New Rule

Introduction: Wouldn’t you know it.. the fridge is full again! Sorting all the stuff out, tossing the rotting leftovers, freezing the surplus, and finding room for your new groceries can be quite the challenging puzzle. In this game, players try to figure out how to cram all their stores into one common fridge. With some cunning candy swapping, artful prediction, and a little bit of luck you’ll be the first to get all the food onto the shelves before the ice cream melts and the milk goes bad.

Players: 2-4

Materials:

• Regular-sized bags of identically-shaped, multicolored candies (such as M&Ms or Skittles), at least two bags per player. Ensure that the colors include red.
• Bags, hats, or bowls to hold the candies for random drawing — one per player and one for the central pool.

Setting Up: Place all the candies into a central bowl, called the common bowl. Players take turns drawing candies from the common bowl, placing them in their personal bowl, until only ten remain. Designate a first player; play proceeds to the left.

How to Play: In this game, players seek to stock the fridge, or unload all the candies in their personal bowl into the common bowl. However, the common bowl represents the already-crammed household refrigerator, and it can only hold ten candies at a time. Players cannot add candies from their bowl without removing some first.

On their turn, players replace candies in the common bowl based on color: they designate a color and remove and eat all the candies of that color from the common bowl, replacing them with an equal number of candies of a different color from their personal bowl. They may do this for any color represented in the common bowl except the color most prevalent. If there are ties, both colors count as the most common and both are off-limits. If a player cannot make a replacement like this, they may place a single candy of any color into the common bowl in exchange for taking any one of a different color into their personal bowl before ending their turn.

After they take this action, they must remove one candy from the common bowl and eat it. It can be of any color they choose, including the color they just added.

Eating the Leftovers: After each player has added and subtracted in this manner, all players blindly draw one candy from the bowl and eat it, and then blindly draw a candy from their personal bowl and add it to the fridge. Exception: players may not win the game this way. If a player has only one candy remaining in their personal bowl, they draw and eat from the common bowl as normal but do not replace it with their last candy.

Winning the Game: The first player to remove all the candies from their personal is the winner.

Next: Designing “Fridge”:

This game was a rough process. I’ve been experimenting with the colored candies board type — I feel it offers quite a number of possibilities, even if I am able to discern only a few, feeble ideas at present. Practice makes perfect.

The most obvious mechanics spring from the different colors and the mathematical patterns created by grouping and assigning value to them. Here I tried to envision a system of tactical planning where players spent colors based on their immediate advantages weighed against the possibility of them becoming more valuable in the future. The value of each color changes after every player’s turn, as the quantities in the common bowl change. A mechanic of adding, rather than drawing, hearkens back to my Quisquilian game, but it’s really more of a semantic point. Ultimately, players still take actions based on their “hand” of candies. My thought is more than changing things up like this helps players step outside old play patterns and look for new ones.

The eating of one candy per player turn is, I think, one of the more effective mechanics. It offers player a small opportunity to affect the balance of quantities, and in so doing thwart trades other players might make by shifting what color counts as the most prevalent or whether or not the following player has enough candies to make the trade. This is the core tactical action.

The leftovers system is a shabby entry, and I know it, but I can’t let the game be entirely predictable. Perhaps, after playtesting, the player choice of which candies to swap will serve as enough of a destabilizer to suffice and I can scrap it. We’ll see.

Tags: Game Design //