New Rule

Introduction: Hardly any necessary Roll your little gooey avatar around the table and try to bump your opponents as you compete to score points, but beware: your elasticity and density waxes and wanes with the dice rolls.

Players: 3+

Materials:

• Several twelve-sided dice, one per player, preferably of different colors
• Rulers or tape measures
• A playing surface at least twenty-four inches on a side
• A small sticker or counter to mark the center point

Setting Up: Each player chooses a die to represent themselves on the playing surface. Plot the center point of the surface and mark it with the sticker or counter. Each player rolls their dice and positions it that many inches away from the center point, in any direction. Designate a first player; play proceeds to the left.

How to Play: Each player’s die is their avatar, or gooball, with which they attempt to score points, flatten opponents, or both. On their turn, players indicate a direction in which they intend to move and place the ruler or tape measure along that line, with the edge in line with their gooball. They then retrieve their die, roll it, and return it to the position it occupied at the start of the turn with the newly-rolled value showing (player should mark the die’s position with their finger or the corner of the ruler in order to remember it accurately). The new value represents the gooball’s power for the turn: it is the extra distance in inches the gooball may move and the strength it wields when bumping other players’ gooballs.

Once the die has been rolled and repositioned, the player may move it along the path they indicated at the start any distance up to the gooball’s power plus five inches (they are not required to move the full amount if they so choose). Note that this means a gooball has a minimum movement of six inches (five plus a roll of one) and a maximum of seventeen. If the gooball collides with another player’s gooball, they bump it (see below). If they pass over or onto the center point of the playing surface, they score a point (see below).

Bumping: If a player’s gooball bumps another player’s gooball, the gooball’s movement ceases immediately and a collision occurs. The gooball with the higher power remains in place, and the gooball with the lower power is moved directly away from the stronger gooball a number of inches equal to the difference in their value, along the path the moving gooball was traveling before it hit. Distance traveled to effect the bump has no bearing on which gooball is displaced or the strength of the collision.

Scoring: Every time a player’s gooball passes over the center point of the playing surface, they score one point. Note that this means that a player may score multiple points in a turn if they are bumped across it by another gooball.

Winning the Game: The first player to reach fifteen points is the winner.

Next: Designing “Gooball”

This game came from a mechanic I observed in a student game today, in which the dice themselves represented the player’s position on the board. I wondered about the possibility of combining the two functions — agent and token — into a seamless mechanic, and hit upon the idea of deriving a vital statistic from the die’s value that had implications based on the die’s position.

I didn’t take it much further than that because I wanted to test the strength of this single mechanic. It was a simple matter to borrow standard miniature game conventions for movement and proximity-based combat to represent the play space, and the concept of bumping and point-scoring seemed like an equally simple, reliable way to flesh out the rest of the crucial elements: player-to-player competition, obstacles, and a goal.

This is more a proof of concept that a complete game, and if it turns out well I’ll see about merging it into some future game design.

Tags: Game Design //