Blog - Weekly Game 4: Parkour
Saturday, February 7, 2009Introduction: This game attempts to simulate the urban sports of parkour and free-running, where participants overcome obstacles of the urban environment with feats of agility.
In free-running, runners attempt to keep moving forward despite all obstacles they may encounter. In this game, players are to try to live up to this philosophy and keep advancing until they encounter an obstacle they can't handle.
Players: 1 (Solitaire)
Materials:
-A standard deck of playing cards
-Plenty of table space!
Setup:
Shuffle the deck and lay the top card from the deck face-up on the table to act as the first obstacle card.
Next draw 5 cards for your hand of cards.
Set aside the rest as a draw deck, leaving space to discard cards.
How to Play:
It is first important to note the differences between the cards in your hand and the cards acting as the obstacles you encounter.
Hand Cards:
The cards in the player's hand represents the abilities of their runner.
The different card suits determine how these cards are used:
*Spades represent their runner's ability to jump or vault over obstacles.
*Clubs represent their runner's ability to overcome other kinds of obstacles through miscellaneous feats like sliding or climbing.
*Hearts represent their runner's endurance, and ability to push forward in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. They are used to either modify the power of Spade or Club cards, or can be exchanged for a new random draw.
*Diamonds represent the runner's perception and quick-thinking - it is used to explore possible alternative routes and plan combo moves.
Obstacle Cards:
Throughout play, the game world will be built using cards laid down onto the table as tiles. These cards represent the obstacles the runner will face in the game world.
The suits of the cards determine what kind of obstacle is encountered:
*Spades represent obstacles that players must jump or vault over, using spade cards from their hand.
*Clubs represent obstacles that players must use alternative means to overcome, by playing cards of the clubs suit from their hand.
*Hearts represent an open stretch, free of obstacles. No card from the player's hand is required to pass this card, but the card also awards the player with no new card either.
*Diamonds represent obstacles that the player can foresee multiple ways of overcoming the obstacle. Either spades or clubs cards from the player's hand can be used to overcome this kind of obstacle.
Defeating Obstacles:
The player can defeat obstacles with the cards from their hand.
To overcome an obstacle, play a card from your hand with a number matching or higher than the number on the obstacle card.
Example: If the next obstacle is a 7 of spades, if the player has an 8, 9, or 10 of spades, or any of the face cards (including Aces!) of the spades suit, then any one of those cards can be played to overcome the obstacle.
In the case of an obstacle that is a diamond card, the player can play a higher-or-matching spades or clubs card to overcome the obstacle.
Example: If the next obstacle is a 5 of diamonds, the player can play a 5 of spades, a 5 of clubs, or any higher card from their hand of the spades or clubs suits.
Cards from the player's hand of the hearts suit can be used to boost the power of the runner's moves.
Example:If the next obstacle is a 7 of spades, and the player only has a 3 of spades but also has in his hand a 4 of hearts, he can play both those two cards from his hand to defeat the 7 of spades.
The player can also choose to discard any hearts card from his hand to draw a new card from the draw deck.
Lastly, The player can spend cards in his hand of the diamond suit to find alternative obstacles to overcome if the current one looks too daunting, or if he wants to risk performing a combo.
To explore an alternative route, simply discard one diamonds card from your hand, and draw a new card from the draw deck to act as a new obstacle, placing it directly to the left or right of the current obstacle.
The player can then choose to tackle the original obstacle OR this new obstacle OR play another diamond card to explore yet another possible route.
Alternatively, players can choose to play a diamond card to draw and place a card directly behind the current obstacle or an obstacle of an alternative route.
If the player can defeat both obstacles (or more, if the future sequence was continued) with the cards in his hand, then the player is said to have performed a combo of moves very elegantly, and this will award the player with more cards for his hand (see the next section)
Acquiring New Cards for the Hand:
For every obstacle card the player overcomes, draw 1 card from the draw deck to place immediately behind it as the next obstacle (unless the player performed a combo, in which case, place the next card behind the end of the combo sequence).
If a hearts card was drawn, draw and place yet another card after it, until a heart card is not drawn.
Once the next obstacle has been placed, the player may then draw the next top card from the draw deck into their hand.
If the player performs a combo, draw an additional card for each extra obstacle the player defeated in a single turn. As hearts do not count as a proper obstacle, they do not award this additional point.
Winning the Game:
Once the player can no longer make a move (In other words, the player encounters only obstacles they cannot defeat) then the game is over.
Award one point for each row of cards in the sequence of obstacle cards - i.e. one point for every move forward the player made. This does include heart cards.
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Designing the game:
I had explored this game as an idea for an earlier weekly game, but ended up building the DJ game instead for that week's challenge. I lacked the materials necessary for my other game idea for this week, so I decided to revisit the Parkour game for this week's challenge.
I liked the idea of using playing cards as tiles for a tile-laying board sort of game ala Carcassone, much like I did in the previous challenge, Pennies and Dimes. It certainly made sense given that Free Running is largely about spatial awareness and use of space, so needed to make a game that involved some sort of game world to provide the obstacles the runner was to overcome. Tile-laying of cards seemed like a reasonable solution to this problem.
I liked the core idea behind free running that the participants are intended to move forward at all costs, regardless of what obstacles they may face, and that the run is done when they can no longer move forwards. (By comparison, parkour allows runners to change directions and is more free-form - according to my research that's the main difference between the two related sports)
In any case, I thought it was the reasonable basis for a game based on the two sports.
I took a bit of inspiration from a few earlier games I had done, namely the earlier weekly game Creature Battles, as well as a game I worked on for one class using a CCG as the basis of a tabletop RPG, in using the properties of various cards to act as the stats for your player.
I especially liked the mechanic of using diamonds as a representation of the runner's perception and quick-thinking to find alternative pathways or alternative means of overcoming obstacles or plan advanced combos.
Still, this system lead to a few clunkier features of this game I haven't yet found solutions to that satisfy me yet, such as what happens when the player draws hearts cards as obstacles.
The current solution works, but doesn't at all feel like the best solution yet.
Labels: weekly game
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:21 PM
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