A thought experiement with Tutankhamen

Watching my son play with Piecepack made me think about how the way he was putting the tiles in a row reminded me of That's Life, a game that I think is sorely under-rated. But we have a copy so I don't need to reinvent that wheel.

But then I found myself thinking about Tutankhamen, which was one of Knizia's earliest designs. I haven't owned it in years and I haven't played in even longer. But I do remember it :P

You could probably make a simplified version of it with the Piecepack so I decided to do it as a thought exercise.

In Tutankhamen  you create a trail of tiles with the far end ending at the pyramid and a big mask tile that serves as a wild symbol. You can move your pawn forward as many spaces as you choose but you can never move backwards. You collect the tiles you land to create sets.

Here's the twist and what require some changes with Piecepack. You're aren't collecting for points. You're collecting to discard coins and the winner is whoever gets rid of them first.

Here's my idea. You shuffle the coins in one pile and the two of each tile in the second pile. You then form a trail randomly placing six coins, symbol side up, then one tile symbol side up and so on. At the end of the trail, place all four dice. Everyone gets one pawn of their very own.

You fall the same basic idea of Tutankhamen  You move your pawn as far as you choose but you can never go back. And you claim every coin and tile you land on (but not pass over)

Here's the first big difference. You are scoring points with the coins counting as one symbol and the tiles counting as two. HOWEVER, we're using the Coloretto style scoring. You use a triangular number sequence (1,3,6 etc) and your lower two symbols are negative points.

The second difference is the game end. The game ends when someone reaches the dice. They randomly draw one die and roll it. They add that number of symbols to their collection. Could be big, could be small, could get them lots of points, could totally mess them up.

Frankly, I see a lot of potential problems with this revision of Tutankhamen. For one thing, it has less than half the tiles of the original game. Only four symbols could make each layout easy to solve, particularly if people don't try to compete for the same symbols. The game kind of counts on people being jerks. And while the dice at the end are designed to create uncertainly and brinkmanship, they could be so swingy that they decide the game by themselves.

Honestly, Tutankhamen isn't a bad game but it's not a game I've missed playing. My Piecepack variation needs a lot of test playing before it's balanced and I'm frankly not interested enough in doing that :P

Still, it was fun to think about it.

The creativity of toddlers with board games

Slowly but surely, I am continuing to expose our son to board games. At this point, it's concentration level still pretty much keeps us in the category of dexterity games, matching games and simple versions of Slap Jack. Ah, to be one of those parents whose children have mastered Carcassonne with the farmer scoring at six months and out trade their parents in Catan at a year and a half :D

Still, at this point, when I introduce him to a lot of games, the pieces are just toys to him. Games are just a category of toys to him. (Wait a second! Games really are just a category of toys! He's further along than I thought!)

With that in mind, the way that he plays with them as toys can be close to how they are played as games. Katamino, which is basically a set of three-dimensional pentaminos, has long been something I've let him play with. However, in the last couple months, he has started to try and fit them on the wooden board like a puzzle, which is literally one of the ways to play Katamino. (Seriously, it's a great game if you like puzzling things out)

Also, with a heavy heart full of fear, I let him at Blokus Trigon, which is my favorite version of the game (I've gotten rid of the original version awhile ago) After he realized that the pieces will fit into the slots on the board, he began trying to fill the board with the pieces, which is the solitaire variant of the game. I'm now thinking of getting him a used copy of the original game to mess around with. 

It is interesting watching him play with different kinds of games. Quite frankly, with all the different games that you can play with Looney Pyramids, I wouldn't be surprised if he's actually played some by accident. And watching him play with Piece Pack has made me wonder if I could make a version of That's Life with the pieces. Of course, I don't need to since I own it but it was an interesting thought exercise.

How am I doing on not buying games?

As we are nearing October and the last quarter of the year, I'm pausing to assess how I've done with my promise to not buy any new games this year. Particularly since holiday sales could change things, I might as well look now :D

http://www.gnomepondering.com/2017/01/resolving-not-to-buy-games-in-2017.html

When I made that pledge, I gave myself some loopholes. Thrifted games don't count but within reason. Games for the toddler don't count BUT I can't say 'Sure, he'll play Terra Mystica'. I initially said Kickstarter didn't count but I set a small and strict budget. Since then, I changed that to only getting PDF files for PnP from Kickstarter, while still sticking to that budget.

And, of course, print and play doesn't count and is fair game.

So, how have I done so far?

Lets see, I have made a lot of PnP games (a good chunk for my solitaire binder), I've stuck to my Kickstarter budget and only buying PDFs, the doodle has gotten some games and I've gotten thrift copies of Rolling America and Qwixx. And those only squeaked in by being a dollar or so, taking up minimal storage space and being games quick and easy to get on the table.

So, yeah, I'm doing pretty good.

The latest night when we almost had a TPK

Session Ten of the Late Night Lurkers

This was the session where almost had a total party kill come right out of the blue. Plenty of other stuff happened but that's what we are going to remember. Forever. And no one was more horrified while it almost happened as the DM :)

I wasn't able to log in on time (you know, adult life) so I missed our druid getting cured of being a wererat and the party agreeing to help the dwarf city where she was cured by checking out a cursed mountain path that killed everyone who tried to go through it. I joined in at the tail end of a fight with vine blights, which I have never actually encountered before.

(It's worth noting most of us are the unfavored by our Jarl so we are usually sent on nigh suicide missions)

Quick overview from there: we followed the trail of the vine blights to a foul cave where we fought a pack of ghouls, a lone skeleton sentry and two rat swarms. The vine blights and the ghouls were relatively rough fights but not unreasonable.

(I will note that the druid neutralized the rat swarms with an entangle spell. When someone asked if we could set the vines on fire to kill the rats, the DM reasonably ruled that the vines weren't really there and the rats were held in place by magic. If the vines were real, the rats could just scamper through them.

The reason why I note this is I have seen the effects of flavor text argued during games, sometimes in the name of suspension of disbelief. This can be a problem because it can throw off the balance of spells by giving them new limits or additional powers)

Okay, so here it is. We found a treasure chest that had strange runes on it. The dwarf cleric goes over to examine the runes. They turn out to be eyes. It's a mimic, perfectly reasonably and traditional monster.

And it crits on the surprise round and drops the cleric from full to zero before we are in regular rounds. The ranger runs up to protect the unconscious cleric. Misses. The mimic rolls another crit and the ranger is down too.

This is where half of us started talking about beating a hasty retreat. And the druid decided to run up and fight the mimic hand to hand since they still had shillelagh up from the last fight. So my fighter closed as well while the warlock and the elf fighter (whose player had to sign off early so the DM was playing him very defensive) The mimic moved and critted the warlock and then my fighter dropping both of us.

Keep in mind, thanks to Roll20, all of the rolls were in the open. None of the rolls were fudged. The DM was more horrified than any of us. He's been running games for over thirty years and he'd never seen a fight go down like this. We really thought we're looking at a total party kill.

Luckily, the druid found a magic chest that was jumping that turned out to be some kind of magic leash for the mimic. (No, this wasn't the DM pulling a desperate deus ex mechina. He has included special items like this in other encounters.) She froze the mimic and was able to kill it.

Some emergency healing later and no one lost a character. For a little bit, it looked like the characters whose players weren't there would be the only ones left. And we still haven't found whose really in charge of the cave that's turned the pass into a death trap but that's for next session.

A lot happened in the session but the mimic fight is what we are going to remember from it. It is the take away. Even as it looked like we were all going to be rolling up new characters, we all agreed this was going to be a great story. And we will be telling that story for literally years to come.

In total, six players ended up playing during the night, albeit there was only a short time when there were all six of us there. That pushed more of a combat session than a role playing session. Which, in all honesty, is really one of Roll20's strengths. If you want to have a dice free, role playing heavy session (which is a totally cool thing to do), you can just use Skype.

The Captain's Cursed - flawed but captivating

GenCan't Roll and Write Library - The Captain's Curse

The Captain's Curse is an interesting little exercise in trying to loot an island stuffed with pirate's treasure while the island sinks around you. If nothing else, it does a good job ramping up the tension as the game goes by.

Like all the games in the contest, it's a free PnP and, like most of them, construction consists of printing out the player board. In this case, the board shows an island with thirty-six different treasures (six of each type) and dotted lines cutting up the island. In the center is a box with six columns of numbers, one for each type of treasure.

Okay, here's how you play. On your turn, you roll a white die and a black die. You choose one and circle a number of the column and a treasure that matches that column on the island. You have to fill out numbers in order (half are one to six and the other half are six to one)  but you can cross out numbers to reach the one you rolled. 

AND, if you choose the black die, the curse goes off. Choose one dotted line, fill it in, and scratch off all the island that's on the far side of the line, sinking it into the ocean. Some of the lines let you get away with only little pieces of the island but you quickly end up sinking big chunks.

Any uncircled treasures that get sunk are lost forever. If all of a type are gone, you have no choice but to cross off the remaining numbers in that column. 

The first time you roll doubles, you circle that double on a chart on the bottom and you have to use the cursed black die. However, after that, you can cross off that circle to adjust a die plus or minus one.

The game ends when you either sink the island or finish all six columns. Your score is the sum of the circled numbers minus the number of crossed off numbers. You automatically lose if you sink the island but you need at least seventy points to win. There are other accomplishments, like not sinking too much of the island, to get a higher rank.

I have had a lot of fun with the Captain's Curse. The rules all fit together nicely. I use solitaire games for quick mental breaks so it's short and simple format works for me. And the sinking island creates a lot of excitement.

But... I can't help but think that it has a false sense of choices. You're working with really the role of one die, not the bell curve to two. You will always choose the white die if you can. You're going to pick the outer treasures first so you have them before that part of the island sinks. And you're going to follow a fairly prescribed path of sinking the island.

Ultimately, I don't think this game offers as many real choices as it seems to. The dice are going to end up dictating what you do most of the time. The experiences fun but I think, in the long run, there isn't a lot of replay value here.

There are games in the GenCan't Library that have pretty much guaranteed themselves a permanent place in my solitaire binder. The Captain's Curse is probably a short timer though.

Having just said that, I have no regrets trying out the Captain's Curse. Free files with material costs under two cents and it definitely entertained me.

Change, a game system whose games work just as well with regular cards

I probably still have two or three copies of Change, since it was so cheap and it is so small. One copy lived in my bag for a while, in large part because it is the size of a box of matches.

And the idea of Change was one that appealed to me and still appeals to me. Instead of one game, it's three different rule sets for a tiny, special deck of cards. You know, a game system.

Really, given the whole found art nature of James Ernst design aesthetic, you could say that game systems are his speciality. In many ways, that has so far culminated with the Pairs deck.

But Change was a very early approach to a game system in the world of Cheapass Games. And, I really hate to say it, it shows.

It's a deck of fifty cards. There are no suits. Instead, there are ten 1's, 3's, 5's, 7's, and 10's. They are decorated with cute pictures of the Fridey's zombies and done up to look like paper money. It's card stock, which might have the word card in it but doesn't make for good cards but this is Cheapass we're taking about.

The games comes with three rules sets: Make Your Own Change Night, Boneyard (which I admit I never played) and Diminishing Returns.

Here's the big problem. Make Your Own Change Night is a retread of Hey Bartender from Chief Herman's Holiday Fun Pack and Diminishing Returns is a retread of Pennywise from the same collection. In other words, they were games I was already familiar with, just tweaked for the special deck.

Now, I have had fun with Make Your Own Change Night so it's not like Change is a total waste. But a deck of cards can do the same trick and I can play a whole bunch of other games with that.

(It's telling that Boneyard has since been released as a rule set for regular cards, although you do need two decks of cards to get the right card count.. I also have to admit the rules to Boneyard confused me when I first read them years ago but they seem perfectly simple now, although I still think calling the auction sets buckets is bad jargon)

What a game system needs, more than anything else, is a great game. A killer app. For instance, if the only game you had rules to play with the Looney Pyramids was Zendo or Volcano, I'd still be happy with those games. Change it only doesn't have that killer game, its games work just has well with regular cards.

I have seen a lot of different kinds of decks over the years. Five or six suits, pyramid decks, multi-suited cards, straight up numbered decks. I haven't seen another deck like Change and maybe there's a reason for that. It would be really interesting to see what a killer game with a deck like this and I still don't know what it would be.

Recycling Route - dice drafting and picking up recyclables

GenCan't Roll and Write Library - Recycling Route

In Recycling Route, you're driving your recycling truck around the city, picking up different kinds of reusable garbage and effectively trying to corner the market on some of them. Along the way, you're going to get stuck with some legit garbage that has to go to the landfill and you might even get to upgrade your truck. Because there's nothing more exciting than a speeding garbage truck :D

The centerpiece of the mechanics is a fairly nifty dice drafting mechanic, where you choose either three dice you can see or three you can't. Seriously, it's a cool take on dice drafting and definitely really pretty pushes the game to the next level or maybe the level above that. You also have set collecting and route building.

Recycling Route is one of the finalists from GenCan't Roll and Write Contest. Which means it's a free print and play and, like most of the entries, you just have to print out player sheets and add dice and pencils. Man, I've been writing that a lot but I kind of have to.

In Recycling Route, the player sheet consists of a map of the city, which is a square grid with some squares already filled in with gray, and a checklist of different types of recyclables as well as truck upgrades and the infamous landfill. You get two player sheets per page because you'll need two for the solitaire rules.

Okay, here's the cool bit. On your turn, you secretly roll six dice and divide them into two groups of three. You reveal one set and the next player chooses either the set they can see or the unknown one. And you get the other. You each write down the numbers on open spaces on your map and then you, the active player, extend your route/drive your truck through the city.

Okay, what you really do is draw a line and extend it each turn. You start on the highest left box and will eventually end on the lowest rate box. At the start of the game, you can drive through three boxes at a time.

When you pass through a number, you check it off on your checklist. In game terms, that means you picked up that particular type of recyclable. Each number is broken down into sets of boxes, and you get a bonus if you complete a set first.

Ones and sixes are special. Ones can either be used to upgrade your truck so it moves faster or is wilds with another number you pick up the turn. Sixes are legit garbage that you have to dump into the landfill. That starts off being negative but ends up being positive points, to keep you from trying to dump sixes on someone. And you reroll sixes after you check them off.

The game ends when all but one player has driven off the map. In the solitary game, the robot opponent uses drones to grab numbers off your map. Either way, most points wins.

Out of the four finalists in the contest (Washington D6, Ada Lovelace and Jurassicco being the other three), Recycling Route just barely edges into fourth place for me. Which _isn't_ to say I dislike it or think it's a bad game. I don't. The dice drafting is great and Recycling Route not only is the only game with multi-player rules, it's probably stronger in that format.

However, it feels the most unfinished and least polished out of the four games. I can honestly picture the other three games having a shot at getting it published. Recycling Route feels like it needs some more refinement.

Between being able to upgrade your truck and picking up different kinds of trash and recyclables, I feel like the game is 3/4 of the way to being a full pick-up-and-deliver game. I don't know exactly how you would add a deliver function and still keep it down to one page of easy bookkeeping but if that was part of the game, I think it would be a big boost.

As it stands, I still think Recycling Route is a good game, made better by being free and easy to make. It is staying in my solitaire binder and will continue to see play. And if I get more multi-player games in, my opinion might get better.

 

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/232920/recycling-route