Nice Games Jam: ”Pothole Run”

According to Minnesota Public Radio, it's hot girl sinkhole spring. In other words, we have an insane number of potholes right now in the Twin Cities, and since we can't do anything other than wait for the hardworking folks of road repair to fix them, we made a game about the whole situation. Andy and Beth Korth join for this special Nice Games Jam!

• GLOM preorder through Miniature Market
• GLOM preorder through GameNerdz
• ✨hot girl sinkhole spring✨ - Minnesota Public Radio
• Uptown washout leaves 8-foot-deep sinkhole in Minneapolis intersection - Tim Nelson and Kerem Yücel, Minnesota Public Radio
• The Korths are back! They were first on episode #002 Steam Greenlight
• Episode #102 with Beth & Andy Code Comment: "Verdant Skies"
• Episode #204 with Beth & Andy Families in Games
• Episode #132 with Beth Narrative Design
• An example of the pothole + sinkhole situation we're dealing with this spring.
• Another view of the school bus sinkhole.

Prompt Ellen gave us a prompt: "Create a game about patching potholes that Gabe would have fun playing" Game type Tabletop game Materials

Marbles

Play-Doh or alternative squishyness

A very complicated custom game board

Road tiles of various sizes and configurations

Setup

• Set up the custom game board
• Distribute marbles to all players
• Distribute Play-Doh to all players
• Distribute road / terrain tiles to all players
• Determine who will be the first player per the rules below

Rules

In a nutshell, the game challenges players to roll marbles down a hill. The hill is made of road tiles, but some of the tiles are pitted with potholes. Players can use Playdoh to patch potholes in the road so the marbles will make it to the finish.

The board is a grid laid over a raised pyramid where players put down terrain. Everything starts in the center (city hall); that’s where you put the marbles so they roll down the hill. Each quadrant is a side of the pyramid, there’s some method of tiling for the player to put pieces down to determine how the marbles will travel in that area.

Turn order

• Play starts with the player who most recently hit a pothole with their car or their bike. In case of a tie (as might happen if multiple players were in a car together), the younger player goes first.
• Play then proceeds clockwise.

Players can take 3 actions on their turn. You can do the same action more than once. The actions are:

• Rotate the board
• Place or swap a tile
• Patch a pothole
• Drop a marble

Tiles

• Each tile is worth 1, 2 or 3 victory points when marbles pass through. The rougher the tile, the more victory points it's worth.
• Players also get a bit of Play-Doh to fill up potholes in the terrain.
• Players have 5 tiles in their hand at any given time; as an action, they can play one, then draw back up to 5 tiles.

Rotating the board

• Rotating the board happens towards the left (counterclockwise), the opposite of play order, which goes to the right (clockwise). Each rotation turns the board 90 degrees.

Scoring & dropping marbles

• If a marble reaches the bottom of the hill in front of you, you get the victory points that it acquired from each tile it moved through on its journey from the top of the hill to the bottom.
• You ONLY get the victory points if the marble reaches the bottom of the hill. If you drop a marble as an action, and the marble gets stuck on the way, you don't get any points from the tiles it passed through.

Winning the game

• Play proceeds in 12 rounds. Each player gets one turn per round.
• Play ends when the turn counter reaches zero (game starts at the start of winter, ends at the start of the next winter)
• Whoever has acquired the most victory points by the end of the "year" is the winner of Pothole Run

Fun stuff to think about for the future

• We have to create an extractor to get the playdoh out.
• Cooperative play mode? Roles for each player? Someone who’s better at filling potholes, someone who can put more marbles down, etc. Maybe two teams?