A while ago I went to Bit of Alright, a quality day of game design talks / presentations / misc in London.
One of the sections that I put in the ‘misc’ category was Game Design Rocks, where the challenge was to make a game involving rocks. Me and a few other people came up with Rock Trumps. Hardly the most original idea, but I was quite pleased with how we balanced the rules out in the end. I thought I’d record the game here.
Rock Trumps
– You need some small rocks, which are preferably a random assortment of size, shape, colour, texture, etc.
– For 4 players, each player randomly takes 4 rocks (5 for 5 players, etc). No one must see the rocks!
– Take it in turns to select one of your rocks – only by touching it, you still can’t look at them – and make a bet about that rock. For example, “I think I’ll have the biggest rock”. Choose any property of the rock that you want, or bet that yours is second biggest instead of biggest, or whatever you fancy. That’s the beauty of it not being a videogame.
– After announcing the bet, all other players select a rock of their own. All rocks are then shown, and you decide between yourselves who won the bet. The winning rock is discarded (this stops the game going on forever), and the winning player takes the each rock that the other player bet.
– Keep betting until only one person has rocks left! The same bet can’t be made twice, however.
That’s that.