Announcing Forage, ready for playtest

["karlvonl.geo" <karlvonl@...>]

As you may recall, I mentioned last week that I was working on a new piecepack game. Profesor, David Cousins, and king_toren_I all expressed interest in helping with the playtesting. So I am pleased to present the first set of playtest rules for my new game, Forage.  I hope you enjoy it!

And now, profesor, I guess I owe you some playtesting on Wand of Odin and/or DelvenWarr. :-)

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Rules for Forage (playtest version 0.1)

Number of players: 3-4

Equipment needed: 1 piecepack

Overview: The game takes place in 2 phases. In the first phase, the players distribute the coins of their suit face down on an 8x8 board. In the second phase, the players move their pawns around the board trying to collect as many of their opponents' coins as possible. The player with the highest total value of coins wins.

Set up:
Take out 16 tiles. Lay them out face down in a 4x4 square, thus creating an 8x8 space game board. Lay the rest of the tiles aside, as they are not used.

Each player chooses a suit and takes the pawn, die, and coins of that suit. Place your coins in a stash in front of you. Place them value side down, so the other players don't know the values. Each player then puts their pawn in a corner space on the board. Then roll to see who goes first.

The play:
In the first phase of the game, you are using your pawn to lay your coins out on the board. On your turn do the following:

- Choose one of your coins. Your coins are face down so your opponents can't see which values you haven't used yet, but you can always look at the values of the coins in your stash area.

- Show the value of the coin to your opponents, and say it out loud, so they know you aren't cheating.

- Place the coin on the space that your pawn occupies.

- Move your pawn the number of spaces equal to the value of the coin.

Rules for moving:
You may move your pawn in a straight line in any of the 8 orthoginal and diagonal directions. Always move the full amount indicated by the coin. The ace coin is equal to 1. The blank coin is wild, thus you may move from 1 to 5 spaces, your choice.

The board wraps at the edges. Thus you may move off one edge and in on the opposite edge. (This might be confusing when moving diagonally.)

You may pass through and land on empty squares. You may pass through, but not land on, squares occupied by coins. You may not pass through nor land on squares occupied by opponents' pawns. In the unlikely event that you have no legal move, then instead of moving the full amount indicated by the coin, pick a direction and move until you hit the first empty square in that direction.

After each player has had 6 turns, all the coins are on the board, and the second phase begins. On your turn, do the following:

- Roll the die, *or* choose a coin from your stash. You may *not* roll before deciding to choose a coin instead. You *may* look at the values of your coins before deciding. (On your first turn of phase 2, you will obviously have no coins in your stash and must therefore roll.)

- If you chose a coin, show and tell the other players its value, and place it on the space your pawn occupies.

- Move your pawn in one of the 8 directions the number of spaces indicated by the number rolled on the die or the coin just placed. The rules for movement are the same as in phase 1, except that you can now land on a space occupied by a coin.

- If you landed on a coin, and it is *not* your suit, take the coin and put it value side down in your stash. If you landed on a coin and it *is* your suit, leave it on the board under your pawn.

If your pawn is sitting on a coin of your suit at the beginning of your turn, you may use the value on that coin for movement. In other words, normally you have the choice of either rolling the die or playing a coin from your stash. If you are sitting on one of your own coins, you instead have the choice of rolling the die or using *that* coin only. You may look at the value of the coin before deciding whether to roll.

Game end and scoring:
The game ends when the number of coins remaining on the board equals the number of players. I.e., a 4-player game ends when there are 4 coins left, and a 3 player game ends when there are 3 coins left.

Each player scores the total of values of the coins in their stash. An ace is worth 1. A blank is worth zero. The player with the highest score wins. In the case of a tie, the player (among the tied players) with the most coins wins. If it's still a tie, the winner is the tied player with the most high coins. In other words, whoever has the highest coin wins, and if tied look at the total of each player's highest 2 coins, then highest 3 coins, etc. until it's not a tie.

Variants:
Note that the above is what I've been playtesting with, and due to some feedback I've received, I've had ideas for changes. These are the changes that I'd be interested in testing before settling on a final rules set.

The biggest complaint has been that people often get confused where their pawn is going when moving diagonally and wrapping off an edge of the board. So perhaps wrapping should be eliminated. This means that the board should be bigger, so all 24 tiles should be used. Also, the pawns would then start not in the corners, but instead near the center of the board. The 24 tiles can be arranged either in a 6x4 rectangle, or a 5x5 square with a hole in the middle. I think the latter option might be more interesting.

Perhaps at the end of the game, any blank coins you have are not worth 0, but are instead equal to the lowest value of your other coins. So if you have (5) (3) ( ) ( ) then your total is 14, because the blanks are worth 3. The problem with this rule is that people with blanks will throw their low coins back on the board more often, and the game might not come to an end as quickly (or at all).

People have complained a little about the memory aspect. Perhaps when playing a coin for movement in the second phase it should be placed face up, and can then never be picked up again. This might work well in conjunction with the previous variant. Then the end condition would be that the game ends when there are no more value-side-down coins on the board.

Finally, I made it so the game ends with coins still on the board, because the game could go on indefinitely if people keep using coins for movement, or no one is getting good die rolls. But this is just a hypothesis; I have not actually tested playing a game in which the game ends when the board is clear of coins, so it's probably worth a try.