ARENA - A combat game with Icehouse pyramids by Christoffer Fogelström Done? No. Players: 2-4 for optimal gaming experience, more probably works better at a larger arena. No. of stashes: As many as possible, a minimum of 1 per player Extra equipment: Tiled/checkered playing area, such as a chessboard. Optmized for a 8*8*8 board. A way of indicating height if not enogh pyramids are available, 8-sided dice are perfect. A way of indicating speed - again, 8-sided or even 6-sided (as you dont want to go very much faster than 6 in most cases) dice are good. Markers to use for obstacles and powerups, such as coins (different values of coin can be different powerups) or Icehouse pyramids. Several 8-sided die. Goal of the game: To kill your opponents! Overview: By keeping track of, and selecting, the speed of your ship you will move around an imaginable arena for space combat, where the galaxys' aces settle the score! But watch out - if you crash into the walls or any of the arenas obstacles, your ship will be hard to control. Detailed rules: Each player starts at any desired height in one of the 4 corners (this means players can start in 8 different corners). Each player has 20 points to distribute on the attributes Aim, Damage, Hull and Speed. No attribute is allowed to be lower than 1 or higher than 8 (later in-game, they can go as high as 10 with the aid of powerups, but 10 is the absolute maximum). Aim represents how good your pilot is at shooting with the ships weapons and the power of the weapons is determined by Damage. The armor plating of the ship is represented by Hull, and the maximum amount of fuel the ship can spend each round is determined by Speed. The height of your ship (stack a few pyramids in nice colors so that the "ship" looks badass and if desired, lay it down.) is determined by the 8-sided die next to it, or when playing with a lot of pyramids, the number of pyramids stacked beneath it. The easiest approach is to simply use one color per player and the player makes a tree out of the number of pyramids equal to the height of his ship. When all players have assigned attributes to their ships/pilots and decided starting height, the game is on! Movement: Movement is very simple. You spend 1 Fuel per speed/turn you want to increase or decrease. 1 speed equals 1 height/turn or 1 tile/turn in movement. Say you are at B4 (assuming you are playing at a chess board with numbers and letters), height 3. You want to move to B8, Height 7. There are several ways of doing this. The maximum number of Fuel units you can spend is determined by your Speed. This applies to movement in one direction, so if your Speed is 4, you can increase - or decrease - your vertical speed with up to 4 speed/turn. This means getting to height 7 can be done in one turn - if you spend 4 Fuel next turn to brake. Or, you could spend 1 Fuel and wait over 4 rounds and then use 1 Fule to brake. Getting to B8 can be done in a lot of different ways in the same fashion. Say we are in a not so great hurry. We spend 2 Fuel on moving "up" in numbers, 0 Fuel on moving through the letters, and 2 Fuel increasing height. When movements are resolved, we will end up at B6, height 5. Next turn, we think things are working great. We spend 0 Fuel. Movements resolve and we end up at desired location - B8, height 7. Next turn, we need to spend 2 Fuel to brake the horizontal speed and 2 Fuel to brake the "number" speed. If we want to go back to height 3 as soon as possible, we need to spend 4 Fuel this turn for movement, and then 4 Fuel next turn to brake. Keeping track of all this mess is best used with three dice, representing left-right, up-down and back-forth. The dice are not hidden or secret in any way, as all pilots can guess how fast an opponent is going. Choosing movement is however made in secret, as the pilots don't know what their opponents are up to. When everybody has chosen movement, you reveal your plans, adjust your dice and movement is resolved. Keep in mind all ships move at the same time, so make sure there are no collisions. Collisions occur when two ships are in the same tile at the same height throughout the movement phase. This means resolving movement should be done systematicly, one tile or height at a time. Colliding can be done on purpose and is simply called a ramming attack. Ramming attacks do the same damage as the particular ships Hull value, plus its highest of the three speeds - but beware, you will take the same damage! Attacking: Finally, the good stuff! Attacking is resolved at any time in the movement resolve phase. The player who wants to shoot simply exclaims that at this position (before moving the next tile etc.) he wants to attack. You can only attack once per round unless you have a powerup that says you have more attacks. Distance is determined by the number of tiles separating the ships left-right, up-down and back-fort. A ship at A1, height 1 shooting at a ship at H8, height 8(again, chess board), will be shooting 8+8+8 tiles. This doesn't quite follow Pythagoras Theorem, but it's simple enough. If you want to use your trigonometry and be exact, feel free. It hopefully wont affect the balance of the game. The maximum range of the weapons on the ship is determined by the pilots Aim x4. Every 4 steps of tiles you want to shoot "costs" one Aim. Attacking from A1, height 1 to H8, height 8 will require an aim of 6, and will make the attack roll 6 harder, i.e. 0 chance. A 8-sided die is rolled and the victims current total speed/turns is subtracted from the roll. If the end total is above 5, the attack has hit. Back to the example, the attack would be impossible if the victim has a total speed of above 5. Lets say he is slowly descending towards the ground at 2 height/turn. This gives a total of -2 before the roll is made, and it requires a roll of 7 or 8 to hit. Let's say he is a sitting duck. That requires a roll of 5,6,7 or 8. A more realistic example, A1 wants to fire at C6. Height difference is 2. That makes it a total of 6 + 2 + 2 tiles to shoot. Thats three started "fours" so we subtract 3 from the attackers aim, which happens to be 4. The victims speed is 1 going up, and 1 going to the right(i.e. towards D6), a total of 2. That leaves us with a -1 without the roll. The attacker then rolls, and if the roll is 6 or higher, it is a hit. Hitting: When a ship is hit, the damage of the weapon is compared to the Hull of the victim. For every step of Damage above the victims Hull, 1 Hull is subtracted (keeping track of this is best with - thats right - a 8-sided die) representing the damage done. One-shot killing someone with a Hull of 4 would require a Damage of 8. When colliding or ramming, the Hull and speed of the two (or more!) colliding ships is compared in the same fashion. Determining a collisions Collision damage for each ship is made by adding the total of the ships' highest speed value (called Collision speed) to the Hull of the other ship. The excess damage is then removed from the target ships Hull. Two ships with Hull 4 frontal colliding at speed 2 would simply crash and burn. The same ships colliding head-on with one ship standing still and the other moving at 2 would inflict 6 damage to the moving ship and 6 damage to the ship standing still (instead of the 8 in the earlier example). For an extreme, a ship with Hull 3 has left-right speed 1, and nothing else. A ship with Hull 6 has chosen speed this round that means that after moving its 8(!) tiles, it will end up in the weaker ships tile. Say it was going upwards really fast, 6, and moving one step to the left and one step backwards. This basicly means that the pilot zooms away and hits the other ship from beneath. The highest speed for the tougher ship is 6, and for the weaker 1. This means the collision will do a base of 7 damage. The hull of the other ship is then added, which means 13 damage to the weaker ship and 10 damage to the tougher ship. This means they end up dead and at Hull 2, respectively. Dying: Your ship explodes and your pilot dies when your Hull reaches below 0. At Hull 0 you can still shoot at people, but you are a sitting duck since you cant move. Your aim is reduced by 4, but never below 1. Fuel: Every player starts with 100 Fuel. Keeping track of this is done in any manner you find to work good(the game designer recommends the use of a D100). The tiles where players start at the beginning of the game become refuling stations when the game starts. For each turn spent standing still in the same tile as the refuling station, you get 40 Fuel. Zooming through the tile in your movement gives you 10 Fuel. Powerups: Such as temporarily increased max Speed, increased number of attacks, special one-shot attacks with a higher damage, a permanently raised Hull value (also works as a "repair" when damaged), or whatever your imagination wants. Different colors of D8 are great here, since you easily can indicate height. Can you tell i like those small buggers? Distributing the powerups are done in whatever fashion you like, with a fixed number of spawns each round at a random location, or certain pick-up tiles that always spawn the same type of powerup, or whatever you want. Other stuff: Yes, i like 8-sided dice. Yes, i was inspired by the wonderful board game Frag! whilst coming up with the game rules - but not the game idea however. Yes, the first version of the rules was made in Notepad with completely random example numbers and no real thought put into game balance in about one hour, whilst surfing on the side on and off.