Iris Wars

This one's my 10 year old brother's. I was kind of shocked: As far as I could tell, he came up with it in about 10 minutes and it's honestly about as close to replicating the strategy and resource-management of some simpler RTSs.

Rules:

The goal is as simple as eliminating all of your opponent's pieces, excluding the titular Iris Beams.
Though it's played on a Chinese checkers board, it bears almost no resemblance to that game. Each player uses 3 of the six colors, in this case, either hot or cool colors, to signify their team's pieces and ranks.
You start with 4 light pieces, which deal 1 damage and have 1 "health", 3 medium pieces, with 2 damage and 2 health, and 4 heavy pieces, with 3 and 3. In addition, you start with one immobile "iris beam", which doesn't count as one of your pieces when it comes to determining a winner. The point of each arm of the star is a potential "iris beam", and when one of your pieces steps onto one of these points, they are converted from a game piece into a beam. Beams can only be destroyed by other beams, but may be replaced if another piece steps into the corner space. Regardless of the piece sacrificed in this way, the beam it creates is destroyed after a single hit. The 2 white circles in each of the four horizontal points of the board represent shields invulnerable to the attack of an iris beam external to that corner. If the beam corresponding to one of the two white circles fires through it, the shield is removed and the beam is vulnerable from that axis.
A turn consists of three moves. A move can be one piece moved one space, one piece attacking an adjacent piece once, or one attack from an iris beam. These actions can be repeated or rearranged however you want (ex. one piece can move 2 or 3 spaces, or attack 2 or 3 times, etc.). Beams can only fire along two axes, passing through one of the two white spaces on the diagram. A beam attack consists of either destroying the first piece in the row (starting from the beam itself) or dealing a single damage point to every piece in the row (including your own). A heavy piece is invulnerable to iris beams and acts as a shield, stopping the beam from affecting anything beyond it. When dealt damage, a piece is downgraded that many ranks, so if a heavy piece is dealt 1 damage, it is removed and replaced with a medium piece (and no longer has invulnerability to beam attacks).

Verdict: Interesting. Really fun, and intense. A lot of strategy is involved, especially concerning the decision to sacrifice one piece (and one more chance or winning) to gain a beam. Still needs a little polish, but since it's symmetrical, it can be played as-is.

Candyland Revisited

Our goal: Take the most mindless game ever conceived and ad strategy to it. Ultimately my goal would be to completely remove all luck from Candyland, but for now, our cross between Candyland and Go-Fish is as close as we've come. This one is good because it can be played by up to four players.

Rules: From the stack of Candyland cards, each player is dealt five cards. The players take turns asking another player for a card in their hand, like in Go-Fish. They may ask for any card, even if they don't have it themselves. However, keep track of which cards you got from which opponents, because an opponent can never force you to return to them a card you guessed from their hand. (However, if you have duplicates of the card in question, you may give the opponent the specific duplicate which they did not give to you). If the player doesn't have the card they've been asked for, the asking player may chose to draw a card from the top of the deck instead. A double color must be asked for specifically as a double. For example, a person with a double red in their hand does not have to pass it to a player who asks only for red. A person may ask another player for cards as many times as they successfully get a card from another player. They may also ask again if they have the option to draw from the pile after an incorrect guess and draw the card they asked for.
Next, that player plays any one card from their hands into a face-up pile, moving as they would in Candyland.
Finally, if the player has less than five cards in their hand, they may draw cards until they have five cards.
The goal of the game is to end on the last purple space with no cards left in your hand. If you land on the purple space with cards remaining in your hand, you may play them one a turn, without moving, until the last card from your hand has been played and you win the game.
These rules apply to character cards as well, and you must play all character cards from your hands to finish the game with two exceptions. You may, at any time during the game, skip your next 2 turns in order to buy "immunity" from the character card of your choice (if you get their card, you may discard it), as long as that card isn't in your hand. If it is, and you don't want Plumpy to drag you all the way back to square one, you can skip your next two turns and reveal your hand to all opponents in exchange for discarding his card.
If someone lands on a space that requires you to stay in one position until a certain card is drawn, you remain their until the specific card is played.

Verdict: Really really fun. You have to look at this game and how it improves upon both Candyland and Go-Fish. It is absolutely better than either game in it's original form, and is entertaining enough to inspire my to find an old copy of Candyland on ebay.

Clue-Chess

Essentially just Clue + Chess. This one has the benefit of being able to be played by more than 2 players. It is a little confusing, but in the abstract, the Clue and Chess pieces share the Clue board, with the Clue player(s) trying to solve a murder while the Chess pieces hunt them down.

Rules: There are two groups of players: Clue players and a Chess player. There is only 1 person who can play with the Chess pieces and either 1 or 2 people who can play with the Clue pieces.

The game begins, as in Clue, with a character, room, and weapon card being randomly selected. These represent the case the Clue player(s) have to solve.

Each player takes one turn every round, even when there are more than one Clue players.

Clue player(s):
The goal of the Clue player(s), as in the original game, is to solve the case selected at the start of the game by process of elimination. If one player is playing Clue, they control all 6 pieces. If two players are playing Clue, each controls 3 pieces. The players all share one clue guessing sheet and work cooperatively.
During each Clue player's turn, that person rolls a die. Then, they may select (individually, for each piece) to either stay in place or move the entire roll of the die. As long as the piece doesn't end on a space shared by another piece, it may move through both Clue and Chess pieces. Also, on up to (only) 3 turns, the player may move any number of their pieces through one of the secret passages as that piece's move.
After having all movement is finished, if the player has any pieces in rooms, one of those pieces may guess a possible combination for the case, as in Clue. The guess must include the room that piece is in, but as in Clue, any other players that are being guessed must be immediately moved to that room. The Chess player, who holds all the cards besides the 3 case cards and whatever other character cards have been set aside, must show the Clue player(s) only one card to disprove their guess. This card is set down exposed on the table and may never be revealed again. After a guess, that exact combination may never be guessed again by any player. Each piece can only guess once in a room and must move back into the hallway before guessing again.
A player may, instead of making a guess as to what the case file contains, may guess which of their pieces is being hunted by the Chess player. This guess does not have to be made from a room and yields only a simple yes or no answer. If the guess is correct, the Chess player replaces the character card and randomly chooses another target from that players possible characters (the same character may be drawn again).
At any point during their turn, a Clue player may make an accusation, definitively guessing what cards are in the case file. If they guess incorrectly, they are out of the game.

Chess player:
The goal of the Chess pieces, like in Chess, is to capture a specific member of the opposing team(s) (in this case, the Clue pieces). At the start of the game, after the case cards have been set aside, the chess player randomly chooses one character card corresponding to each opponent and sets it aside. It is the goal of the Chess player to hunt down and capture that piece (or pieces) by either landing directly on their square in the hallway or enters the same room as them. If the critical piece is captured, the player in charge of that piece is out of the game. Other Clue pieces may be captured and removed from the game as well, but the Clue player stays in the game, and may still guess captured pieces, although those pieces are for all other purposes out of the game.
For the purposes of this game, the staircase box in the middle of the Clue board counts as a room, in which the Chess pieces start. The door is as wide as the wall facing the "Hall", and is where the Chess pieces may exit from at the start of the game.
The Chess player starts with a queen, a bishop, a rook, and a knight in the center staircase and may move one piece a turn, as in Chess.
When entering and exiting a room, the piece's move must land them on the square directly inside the door(s). While the pieces may not move past each other or the Clue pieces, the knight may jump over both Clue and Chess pieces. Chess pieces may never use secret passages.

Verdict: Amazing. The level of strategy involved for the Clue player is hard to believe, and though the Chess player(s) have a more straight-forward objective, he or she has to try not to let their opponent(s) know what their target is. It very unrefined, and has changed a lot since my sister and I first came up with it. It probably still needs work. But it's fun.

Chess-Hammer

Inspired by table-top RPGs, we came up with this immediately after Mine Chess. The most interesting thing about it was our attempt to translate the movements of Chess pieces into a grid less space.

Rules: I don't remember, I'll post them later.

Verdict: Slow, tedious, unbalanced. It's possible to win having moved only a single piece.

Mine Chess

This game plays like a cross between Stratego and Chess. My friend and I came up with it at a party a couple months ago when it became too tedious to play another full round of Chess.

Rules: Essentially, the rules are identical to that of Chess, with one exception. At the start of the game, you (somehow, we used stickers) mark any three of your pieces, making sure that only you know which ones are marked. If the opponent captures a marked piece, the capturing piece, as well as any pieces in the 8 adjacent spaces, are destroyed. If this includes either King, the game ends for that person.

Verdict: The real way to review this game would be to compare it to the classic Chess game. The strategy is not as obvious as in the original, and a good poker face is important, since a lot of the new strategy involves faking-out opponents, either letting them know which pieces are booby-trapped or keeping them anonymous depending on the situation. Faster than classic Chess, and definitely fun.

I've had a lot of free time recently and I found myself on a week-long vacation with classic board games taking up a large amount of my time. With so many games at our disposal, writing new rules of games and mashing others together came fairly naturally after the 100th game of checkers. Here's what some friends, family, and I have come up with.