fend off attempts by other players to play cards to prevent this from happening.

This game is entertaining and informative, but more importantly, it is an effort from a Singaporean who tried to launch a game into the markets.

What I did notice about the game is that the artwork is also particularly evocative to little kids. I have many games placed on my shelves but my daughter would always pull out this game because the art work appeals to little children.

( Why does my daughter not pull out Squad Leader or Car Wars instead ? A gaming dad might ask. )

Wongamania is definitely a good way to teach kids about the importance of planning for their financial futures and balances the priorities of entertainment and education well.

A fair and balanced review which highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the game along with an explanation of game mechanics can be found here by famous games reviewer Tom Vasel. While the review has both positive and negative elements, I consider it quite a milestone for a Singaporean game to be reviewed by Dice Tower.