So we were first given a sheet of paper with the newer board shape on of the Royal Game Of Ur. As it is a two player game we then had to get into pairs and then get two sets of four dice and then two sets of five pieces to play the game with.
We then had to get some tipp-ex and use it to cover over two of the triangle dice. This was so that when we rolled the dice if it landed on a corner with tipp-ex that counted for one move space and each dice that landed that way up meant the amount of spaces we got to move on the board.
Me and my partner thought that it was best to play the game first using the basic rules just to refresh ourselves with the game. Once we had finished the game we started to think about what iterations we could add to the game without taking away from the basics or breaking the game. Our first iteration to the game was change the rule on the Rosette square from being able stay on it for as long as you want without the chance to be knocked off to being able to stay on there for three rounds before getting knocked off.
At this time we also added the rule that gave you the choice to group your pieces together and then move them all at once. With these two iterations we played the game. Once we had finished the game we had found out a few interesting advantages and disadvantages to the iterations. So the iteration to enable you to group your pieces together gave the game a extremely high tension to it. This because if you moved all of the pieces at once and did not make it to a Rosette square your had the chance to knock all of your pieces off in one go. We found that this work extremely well giving you the advantage to get more than one piece off the board at a time; but also having the disadvantage of having all the pieces removed if your opponent landed on that square. We found that we were constantly on edge and engrossed into the game after this.
Our second iteration was quite interesting as well as it made us have to think about our moves move carefully a remember how long we had been on the Rosette square for. We found that the advantage to this iteration was that it gave your opponent the chance to remove your pieces if you forgot about the round limit of staying on the square. The disadvantage to this though is that it was very easy to forget how many rounds you had sat there for. To solve this problem for our third iteration to the game we added two boxes on the side of the board with three circles in. We then used another counter each and put the counter on the circles for each round we have sat on a Rosette square. We found this helped us a lot to keep track of the rounds.
After playing this and adding the iterations i have found that almost any game you play you can change the rules of to either make the game better or break it.
There's some interesting stuff here; the mechanism for tracking the number of turns a player has been on a rosette square is useful, but what would happen if a player had two pieces on different rosette squares? Also, the ability to stack all five pieces considerably ramps-up the stakes for both players. Would restricting the stacking to two pieces change the dynamic by spreading the risk more evenly as, in a game with five pieces, a player could only have two stacks?
ReplyDeleteHi Harry,
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