Rats is a board game designed by James Caskey, David McDonough, Brian Shurtleff, and Daniel Wilkins.

Players take on the role of crooks trying to steal a safe from a museum. However, to escape with the loot they'll have to work together to haul the heavy safe through the museum's halls filled with impassible pillars and priceless urns. What's worse is that the security guard is hot on their tails, and among the thieves is a traitorous rat!


The rules to the game can be downloaded here:
(Word .doc).



Making Your Own Game Pieces:

Board:
A full-sized image of the board can be seen here.
You can try to print your own board, or use it as a reference to draw your own.

Cards:
The game requires three different kinds of cards: a deck of Role Cards, a deck of Stumblin' cards, and a deck of Bumblin' cards.
Index cards work well for these. For our final version of the game's cards I printed the designs onto business card sheets. You'll need to make the following cards:

Role Cards: Make five cards that say "Loyal" and three that say "Rat". On the back of each, write "Role Card" for easy reference.

Stumblin' Cards: Make ten cards that say "-1", ten that say "-2", fifteen that say "+1" and fifteen that say "+2". You'll probably want to label these cards "Stumblin' Cards" on the backside.

Bumblin' Cards: Make ten cards that say "Left" and ten that say "Right", and again, label them "Bumblin' Cards" on the back.

Tiles/Tokens:
You'll need small items to represent characters and objects in the game: nine "Urn" tokens, one "Safe" token, and one "Guard" token.
Any small items will do, like coins.

The "Hat":
An opaque container of some kind, where players can place their cards secretly inside, disguising exactly who played what card.
Bags, boxes, hats, cups, etc. will work well for this.



Also, check out the postmortem for some insights on the development of the game.