Wimbledon game

We have been playing the game Wimbledon from John Golden. J1 and J2 absolutely love the game and J3 has enjoyed pretending to play as well. Definitely try it out!

Below is a session report sharing some of our experiences with the game, including some alternative rules (aka mis-reading).

Our basic play
For the serve, we allow the following options:
(1) serve a single card from the top of the deck
(2) serve one or two cards from your own hand

We also allow returns that have the same value, if the largest card in the combination is higher. For example, 8 + 2 can be played on top of 7 + 3.

When playing doubles, we followed tennis conventions: one player serves the whole game, return of serve alternates. For the return of serve, the designated player must return on their own. For other returns, either of the partners alone or in combination can play cards for a return.

Having gone back to John's original post, I now see that we played with the inverse rules for aces. On the serve, we counted them as 11, all other times 1. We didn't distinguish between aces played from the hand or served from the deck, those were all 11s. That formed a strong advantage for the servers, while making aces essentially worthless for all other players.

With three players, I had the kids play as partners and I played with a ghost partner. The ghost partner would contribute cards randomly. When the ghost played cards that weren't large enough to be legal plays, we considered that an unforced error and awarded the point to the other team. While the ghost was able to hold serve for one game, it was a big disadvantage. An alternative for three players would be to have the ghost partner with the server and for everyone to take turns serving. This would put the server advantage (with our "house rules" for aces) against the ghost disadvantage.

A modification
In our play, we have found that the 10 value cards and aces (on serve) dominate game play. Here are two ideas to address that:

• Assign face cards values 11 for Jack, 12 for Queen, and 13 for King. Ace, on serve, can have a value 14.
• Allow players to combine as many cards as they like. This would probably work best with our "Further extension" rules below. A possible sub-variant is to only allow gradual escalation where the players can step from single card plays to 2 card plays, from 2 to 3, etc, but could not jump from a single card play to a 3 (or more) card play.

My instinct is that the variation we will like the most is to differentiate the face cards and allow gradual escalation for multi-card plays.

Further extension
Now that we've gotten comfortable with the basic and doubles games, we are considering a more complex version. The idea we are considering is to somehow limit the players' abilities to refresh their hands by redrawing so that burning a lot of cards will have a cost.

This is the rule modification, written for a 2 person game:

1. Create a draw pile for each player with 15 cards.
2. At the start of the game, each player draws 5 cards into their hand.
3. Points are played as in the normal rules
4. At the end of a point, the players refresh their hand up to 5 cards from their draw pile
5. If a player runs out of cards in their draw pile, they cannot draw additional cards to refresh their hand.
6. If both players run out of cards in their draw pile, then shuffle the pile of face-up played cards and give each player a new draw pile with 10 cards.
7. Repeat step 6 as often as needed

The idea of this variation is to thematically mimic the idea that one player could push too hard, too fast, and get tired out relative to the other player. Strategically, our idea is that this will also create a tension between dumping your own low cards and letting the opponent dump.

Labyrinth cool game mechanic, but weak game

Background

Labyrinth, the board game, has a sliding tiles mechanic that I really like. Sixteen tiles are fixed on the board and 33 (7x7 - 16 + 1) loose tiles are available to slide through the frame created by the fixed tiles.

This picture shows the board and J3 punching out the loose tiles:

Here, we've started to put some of the loose tiles into the board:

You can see that each tile has a picture that includes a segment of a maze and, possibly, an item. Paths through the labyrinth depend on how the tiles are arranged. Along the open rows and columns, loose tiles can slide up/down or left/right. This is also where the extra loose tile comes in: sliding a column creates an open space for the extra tile and forces another one off the board.

My problem

We don't find the game very compelling, so I am looking for ideas about how to make use of the underlying structure in a new game. We have done some investigations about arrangements of the loose tiles (can we create a maze without any inaccessible tiles? What do we get when we minimize/maximize the number of inaccessible tiles?) However, I feel like there is a lot more that should be possible.

What are your ideas?

An unrelated project about birds' wing shapes from J2:

Castle overrun and storm the boat (creating games)

Playing Santorini with a make-shift set inspired the older two Js to create their own games. We test played J1's game, but haven't yet had a chance to test play J2's game.

Castle Overrun

Equipment: 
TRIO set. In particular, we used the 7x14 top, 5 short and 1 long magenta and 5 short and 1 long green straight connectors, 50+ 1x1x1 cubes. The long connectors are kings, the short connectors are soldiers. Key feature is that the cubes can stack on top of each other and on top of the soldier/king pieces.

Set-up:
Kings start in diagonally opposite corners with their soldiers one square away. Pre-placed cubes also start on positions (6, 3), (6, 5), (9, 3) and (9, 5).
You can see these details in the picture below (the extra chains of cubes were just on the board to give a tidy "resting" set-up when we weren't playing):

Turns
Turns alternate. On a player's turn, they move one of their pieces (the king or a soldier) one grid space (pieces can move diagonally). Then, they have an option of one of 3 possible actions:

• build a cube on an adjacent space (including diagonally adjacent). There is no limit to how high they can build. Think of this as building part of a wall or tower. A king can build two bricks on one turn.
• destroy the top cube on an adjacent space. This is tearing down a part of a wall.
• Attack an opponent's piece on an adjacent square. This involves putting a cube on top of that piece. The J's called this "pig-heading" and a piece with a cube on top is "pig-headed." If a soldier has 2 cubes on top, they get removed from the board. If a king gets 3 cubes on top, then it gets removed from the board.

Winning
First player to remove the opponent's king from the board is the winner.

Playability
There are some elements that suggest this game has possibilities, but the current rules quickly become a stalemate. First, we noticed that any attempt to pig-head an opponent is a half-suicide mission, since they can pig-head right back on their turn. There is one exception, but it involves the opponent accidentally walking into an obvious trap (and there's no reason why they would do that).

Also, the king can quickly build a fortress around himself before the enemy soldiers get close. Because the king can build two bricks on a turn, it would be impossible for the enemy soldiers to break through. In fact, this strategy is what gave us the idea for the name of the game.

Possible modifications
The main problem is that wall building is too fast. Perhaps we should allow the soldiers to break down two bricks each turn, but restrict all building to one brick at a time. This means that any fortress can, eventually, be broken down, if the siege army is unmolested.

Storm the Boat

Equipment
Again, this is based on the TRIO set, but also requires 2 dice (choose your favorite sizes/shapes/markings).

Set-up
The straight connectors start in the same corner configuration as Castle Overrun:

Again, place one cube on each space (6, 3), (6, 5), (9, 3), (9, 5). Further, add bricks in a line from (1,2) to (4, 2) and (11, 6) to (14, 6).

There is another special piece in the center of the board, the boat:

Turns
Player rolls two dice and then moves a piece according to the values shown on the dice. They can move one piece for both values, or move two different pieces. Restrictions: movement is orthogonal (not diagonal) and pieces can not pass through a space occupied by another piece.

Pieces can move up one level on the boat. For example, if they are next to an open bottom magenta space, they can move onto the boat. If they are on the magenta level, they can move onto the blue seats.

After moving, the player pushes the boat one space toward their starting corner. This means that only one of the boat entry points is available at a time. This is like a moored boat rocking back and forth with the waves.

Winning
The first player to get three pieces onto the boat seats is the winner. They get a double win if their "king" is one of the pieces to get onto the boat.

Playability
This seems to be a solid racing game, similar to many other games for children. The boat mechanic adds a small twist. It seems playable and fun for kids, but lacks any deep strategy.

Possible modifications suggested have been:
(a) some way for the two teams to attack each other
(b) a way to release the boat from its anchor so that the movement is more extreme and/or erratic
(c) possibility for a team to attack the boat and sink it (perhaps to prevent an opponent from reaching the winning condition).

Summary thoughts

Putting aside how good their games were, I was delighted with the ideas and enthusiasm both J1 and J2 had for creating their own games. While I had been hoping they would have been more pro-active about designing a DIY Santorini set the day before, it seems that exposing them to this gave them a boost of inspiration to try their own.