Gamechangers

One of my favorite things to do at camp is to visit the game shelf. It’s stacked high with donated games, most of which sit unused for months at a time. Many of the games are for children much younger than those who go to camp. Others are missing vital pieces or are simply way too bland to lure kids away from building treehouses and robots or hitting each other with boffer swords.

This is where we come in - me and my merry band of tiny game hackers. Connect 4 turns into a game of math and secrets. A frog-hopping game for three year olds now incorporates swamp monsters, cannibalism, and global warming. A rules-based Harry Potter game becomes… well, a very similar rules-based Harry Potter game. Hey, I let the kids decide.

Myself, I have only successfully hacked a game twice (where success equals other people spontaneously playing it later, just for fun.) I wrote about Dreidel+ here on this blog. But I do not think I have ever mentioned Zombie Apocalypse Chess.

I designed this game with my friend Nick while chilling backstage during rehearsals for a space opera we put on back in college. The rules are as follows:

1. One player takes the zombie side. All their pieces, except the King, have the abilities of pawns. Once per turn, if there are “captured” pieces from either player off to the side, they can be raised from the dead. They should be placed as far back on the zombie player’s side as possible.

2. The other player has the human side. Their pieces have their normal abilities (a pawn is a pawn, a knight is a knight, etc.) Bishops have a special power: when they kill a zombie, it stays dead forever. Both players are trying to kill the other side’s King to end the game.

(Evan, Nick and Andy play before going out to their gruesome and politically charged deaths. In space.)

A few weeks ago I discovered Tapatan, a variant of Tic Tac Toe where players only have three Xs or Os and must move them around the board to try and get three in a row. This relatively small change made a huge difference in enjoyment. We played for over an hour, trying to figure out what moves guarantee a win (like you can use in regular Tic Tac Toe.) We didn’t get anywhere - Tapatan, though so similar, is much more complex than Tic Tac Toe.

There are, a google search informs me, a very large number of Tic Tac Toe variants. I think the quantum version is my favorite so far. If only there were a two-player version of this, instead of the current proof-of-concept! I’m almost of a mind to make it myself.