Meet Malaysia's own board games maker, Mr Ting Sie Bing. Mr Ting may not have exactly masterminded brand new games but his efforts have enabled Malaysian children to play well-loved games, Scrabble, in Bahasa, is one. It's called Sahibba.

He developed the Malaysianised version of Monopoly to enable players to buy properties in Kuala Lumpur and pass through rubber estates instead of Charing Cross in London. All these for the sake of education in the most enjoyable way thinkable.

Mr Ting has chalked up more board games to his merit since he Malaysianised Scrabble - a process which took him four years. Now into games making full-time, with a staff of 15 to help him run the show, he has come out with Saidina (adapted from Monopoly), Digician and travelling mahjong.

Board games are not merely pastimes but a very enjoyable form of education, says Mr Ting. "In word building and digital equation games, for instance, the child not only have fun playing it but along the way learns the vocabulary and arithmetic."

Digician, for example is a game for two to four players and involves addition, subtraction, multiplication and division across and down the board. Recalling how it all started Mr Ting said it began when he noticed some friends playing a game of Scrabble but with Bahasa.

"This simply cannot work out as the frequency of certain alphabets in English words is different from Malay words." Intrigued, he spent about four years to come up with Sahibba (initially marketed as Skreble). Consulting four Malay dictionaries, he compiled a list of frequencies of each letter of the alphabet in about 4,000 Malay words (those not exceeding eight letters).

From that painstaking process, he found that the letters B, K, S, T, P and L occur at a high frequency of 51 per cent and that the vowels (A, E, I, O, U) appear at a frequency of 41 per cent (compared with 36 per cent in English words). "Thus there must be more chips for those letters that occur more frequent," he explains.

Scrabble has only nine A tiles but Sahibba has 24. Unlike Scrabble, the Bahasa version does not have a single for the letters Q, V and X. And letters F and Z are so infrequent that they share only one chip.

Mr Ting was then an industrial training instructor with the Labour and Manpower Ministry, and he ventured into the business of marketing the game in partnership with another. Two years ago, Mr Ting invented a bilingual Sahibba set in which players can play in Bahasa or in English, or both languages at one time, or even one player can play in Bahasa and the other in English at the same time!

As for Digician, he also went through a meticulous process charting process on the frequency of the numbers 0 to 9 for any function (add, subtract, multiply and divide). To test prove then game, he tested it out on schoolchildren in hundreds of games, recording every move made to ensure that all the games can reach a successful conclusion, as the one player who scores at the end of each game is the 'digician'.

Yet another game introduced by his company (Syarikat Permainan Malaysia) last year is the Mind Reader, a game similar to Mastermind except that two people can play against each other simultaneously to decode the secret word or colours and the game can be played for any Romanised languages such as English, Bahasa, French and German.

The most recent addition to his growing list of board games is a travel set of mahjong that can be played without use of a table. There are four wooden racks to hold the pieces together.