Piecepackman

Piecepackman

Players 1, 2, or 4
Length 30-45 minutes
Equipment Required piecepack, PiecepackMatchsticks
Designer Dan Burkey, Inspired by the video game Pac-Man, designed for Namco by Toru Iwatani.
Version 1.12
Version Date 2018-06-??
License Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Description

A cooperative maze game introducing the piecepack matchsticks.

The Story So Far

Once upon a time, four ghosts lived peacefully in a cozy house at the center of a maze powered by four magical coins. Every day, they cultivated the corridors of their maze with energy cubes, a pleasant-tasting geometric fungus that harmonized with each ghost’s ectoplasmic signature. But one dark night, while the ghosts cuddled together in their little ghost house, a treacherous disk-shaped creature known as Piecepackman invaded the maze. Now he’s tearing the place apart, indiscriminately eating their energy cubes and devouring their power coins in frenzied ghost-eating rampages. Worst of all, he can regenerate himself with his stock of extra lives. But ghosts know a thing or two about returning from the dead. And now it’s time to fight back...

Object of the Game

Players cooperate as the ghosts with the objective to take all of Piecepackman’s lives, or end the game with more Energy Cubes than Piecepackman.

Meanwhile, Piecepackman is trying to collect all the Power Coins and Energy Cubes on the board and stay alive until the board is cleared.

Rules

Piecepackman.pdf

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15PoMMG7ezRCn2rDbXyQi-HDSmHQiiNqEFYiicwIK8_g/edit?usp=sharing

Some clarifications on the rules:

License

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Reviews and Comments

The showcase game for the first-place expansion Piecepack Matchsticks. Unfortunately, not as good as the expansion itself.

Although the maze shows off the matchsticks nicely, building the board is tricky -- it takes a long time and a lot of manual dexterity.

The designer himself warned that the three-player version is broken. (Designers seem to have trouble designing for three players.) Playtester Paul showed mathematically that the Piecepackman character moves much faster than the ghosts (the players) and will consistently beat them. (Math available on request.) However, a glance at some of the variants seems to show that the Piecepackman character is not always so fast in them. I might like to try a solo game in the near future.

A lot of work obviously went into this game. Nevertheless, aspects of it seemed rushed. I wish Dan had put more time into playtesting, even at the expense of some of his nifty diagrams. Maybe in 2.0!

--RonHaleEvans, Where No One Has Gamed Before, October 2018


CategoryGame <add taxonomy category tags here>