Squirrels and Nuts
Basic concepts
A game without death, is that possible ?
Of course … there’s hundreds of them if you look outside of wargames. 😀
Essential items
Keeping things simple we only need two things :
- a deck of cards
- a set of tokens to represent the nuts
Setup
- take out the aces from the deck (these are the player tokens)
- shuffle the deck
- lay out a grid of N by N cards, with N being an odd number
- give each player X tokens
- players place their card (face up) on the outer edge of the grid
Note : no values given as these can be changed at will to make bigger or smaller games.
Goal
Reach the center of the grid with as many nuts as you can gather.
Gameplay
Play sequence :
- move your token to the next (vertical or horizontal) position in the grid
- reveal card at your location
- if card is [face card] : the branch broke … think quick
(a) place one token on the card and stay
OR
(b) move one position towards the edge - if you move onto a position that has a player … you push him of the branch
(a) target player hands over a token to you
AND
(b) target is moved one position towards the edge - at the center : you’ve made it
- next player gets his turn
- play continues until either one has reached his goal or everyone has
Winning
The player at the exit with the most nuts wins.
He is the squirrel lord … until the next time.
Alternate rules
- bluffing : players don’t reveal cards to others, but can act as if ‘broken branch’ happened
- reaching the goal only starts the scoring, players that are still active can still claim victory if they have more nuts in hand …
Leave a Reply