Talk:Traction

I have not had a chance to playtest this yet. - Cerulean

Other names considered for this game were 'IceRunners', 'Martian Football', and 'Skait'. - Cerulean

From what I can see, the only real difference between a small piece and a large (or a medium, for that matter) is that a large has more reach for tackling. And I imagine the first player will have a big disadvantage and that the overwhelmingly important aspect of this game will be tempo, i.e. whose turn it is. I wonder if it would be at all interesting to apply more rules from Icehouse to this? - misuba 06:34, 17 May 2005 (GMT)

The first variation from this that I would try (if initial playtesting did not go well): smalls walk 6, mediums 3, and larges 1; larges only tackle mediums, mediums only tackle smalls, and smalls only tackle larges (Roshambo Stylee). - misuba 06:36, 17 May 2005 (GMT)

Hmmm....interesting thoughts, MiSuBA. First of all, I was tempted to make this a realtime (turnless) game, but if it was, the pieces would lose all relative speed; a piece's speed would be determined by how fast a player could walk it, making the game far more dexterity-based than I wanted. It sounds like the issue here is that the piece movement ranges are too similar. I suggest using small=4, medium=2, large=1; that way, each piece moves about 1.5X faster than the next-biggest piece. How did you arrive at 6-3-1?

Secondly, the first player does have an advantage, letting them get their pieces off the pad and into a position on the field that is both offensive and defensive. This could be remedied by having the starting player only move half of his or her pyramids. As for pacing, the game might flow quicker if turns were shorter, and a way to do that would be to allow each player to move fewer pyramids a turn, say 2 or 3 (this may also solve the starting player advantage problem).

Let me know how the tackling variant works. Thanks for the input! - Cerulean 23:54, 17 May 2005 (GMT)

You cannot walk and tackle with the same pyramid in one turn, can you?--ManyHills 18:25, 19 Jul 2005 (GMT)

I don't intend for that to happen. I should make it clear in the rules that each pyramid only gets to do one thing, either walk or tackle. I shall make the rules clearer in explicitly stating that. Thanks for pointing that out! - Cerulean 14:09, 21 Jul 2005 (GMT)

Just wanted to say I really like how this works as written (4-2-1 movement, turn-based). Reminds me a lot of playing rugby. I think with equally experienced players, first turn advantage would be quite prominent, but possibly not as much as you might expect. In my experience, the best strategy for winning is to set up a fortress defence and have one or two runners charge towards the goal; as such, the first few turns are spent getting the runners clear of the other pieces, then setting up a defence, rather than playing aggressively. This leads to first turn advantage being mitigated somewhat, since you can steal the initiative (by cobbling your defence together quicker), but often you'll leave holes which later require repairing.

My only possible complaint is that it sort of feels like pieces should be allowed to make running tackles, but I worry any way of implementing this would break the way the game works at the moment, which is wonderful. Note that all this comes from playing with 2 players on a fairly long and thin surface. -- Cheshire Swift 21:27, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

P.S. Cork placemats make a very good playing surface.