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September 15, 2005

Pachisi MOD game note

[Tropical life of circle]
I liked the way the pieces are placed at the begining. Since they are already close to each other and it actually increased the chance to interact with other pieces. Also deviding the path of the circle into 4 colors also made me feel that I am automatically interacting with the player who owns the terroritory by having disadvantage or advantage for the number of steps to move.

Because of all the different colors of pieces, a jungle picure with various saturated colored animals on the middle of board and also colorful dry pineapple
snacks, I became focused on color schemes when I tried to figure out the life theme of this game. I don't think this was what the designers' intended, though.
Colors are really abstract concept to think of the metapholic meaning of that and I actually tried to find my own way to put meaning on them.
Certain colors can kill each other and certain colors can share the same tile. Gray and Green colors were sort of similar(cold feeling) and also Pink and Orange(warm feeling) were similar. Similar colors kill each other and different colors live together.It felt like similar colored pieces are trying to kill each other to make itself unique in the jungle. Also different colors are attracted to each other just like human beings are usually attracted(hence favorable) to somebody who's different to oneself.

[Cops and Robbers]
I think donuts were really nice idea for this game. I was actually busy eating it and it actually made me a little bit distracted and lazy just like the preposition written on the game manual. It felt like the game rules were changed to be advantageous for robbers. Cops need to catch all of robbers although just one of the robbers need to escape to win the game. It became more disadvantageous for the Cop team when I was playing this game because cops had to wait for the grace roll for a long time to start chasing. I felt like that this game says that keeping justice is always harder than commiting crime by the game mechanics itself. Then also I was wondering if it is really justice for cops to be lazy to catch robbers because of donuts. This actually reminded me of comedy films about two buddy cops who happened to catch criminals without enough effort in humorous way. I wanted to see more interactions happening between cops and robbers encouraged by the game mechanics, though.

[Coattail]
I think I enjoyed playing this game the most. There happened lots of interactions between players (taking and being taken moments), game pace was speedy and 3 different choices of movement(rolling the dice as many number of times as equal to the number of pieces of the track or starting new piece or changing track) actually brought interesting strategies. Staying in a track with other players' pieces seemed to be more advantageous first time but it became so often chances to be caught by other players' piece. Especially on the most inner track, there are always chances of the new piece's spawining and it becomes too risky to stay on. My best strategy is changing the track and trying to bring more piece of mine to the track to have extra dice-role. The outter a track is the more the number of tiles but it seemed to be less disadvantageous than having more chance to be caught by others. Then losing a turn to change track nicely balances that. This game makes me think about interesting strategies. But I had hard time to find life theme out of that. It would be nice to put specific characters to the pieces or some visual change of the board/piece will be helpful for players to come up with ideas of life theme.

Posted by doox at September 15, 2005 11:26 AM

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