Pressure Project 3: Trailblazing
Posted: December 4, 2017 Filed under: Calder White, Paper & Pen, Pen and Pencil Games, Pressure Project 3, Uncategorized Leave a comment »For our third Pressure Project, our prompt was to take a pen & paper game and combine it with another game to make a delightfully replayable hybrid that had no more than 5 rules and did not require the creator’s verbal or gestural intervention. I love to play card games, and especially drinking games involved with cards, and so I decided to figure out a way in which I could revamp one of my favourite drinking card games — Ride the Bus — to suit this assignment.
For those who don’t know, Ride the Bus is a drinking game played with two people. The dealer lays out five cards and flips the first one. The second player then goes through a sequence of questions guessing the nature of the proceeding cards in this order:
- Is the second card higher or lower than the first card?
- Is the third card inside of (between) or outside of the first two cards?
- Is the fourth card red or black?
- What is the suit of the last card?
The catch is this: if at any point the second guesser makes an incorrect guess, they have to take a drink, a new set of five cards is dealt, and the game restarts. The player only wins once they “ride the bus” to the end.
Taking some inspiration from tic-tac-toe and Connect 4, I was curious about how Ride the Bus could function if placed in a grid. I decided that the cards would be set up in a 5×5 grid and this would become a game about which player — the dealer or the guesser — could collect the most cards by the end. Instead of having to drink for guessing a card incorrectly, an incorrect guess simply signaled the end of a player’s turn and therefore a stunted chance at collecting more cards.
The instruction sheet of my hybrid game can be found here: ACCADTrailblazing
In the end, this game reminded me a lot of afternoon’s spent at my Baba’s house playing War for hours. Although perhaps not the most stimulating for adults, Trailblazing could easily be an entertaining children’s or family game, and definitely gets more fun the more you play it!
Folding Four
Posted: September 20, 2016 Filed under: Pen and Pencil Games Leave a comment »I realized I haven’t published my drafts yet. So here is the playing with game rules post:
https://www.dropbox.com/home/Camera%20Uploads?preview=2016-09-05+14.21.02.jpg
Axel and I modified the Connect 4 by adding new rules to the game.
- After every 3rd move of the players, player 1 is going to fold a line.
- Then the folded line is going to be unfolded after 3 more moves of each player.
- The first rule applies, 3 moves later of each player, player 2 is going to fold a line.
- Repeat rule 2.
The rule set is going to be repeated through the game.
Adding and hiding the lines for a short time frames add an unexpected and playful aspect to game. Now it is harder to predict who is going to win. Therefore it is more exciting.
It is fun to modify a game that all of us are familiar since the new rules change the dynamics of it. Therefore it takes sometime to understand and get used to game, it brings back the excitement of being a kid.
Also it is very interesting to see how little modifications and additive elements might change a simple system like a game. Going through the each step and rule of the game, in order to understand the dynamics and change or modify it is a simple but effective exercise to learn about systems.
Explosive Dots Paper and Pen Game
Posted: September 8, 2016 Filed under: Pen and Pencil Games Leave a comment »Per part of an in-class exercise, Ashely and I decided to improve upon the game that many refer to as Dots. In traditional dots, you make a grid of dots on a piece of paper, and each player takes turns drawing lines to connect them. When a player completes a box, they get a point and take an additional turn. The game ends when the grid has been filled with boxes.
To improve upon this game, we added two rules. The first rule is that when a player completes a box, instead of taking an additional turn, they can instead erase one line on the grid, as long as it is not part of a completed box. The second rule is that whenever a player creates a 2×2 cube of boxes, they can “bomb” any box that belongs to their opponent. This erases all of the lines of that box and all other adjacent boxes of theirs, as long as they do not belong to the player dropping the “bomb.”
In gameplay, it is actually fairly rare to get to “drop a bomb.” However, as observed in play-testing, the simple fact that this rule exists significantly changes the way in which the game is played. Whereas in traditional Dots, there comes a point where players need to draw lines that will certainly give a box (or boxes) their opponent, in Explosive Dots the tension is much greater and requires greater thought and strategy to be sure that you do not give your opponent the proper boxes to form the 2×2 cube. This also offers a possibility for redemption. Because of this, a game can last much longer, as large portions of the grid can be reset, allowing for another player to take the lead.
The game I got to test-play was titled Hangman’s Revival. As the title suggests, it is based on the classic Hangman game, only in this version, if you get two letters correct in a row, you earn “extra lives” which can be used if the entirety of the stick-figure person is drawn before you can guess all of the letters. At first, we played using fairly common words with no more than seven or eight letters before we ran out of time for this activity during class. It was right at the end of this that I realized that this game would be very effective when playing using long, complex, or uncommon words. Had we had more time in class I may have opened up a dictionary and found a word at least twelve letters long.