Human Harvest

Description

In the year 2348 an automated manufacturing plant goes haywire due to a computer virus and the central computer systems develop artificial intellegence. By 2364, humanity is in a struggle to survive against human/machine cyborgs searching the wastelands looking for "spare meat". Massive war machines have devastated much of the Earth and many of the rogue manufacturing plants have been destroyed by the people of Earth. Now is the time for the last effort by the machines to rise up and defeat their human aggressors.

In Human Harvest, players control cyborgs gathering humans to change into new cyborgs in the Cyborg Factory. The winning player must collect enough humans to create 6 new cyborgs while evading militia units bent on machine destruction.

An entry in the GoodPortsmanship contest. Based on the game Atta Ants.

Rules

http://www.ludism.org/attachments/ppwiki/HumanHarvest.pdf

Reviews & Comments

Human Harvest, a port of Atta Ants, by Todd Krause. First, I think the choice of game to port here is brilliant. Atta Ants could have been an original piecepack game. The components map from Atta Ants to the piecepack nicely: tiles to tiles, ants to coins, and so on. That said, the game doesn't really gel. In the original game, the spiders move slower than the ants, so the ants can leave the nest and go foraging without constantly getting gobbled by spiders. In Human Harvest, the human militias (= spiders) move faster than the cyborgs (= ants), so the cyborgs are in a constant state of zugzwang ("Zugzwang means that one player is put at a disadvantage because he has to make a move the player would like to pass and make no move."--Wikipedia). In short, it's never to the advantage of the cyborgs to leave the factory (= nest), and there is no rule (that we could find) that says you have to. I actually suspect that the author initially paraphrased the rules to Atta Ants and did a search-and-replace on them, because there's one place where the word "ant" is used instead of "cyborg". Anyway, I suspect this is a beginner effort, so please try again. Make the spiders slower! :-)

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