Monday, November 02, 2009

Rainbow Five Game


One of the neater games to emerge from my Collaborative Writing Practices: Game Design course. To play, all you need is a good set of "rainbow" colored markers. If only they made a seven-colored mechanical pen...

7 comments:

DACarrelli said...

Interesting game. I just busted out some crayons and played it with a friend. It reminded me of 8 queens on the chessboard without attacking each other. Saw a lot of knight manuevers between same colors. Is it possible to complete the game and have no winner? Ours looked close to it with a lot of circles forced to being blank, but 5 in a row eventually found its way.

Michael Goeller said...

The designers originally had an 8x8 board, and I told them about the "8 Queen" problem as a measure of whether or not they could fit all of the colors without violating the "same line" rule. It appears that you can get seven queens (corresponding to the seven colors) onto a 7x7 grid. But eventually someone is definitely going to be in zugzwang -- though I have not proven that mathematically. The "no two colors in the same line," by the way, started as a rule to prevent "draw death." If you did not have that rule, someone could always force a draw. I have only limited experience playing, but it appears that somebody always wins.

Bionic Lime said...

Can you explain a bit more about the course, such as its purpose, and what they students are learning?

You can email directly if you want.

Bionic Lime said...

Thanks!

Michael Goeller said...

The course is taught in the Writing Program at Rutgers University (01:355:375) in a special classroom we call The Collaboratory (you can see pictures in the archives of my class blog). The students use Web 2.0 collaboration software (Google Docs, Blogger, Weebly etc.), Adobe Photoshop, and other programs to design board and card games. For each game they have to have the game itself, rules, a box, website, blog etc. The chief text for the course is Challenges for Game Designers. There is also a book on Photoshop. As you can imagine, it is a fun class. But I think they learn a lot about creative collaboration and the technologies that enable it.

ayodownloadgamegratis said...

Nice game.

Waytosms said...

you are good