Re: Putt putt

["James Droscha" <jdroscha@...>]

--- In piecepack@egroups.com, "Paul Shope" <pmshope@y...> wrote:
> I enjoyed Chris's message the other day about the billiards game.  
> With that and "Soccer" I think we have an official genre of 
piecepack 
> games which I dub "flickers."  (This refers to the practice of 
> flicking the coins, in case you don't get it.)

   In general terms, they would be called "manual dexterity games", 
but "flickers" is much shorter!

> Chris's idea also gave me a brainstorm for another flicker:  
> Miniature Golf.  I haven't worked out any rules yet, but I think it 
> would be fun to set up strange and interesting courses to flick 
your 
> way through.  
> 
> I suppose the rules wouldn't be all that complicated actually.  
Just 
> flick your "ball" through the course in as few flicks as possible.  
> The player with the lowest number of strokes/flicks wins.

   Cool.  Are you thinking that each "hole" would be set up and 
played before moving on to the next?  Or more like you set up an 
entire "course" to be played through non-stop?

   One thing that comes to mind is that if you build the entire 
course, it would likely be the equivalent of only 3 or 4 holes, but 
you could use the leftover coins to conveniently keep track of 
strokes.  If you build and play each hole separately, you will 
probably want to keep a scoresheet on paper.  Also, if you play one 
hole at a time, you could form the "hole" at the edge of the table; 
this would eliminate the need for a rule on judging if a ball is _in_ 
the hole.

   Another thing that comes to mind is obstacles for the course.  You 
could really use anything within reach... cans, jars, toys, 
whatever.  One interesting experiment might be to take, say, three 
tiles and put a rubberband around them to create a kind of springy 
bumber.

   To me, it seems like if you intend to play one hole at a time, it 
would be nice if there were a rule determining who was reponsible for 
setting up the next hole and they could just build it spontaneously.  
If, instead, you intend to layout the course all at once, it might be 
better to have diagrams of pre-designed courses.

   This talk of flickers also makes me wonder what other types of 
manual dexterity games could be played with a piecepack (though you 
would want to play with wood, plastic, or ceramic pieces).  For 
example, what about a game that involved rolling the coins through 
arches or other structures built from tiles?

--James