My last dynasty on BlogNomic was not really a success. Amid the reasons for this is that the central mechanic - that players collaborate to draw monsters one-third at a time - was never tied into a game formula that functioned in any real way.

This is a shame, as I quite like the idea. I’ve always found exquisite corpses to be a bit of a let-down - you have fun drawing them, but when you’re done all you have is a pile of slightly nonsensical scribblings, which you can titter at for a couple of seconds before setting aside. What I’m looking for is a game that has the Exquisite Corpse system as a base, but then uses the drawings (not necessarily monsters, obviously) in a workable game structure. My own thoughts kept flitting to Dvorak, largely because the principle of drawing your own cards seems to fit, although it may not have the same spontaneity that an exquisite corpse game might have.

Any ideas?

Brendan, Kevan, Holly and I recently found ourselves, as part of a wider festival on a similar theme, playing a game loosely based on Hide and Seek, in which over a hundred participants worked through a series of checkpoints over about ten miles’ worth of the centre of London. It was great fun, although not very hide-and-seeky, and we later found out that the game was slightly rigged to ensure playability.

So far, so good; but later this year, the same people are planning another Come Out And Play festival in Amsterdam (of all places). Participating is definitely on the tiles, but more fun would be to come up with our own Hide-and-Seek-based game and see who we can sucker into playing it. If you read Brendan’s post, then you’ll be able to see that adherence to the classical concept of hide and seek can be as tenuous as you like; some of the games on offer when we played were more closely related to Assassins or your old-fashioned Treasure Hunt than Hide and Seek. The guiding concept actually appears to be that the game must be massive, pervasive, and urban; hiding and seeking are relatively optional.

Any ideas?

Okay, I haven’t played in a year or so, but my recollection of Zombies!!! is basically that you never have enough bullets, health or lives, mathematically, to make it through any serious amount of zombies to the end. Bullets only work half the time and there are far more zombies than bullets, hearts and power-up cards put together. There are essentially two strategies: wait for other people to exhaust themselves clearing a path to the helicopter and then make a break for it, or work cooperatively and mostly still die a couple times. Admittedly these are pretty good strategies for a real zombie outbreak, but they don’t make for a very fun game–it’s more a matter of slog than strategy.

Josh and Kevan have already been discussing an appropriate postapocalyptic twist using the Zombies terrain tiles. What else can we do with it? The building-board-as-you-go could be cool for a tactical wargame, with the “player” tokens controlling armies of zombies (although it’d be tough to remember whose were whose–maybe colored dot-stickers?). Can we combine the figurines with other toys (Dieslinger: Zombies vs. Polyhedrons) or use them as currency?

Hey guys, I know I don’t post here often, but I came up with this game a few days ago at three in the morning and I thought you might like to check it out. I call it ‘Chess Re-Rolled’. I was going to call it Dice Chess, but that already exists and is different.

Equipment:
A chess board
2 tokens
16d6 for each player, different colors

(yes, I know that it is a rediculous amount of dice. I caniballized my Stack set to make it work. Several sets of Yahtzee or another dice game would as well)

Set Up:
Each player sets up their dice in the standard chess configuration, with the numbers on top standing for each type of piece:
1 - pawn
2 - rook
3 - knight
4 - bishop
5 - queen
6 - king
Each player also gets one token.

Play:
Play is as standard chess, with the following additions:
Instead of moving one of your pieces on your turn, you may give your token to the other player to re-roll one of your pieces. The piece remains in its space, but it is changed to a different type of piece depending on the number (as above). You may not re-roll kings, and you may not re-roll if you do not have a token.

Winning:
There are two ways to win.
If ANY of your opponents kings are in checkmate at the end of their turn, you win.
If ALL of your pieces are kings and none of them are in check, you win.

Comments:
I played this several times and enjoyed it very much. Once you memorize the numbers, play is very smooth. I like it because it takes care of everything I don’t like about chess. Perhaps I’m bad at chess, but when I play it seems like it takes forever to get the good pieces out, and once you do they’re captured so quickly that you run out and all you have left are pawns, so you try to get them to the other side of the board and get them promoted, but that hardly ever happens. In Chess Re-Rolled, you can promote those useless pawns immediately (if randomly) and, look at that! They’re already on the front line. If you lose all your rooks, try to roll for some more!
There are a couple of mechanics I find very elegant. The tokens are a simple way to make sure neither player re-rolls too often. Also, there is always a slight risk in re-rolling that you will get a new king and he will be in danger. But, this is offset by the alternate win rule, for those players who wish to ’shoot the moon’, as it were. Since you can’t re-roll kings, as the game progresses you slowly accumulate them, and it is not uncommon to end the game with three kings on both sides.

Let me know what you think.

I’m getting rid of this game instead of moving it with me. I bought it because it sounded really cool. I mean, look at this set of pieces, not counting the game board which contains two embedded sub-boards:

• 54 Virtue Cards
• 9 Flag/Conch Cards
• 18 Wrath Cards
• 40 Karma-Destiny Cards
• 22 Prowess Cards
• 16 Warriors
• 24 Blessing Cards
• 108 Coins
• 6 Game Pieces
• 2 Dice

The Virtue cards are all different: “gratefulness”, “maturity”, “equality” (?), “wideness” (??), etc. The “Karma” cards are like Chance in Monopoly. A lot of thought went into this game.

I would say that too much thought went into the game, actually. It’s only slightly less complicated than the Mahabharata itself. Some of this is unavoidable since one of the points of the game is to teach the characters and plot of the Mahabharata, but there’s got to be a better way to do it. The game is full of one-off mechanics and keys that only fit one lock. There must be a simpler game that achieves the same goals; maybe an RPG (the manual reads like an old AD&D manual, down to the tables) or even a real-time strategy game. Failing that, there must be a simpler game that uses these cool Wrath Cards and Virtue Cards.

The game isn’t on BoardGameGeek. I found it in a co-op supermarket in Lawrence, Kansas. You can get it from Lotus Press, or you can take my copy off my hands if you live near San Francisco.

This post goes under “treatments” and “rehabilitations,” because here’s what I’m thinking for conflict resolution in The Things?: Yahtzee!.

Starting conditions: Every player has 5d6 and a hand of at least five cards. Any red card in your hand means you’re a Thing.

Whenever a player declares a conflict (on herself or other players), and assuming that conflict isn’t vetoed, everybody rolls their 5d6. The player with the highest total gets initiative, and describes the stakes of the conflict from his end–basically, “if I win, x happens.” (Ties are broken by a 1-die reroll, player’s choice of die, and three players together can veto anyone’s stakes.) Other players state their stakes clockwise around the table, then everybody gets to reroll as many dice as they like.

After that reroll, you start looking to put your dice in a box. Is everyone familiar with Yahtzee!? You try to make your dice conform to certain “hands,” many of which resemble poker hands, like a full house, four of a kind, etc. There are also catchalls like “total all your 3s” and “Chance,” which is a total of all your dice if they don’t fit into any other category. You can only use any given category once; if you can’t fit your dice into a category at all, you have to put a 0 somewhere.

The first group reroll is a freebie, but subsequent rerolls have a cost–cards from your hand, which go into a pile in the middle, face down. Each die you reroll costs one card, and you must describe a character action to accompany it. Any other player can grab that card from the middle and reroll up to two dice, describing her character’s reaction; in doing so, she takes the risk of becoming infected by the acting player. The cards grabbed for reactions don’t go directly into your hand, but stay face-down until the conflict is ended. All this happens simultaneously–throw or grab cards as you please, or declare that you’re done by putting your hand face-down on the table (on top of the reaction cards you grabbed, if any).

Whichever player gets the most points out of their category (”total all your 3s” is obvious, but a full house is worth 25, and a five of a kind is worth 50) wins the conflict; her stakes come true. Whichever player has the highest end total of dice–independent from the special scoring categories–wins the conflict in-character, and must describe how her character wins (”I block the door”) and how the winning player’s stakes come to pass (”but you go out the window”). These two players may or may not be the same person.

Finally, every player picks up his hand–now including reaction cards–and draws up to five, if necessary, from a deck of all-black cards. Any red card in your hand means you’re a Thing now. If you are a Thing, you can’t use your last red card for a reroll.

a) Does this make sense?

b) How do Things get more than one red card? Maybe there should be one deck of all black cards and one of half red, half black; when drawing back up to a hand of five, players could grab the necessary number of cards from both piles, look at both, decide which one to keep, and put the other one aside in an out-of-play discard pile.

c) Each (pregen) character will have one or two special abilities related to this process–like “Set Your Jaw: use ‘total of all 4s’ as many times as you like” or “Devil’s Luck: you may reroll up to three dice on any reaction.” Those are lame, though. What are some good special abilities?

This is an embrionary idea. It was derived from the idea of grabbing all tokens and cards and whatever from every board game you have around and playing them all together.

In this you’ll be taking two board games and playing them at the same time.

* Rules of each board game are mostly unchanged. You’ll only be adding rules for the interactions between the two games.
* In your turn, you play a turn for each of the mixed games in any order.
* If you win one of the games you win the mixed game. This may change if it proves problematic.

Magic X Settlers of Catan

* Hold your Magic and Settlers cards together. (You could even use proxies and/or cover them with card protectors so they’re all alike.)
* If played as Magic cards, Settlers cards have special rules as written below.
* You can trade Magic/Settlers cards as per the Settlers rules, for either cards in your Magic library or Settlers trade items (I.E. two wheat, one mountain and one Dark Ritual to the bank in exchange for one sheep)

And here are the rules Settlers cards are considered to have if played as Magic cards: They all cost 0 mana to play.

Timber: Green Sorcery. Generate two green mana.
Ore: Black Sorcery. Generate two black mana.
Sheep: White Sorcery. Generate two white mana.
Wheat: Blue Sorcery. Generate two blue mana.
Brick: Red Sorcery. Generate two red mana.
Knight: 2/2 Colorless creature, cost 0.
Road Building: Search your deck for a Land card and put it on play, shuffle your deck afterwards.
Invention: Draw three Magic cards.
Monopoly: Colorless sorcery. Name a card. All players must hand you all cards with that name they possess.

Other than working collaboratively or hiding the last piece, how can any standard jigsaw be made into a (possibly competitive) multi-player game?

Someone was brandishing a deck of Star Wars Top Trump cards at me over the weekend, with every intention of playing it with the given rules, but luckily I had the presence of mind to try the Yahtzee hybrid, which I’ve been percolating quietly since I posted it here.

And it worked much better than I expected. The game itself is still fairly trivial, gambling on the odds that a given random card will beat other random cards, but there turned out to be a lot of humour in the mission narrative - developing little metaphorical representations of scenes that fit the deck’s theme (or were in its film), and seeing how randomly-dealt characters cope with it. Turning over your last card to see who you’re going to have to assign to the high-Dark-Side three-token “torturer” role, and getting an Ewok. Being proud that your Skeleton makes quite a good two-token “head” body-part for your Frankenstein’s monster.

I’ve written the rules up. Am wondering whether the “everyone play simultaneously” mechanic needs tightening to stop people watching and waiting too much (that this didn’t happen when testing it, because nobody was playing fiercely strategically), that a one-token bonus for finishing first might cure that. It works as it is, though.

I don’t know if these were ever popular outside of the UK, but Top Trumps are a commercial variant of War, where you can buy decks of Sports Cars, or Military Aircraft, or Dinosaurs, or whatever else. Each card is printed with a photo and various numerical statistics about its subject, and the game is played in exactly the same way as War, except that the winner of each round chooses which stat to compare for the next one.

(So it still has as little strategy as War, the only real difference being that you aren’t necessarily sure how strong a given stat is, until you’ve played the deck through once. Although even then, it still needs some memory - that 200mph might be a good “Top Speed”, but, unless you know for sure that it’s the fastest card in the deck, you won’t know the exact odds of your opponent’s card being better or worse than it.)

Top Trumps were popular in school playgrounds of the 1980s, and have been experiencing a nostalgic resurgence over the past few years, with various decks being brought out based around modern films and television series; Lord of the Rings, Buffy, The Simpsons, and things. But they all have the same boring old rules. No extra, advanced set for players who aren’t six years old. I imagined there’d be some alternate rules online somewhere, but all the fan sites I’ve found seem more enthused by the idea of TV-themed decks existing, than being playable.

What games could you play with a set of pre-printed cards that each had a list of numerical stats? (Perhaps assuming that powerful cards are balanced in an interesting way, which is often the case; that a card with unbeatable Intelligence might have a low Strength, and vice versa.)