When a push becomes a shove
There’s a modern game mechanic I stumbled across that seems to show up only in games cooked up this century. So unless some ancient shepherd carved it into a stone tablet and forgot to tell anybody, I reckon the credit goes to Gen Y and the Millennials for this little nugget of ingenuity.
I call it the Billy Goat Gruff, the Big Horned Ram Head Butt, or whatever else your local tavern crowd wants to call it.
Here's how the attack works:
A pawn moves into an adjacent enemy pawn's square and says:
"Move it, buddy. This is my spot now."
The enemy pawn gets shoved back one space, and if there are more pawns lined up behind him, they all get shoved too.
Like a domino effect, one push can affect many.
That's it.
No secret decoder rings. No forty-page rulebook. No PhD in Advanced Pawn Sciences.
Just good old-fashioned pushin' and shovin'.
If a pawn is standing somewhere in the middle of the board, you ram into it and push it back.
If it's standing on the edge of the board?
Well...
It'll learns a valuable lesson about border lines.
Off the cliff it goes.
Good Bye Wiley!
Now things get spicy.
If one or more pawns get wedged between two opposing pawns, you've got yourself a pawn sandwich.
And unlike a ham sandwich, somebody isn't walking away from this one.
For example:
X ---> OOOOX
The attacking pawn crushes one of the trapped enemy pawns and the position becomes:
XOOOX
and on the next turn:
XOOX
Keep pushing and eventually you'll have fewer enemies than a rattlesnake at a mongoose convention.
That's really all there is to it.
Simple enough to teach in thirty seconds.
Mean enough to start a family argument before dessert.
And now that you know how the mechanic works, let me introduce you to a few games you can play at home with stuff that's probably collecting dust in a closet.
You'll need:
An old checker or chess board. (I'm betting it's red and black and missing at least three pieces.)
A couple of Fiddlesticks, rulers, popsicle sticks, or whatever's within arm's reach.
Sixteen pawns in two different colors.
Don't have enough checker pieces?
Join the club.
Use coins, poker chips, rocks, seashells, beans, bottle caps, acorns, or anything else that won't roll off the table every five minutes.
Better yet, send the kids on a scavenger hunt to find the pawns.
It gets them off their phones, sparks their imagination, burns off some energy, and buys you ten minutes of peace and quiet.
That's a parenting victory right there.
Once you're ready, give these games a whirl:
The Abyss A fast shoving match fought one bad decision away from oblivion.
Aires Big Horned Rams butting heads for bragging rights, stud status, and King of the Mountain supremacy.
Shobu A polite Japanese style passive aggressive strategy game that quietly turns into a bar fight.
And once you've mastered this horizontal attack mechanic, take a look at my original game:
Because the witch doctor looked at all this sideways violence and thought:
"You know what this needs?"
Gravity!
Now the attacks can come from above and below too.
You're welcome.
And yes...
I just slipped in an advertisement for one of my own games into the middle of a gaming blog.
See what I did there?
A voodoo ape's gotta make a living somehow.