Blog - Weekly Game 5: Jerks in a Minefield
Sunday, February 22, 2009Introduction: The title of this game says it all: in this game players find themselves in a minefield with the goal of being the only one left alive.
Players: 2-4
Materials:
-1 6-sided die
-25 square tiles (you can make your own from paper, index cards, etc.)
-tokens to represent the players (coins, beads, etc.)
On 10 of the tiles, draw a skull on one side - these tiles are the tiles that have mines.
Setup:
Take 9 of the unmarked tiles, and lay them down on the table in the shape of a cross, with one tile forming the center and 2 tiles out in each of the 4 directions from it.
Shuffle the remaining tiles and add them (face down so the skulls are not showing!) until you have a 5 x 5 grid of tiles, with the initial cross forming the center lines for each axis. This grid acts as the game board.
place your character tokens on the center square of each outside edge of the grid.
-In the case of a three-player game, one edge will not be used.
-In a two-player game, each player controls two tokens, set on opposite sides of the board.
How to Play:
In the game players attempt to move around the board, avoiding landmines, and attempting to get into position where they can shove opposing players into the mines.
Movement:
There are two kinds of movement in this game: cautious movement and fast movement.
In cautious movement, the player's character is attempting to navigate the minefield using their minesweeper. A player attempting cautious movement can only move one tile in that turn, but has the choice of revealing one adjacent tile (to either their starting OR ending position). The player does not have to reveal the tile to any other player - it can be considered that player's own strategic knowledge.
In fast movement, the player does not get the luxury of revealing tiles but can potentially move much faster. Players using fast movement may roll the die and travel that many tiles on that turn.
In either case, for any tile landed on, players should flip over that tile to reveal it. The exception is the central cross tiles, which are always mine-free.
Should the player have stepped on a mine-tile (a tile with a skull) then his or her movement is halted immediately and they are killed.
Once a mine has been detonated, leave it skull-side up. This is an inactive mine, and players can travel over it in future turns.
[optional movement rule: have players allowed to travel over potentially mine-ridden tiles with a die roll: On a roll of 4, 5, or 6, the player crosses the tile fine, but on a roll of 1, 2, or 3, the mine detonates and the player is killed.]
Shoving:
When players are at any point in their turn on a tile adjacent to an opponent, they can chose to shove the opponent. The shove, if successful, will move the opponent up to 2 tiles in the direction the opponent was from the player.
Example: If the opponent was to the left of the shoving player, the opponent will be shoved 2 tiles to the left.
If the player is near-enough to the edge of the board that they cannot travel 2 tiles, then they'll only be shoved as far as they can.
To perform a shove, both players involved will roll the die. If the shoving player rolls equal to or higher than her opponent, then the shoving player was successful and the opponent is moved 2 spaces. Again, as the opponent crosses each tile, flip each tile over and if that tile contain a skull, the mine is exploded and that shoved player is killed.
Ghosts:
If you're a player who got blown up by a mine, don't despair! Although you've lost the chance to win you're not out of the game quite yet.
When a player gets killed, they lose their next turn, but then return as a ghost.
Ghosts no longer have a token and therefore no longer move.
Instead, on a ghost's turn, the ghost can perform one of the following actions:
-Reveal a tile. Much like how players can reveal a tile to themselves during cautious movement, a ghost players can reveal any tile on the board to themselves on their turn.
-Re-activate an already exploded mine. Simply flip over the tile back to its original state.
This can be done to a tile that a living player is currently standing on, which causes it to explode yet again and kill that player!
-Swap tiles. Pick two tiles and switch their positions with each other.
This is the only way the central cross and player start locations can be rigged
with mines. Note that a deactivated (already exploded) mine does not re-activate when moved!
Whether or not a ghost is allowed to swap tiles that players are currently standing on should be decided by the players before the game begins. Should a ghost be allowed to, placing an active mine under a player causes it to instantly explode and kill that player.
-Shove. Last but not least, ghosts can also shove players. A ghost wishing to shove can roll the die and on a roll of 6, can shove any living player up to two tiles in any direction the ghost wants.
The rules shoving are otherwise the same as for living players.
Winning the Game:
The last player left alive wins.
In the case of a two-player game, the team with at least one token left alive wins.
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Designing the game:
Still interested in playing around with the idea of tile-laying games, I decided a mine-field would make for an interesting choice of theme for such a game, particularly as I also like playing around with imperfect and/or asymmetric information in my designs. Very early on I came up with the title of the game, and that influenced a lot of the design. ;)
I found early on in playtesting the game that leaving the whole board completely up to random shuffling often created situations where certain players were completely sealed up in certain areas. This is why I ended up ensuring that there was at least one safe path to every other player through the use of the central cross. However, the downside of this is it causes players to not want to ever leave this safe path, so the game often gets a little gridlocked. It also left the areas where players could potentially stumble into mines shoved off into the corners of the map where they seem less effective (for a game that's entirely based around the gimmick)
Unfortunately I thought only of the optional die-roll to cross through mined areas too late, and I haven't had the chance to playtest if that concept can be used to once again allow a completely random distribution of mines around the board, which is regrettable as it seems like that could work and would produce a game more like the original concept I was intending. I also feel like it empowers players with yet another strategic choice, with some risk-reward going on: to risk getting to move through a dangerous tile on a 50/50 chance...
While on the subject of the optional movement rule, the reason there's several optional, player-decided rules to this game were in part due to my lack of time to playtest this game properly (currently working on programming three different games all due this week! eek!) In the case of the optional rule involving whether or not ghosts are allowed to swap tiles someone is currently on, I left optional because I myself couldn't decide whether this should be allowed or not. On the one hand, being the victim of this move could make one feel rather cheated, but on the other hand one of the ideas I wanted to explore with this game with the ghost mechanics in general was the idea of not being too much of a jerk or else it will (literally) come back to haunt you, and the swap-to-instant-kill rule would be a prime example of this.
I decided to leave it as a player-decided rule to A.) empower the players with yet another choice B.) soften the feeling of being cheated should you fall victim to the move if you had agreed to the rule earlier.
For these weekly game experiments I've been tending to stick to games with short play-times because it's always handy to have something quick to play and because I make and therefore also playtest these games in a short span of time, producing a game I can playtest and iterate quickly is very helpful.
Therefore, because this is a game that goes by quickly AND is centered entirely around player-killing and a last-man-standing goal, I felt like it was a good game to try my hand at a mechanic that other students in one of my classes explored during one game project: the idea of having eliminated players return as ghosts to cause mischief in order to let players keep playing to prevent downtime. I felt it was especially suitable for this game, given the title and theme: players are expected to get into character and actually be a jerk in this minefield, but now it can literally come back to haunt them. Also, as a consolation prize for already being eliminated from the competition, the ghost players get to cause lots of silly chaos, which lets them be jerks even from beyond the grave.
Labels: weekly game
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:58 AM
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