Here are a couple sites that provide a compendium of traditional games with directions on how to put together what you need to play:
A Treasure Trove of Traditional Games
Button Men
Sanctum Button Men, artwork by Lee Moyer
Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop comes with a set of Cheapass Game‘s Button Men, courtesy of James Ernest. The book’s Button Men fighters were inspired by Sanctum, an online game I helped create back in the late 1990s.
Button Men is a clever little game and definitely worth trying out. You can find information (rules, game materials, etc.) here… and as a bonus, here are two legacy Cheapass webpages about Buttonmen (here and here).
Zombie in my Pocket
ZimP artwork by Kwanchai Moriya
Zombie in my Pocket (2007), is a print-and-play solo game designed by Jeremiah Lee and winner of a 2010 BoardGameGeek “Golden Geek Award.” Zombie in my Pocket (or ZimP) has inspired dozens of “… in my Pocket” games by other designers who take ZimP‘s mechanics and re-skin them with a new theme.
You can download the original game here. ZimP and its variations can be found on BoardGameGeek in the “files” section of Zombie in my Pocket‘s entry. Among the variants is the well-received print-and-play Airborne in Your Pocket (though a retail version of the game that was sold on Kickstarter ran into some problems).
Hive
Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop comes with a copy of Hive that readers can cut out (or photocopy) and play. As Hive‘s designer, John Yianni, explains in the book, the game grew out of a desire to create a Chess-like game that is played using only pieces and no game board.
Hive‘s design lends itself to expansion by way of adding new insect types to the game. In fact, the John Yianni has created Mosquito, Ladybug, and Pillbug expansion pieces that can be added to the core set of Beetles, Grasshoppers, Soldier Ants, Spiders, and Queen Bees. In addition to these official add-ons, the BoardGameGeek community have come up with several unofficial add-on insects, as well as rule variations.
If you want to take a gentle step into tabletop game design, a good way to do it is to experiment with creating an expansion to an existing game, such as a new insect type for Hive.
Sprouts (pencil & paper)
Sprouts is a nodal game invented by the mathematicians John Horton Conway and Michael S. Paterson that is referenced in Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop. What makes the game unusual is that instead of playing within an existing set of nodes and paths, the players create their own.
Hut (DIY)
Reiner Knizia describes this game in his classic book, Dice Games Properly Explained. The game’s core mechanic is used in Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop as an example of a “negative feedback loop.” [Read more…]
Yut Nori (print & play)
Download a print & play version of Yut Nori.
Yut Nori is a Korean game that comes with Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop. It is an elegant circle & cross game (a class of racing games that take place on circular or cruciform-shaped tracks). The best known cross & circle is the traditional Indian game Pachisi and its modern derivatives (Ludo, Parcheesi, Trouble, Sorry!).
Yut traditionally uses tossed sticks to determine the number of spaces the pieces can move, but this version of the game substitutes coins for the sticks. This does change the game’s dynamics a bit. The outcomes of a fair coin flip are identical in likelihood, whereas tossing a Yut stick results in flat side up approximately 60% of the time.
Print & Play Games
Print-and-play games are tabletop games, usually free, that can be downloaded, printed out, and played. At the time of this writing, there are 3,580 print-and-play games available on BoardGameGeek, with more being added every day. [Read more…]
Agon (print & play)
Agon (also known as Queen’s Guard) is a tabletop game that is mentioned in passing in Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop. The game is notable for being the first known one to use hexagonal game spaces.
3-to-15 (pencil & paper)
In Rules of Play, Salen & Zimmerman describe Marc LeBlanc’s 3-to-15 game. Its rules are:
Two players alternate turns.- A player’s turn consists of picking a number between 1 and 9.
- No number can be picked more than once.
- If any three of the numbers picked by a player add up to 15, the player wins the game.
3-to-15 shares the same underlying mechanics as Tic-Tac-Toe (per the image to the right), even though its written rules are entirely different. Try playing a few games of 3-to-15. Is it the same game as Tic-Tac-Toe, or do you think the differing ways the games are presented results in them being truly different games?