Buckle in kids, this is gonna be a long post explaining all the work that went into taking down the Orange Menace.
Over the past few months during quarantine, I've made a few home made board games. The one which Silas & I just finished playing/play testing was All the Presidents Toast Crunch.
The game went through multiple changes before becoming what it ultimately is (and we're still going to have to tweak it quite a bit, of course). Originally the idea was going to be all the presidents of the United States would be defending the White House against an onslaught of dinosaurs or zombies or zombie dinosaurs. (I gotta admit, that still sounds like a pretty cool idea. Maybe it'll still happen at some point).
What put that idea in the dumpster, though, was ...well, who would want Trump on their team? Frankly, he'd probably sabotage you so that you'd die horribly. (Or the other presidents would be attempting to get rid of him themselves...) Either way, I realized quickly that there's no way that Trump could be a hero.
So, I started thinking...what if he were the villain that the other presidents were trying to expel? The Thanos of the White House, as it were, and the other 44 previous Commanders-in-Chief were the Avengers...
I started thinking of ways to get all 44 previous presidents into play, and the realization that we could have 4 teams of 11 felt right.
So, I divided them up into four color coded 'teams' - pink, green, blue and yellow. (It helped matters that I had dice of the same color...) I needed tokens for the presidents, though, and where was I going to get 44 different pieces? Well. I have a bunch of bottlecaps from Pepsis and Mountain Dews that were just sitting around, and they were about the right size. So... we printed up pictures of all the presidents, and added their names to the outside rims, and voila. Tokens.
Hm. I am explaining this rather poorly. It doesn't help that this was a month's-long process, and I don't remember exactly how it evolved into the game that it became. (And I'm sure that behind-the-scenes info isn't all that interesting anyway.) So.Here are a couple other pics from the creating process, and then I'll get to the meat & potatoes of the game.
 |
| completed board |
As I was making the game, I needed a place to store it, and having the box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch available was serendipitous, as it worked quite nicely.
 |
| hee! |
I placed a piece of tape on the box, with the working title of "All the Presidents", and the next day I saw that I had placed it over Cinnamon, making the perfect game name of "All the Presidents Toast Crunch", which is hilarious. (We sometimes refer to it as "All the Presidents Roast Trump", which works too, but I think Toast Crunch is just funnier.)
Anyway. Game!
The game is a cooperative game wherein all the players work together, taking control of the other 44 presidents (you start the game with 4 on the board, and can summon others as play continues) to defeat Donald Trump.
Trump of course, fights back with his own attacks, and he also has a "MAGA counter", which can increase through dice rolls. If the MAGA counter hits 50, or all the presidents on the board die, Trump wins. If Trump's health hits zero, the players win.
The presidents, as I stated earlier, are divided into four color coded teams:
Green Team: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, John Tyler, Franklin Pierce, Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, and Bill Clinton.
and Pink Team: James Madison, Martin Van Buren, Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, Grover Cleveland (again), Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama.
 |
| Avengers Assemble! |
Each of the presidents has a different ability which comes into play during the game, and they all have different health amounts, and can move different number of spaces.
All the presidents can hold two attack die, and can also hold constitutional amendments (which work as shields against Trump's attacks).
One president from each team starts on their home base, each with full health.
The presidents attack dice are set up on various spaces around the board, and so are the amendments.
Trump's health counter is set up, and the MAGA counter is as well. There's a Trump token (which doesn't actually move, it's just there for 'decoration') that is set in the center of the board.
Three presidents not on the board already are set up in the "summoning lineup", and at that point, we're ready to start the game.
So, each player takes their turn, which consists of three phases: Movement, Attack, and Trump Attack.
With Movement, you spin a spinner to determine how many of the presidents on the board you'll be able to move (1, 2, or 3). You can then move that number of presidents a certain number of spaces (depending on the number of spaces they can move which is on their status cards). Certain spaces on the board are colored, which means those spaces are vulnerable to Trump Attacks, so you need to be wary or where you end up moving your pieces.
If any of your presidents have obtained attack die, you can then move on to the Attack phase. Any number of presidents can attack during this phase, as long as they have attack die. Rolling the attack die causes it to lose 1 stamina; after 3 rolls, it is used up and goes back onto the board where it can be re-collected.
When you roll the attack die, you move Trump's health counter down in correspondence with that. Trump starts with 280 health (because you have 280 characters to tweet with). So, yes, the presidents have to chip his health down bit by bit. And, yeah, if you managed to roll 6s every single time, it would take 46.66 attacks in order to completely take him out. No one said defeating him would be simple.
Attack dice can also be used to "summon" other presidents into play. If you are in the right spot on the board, and have an attack die, you can roll it to summon one of the presidents from the upcoming list.
There are three in the lineup, so a 1 brings in the 1st, a 2 brings in the 2nd, and a 3 brings in the 3rd.
A 4 allows the player to choose which one they want.
A 5 causes the lineup deck to be reshuffled.
And a 6 means that the summoning failed altogether.
After the Attack Phase, it's now Trump's turn to attack.
There's a box where 10 different colored dice are stored. (2 blue, 2 green, 2 yellow, 2 pink, 1 black, and 1 red.) The player whose turn it is blindly grabs two dice from the box.
The color of the die determines which (if any) presidents on hte board take damage. (Blue die damage presidents from Team Blue, and any presidents on a blue colored square; yellow damages Team Yellow, etc.)
The red die moves Trumps MAGA counter up (not good).
And the black die does damage to Trump's health counter. (Let's face it, Trump is often his own worst enemy.)
 |
| The Trump Attack Dice Box |
After the Trump Attack dice are rolled and whatever damage is inflicted, it's then the other players turn. Spin the spinner, move the prezes, attack and Trump attack, and repeat until the end of the game.
That's essentially how the game is played.
While I was making it , at some point I (jokingly) decided that when Silas and I played it, that whatever the outcome of the game was would determine what Tuesday's election would be like, too.
And...well. Honestly, it probably *will* play out a bit like the game.
We started playing it yesterday night, and it was supremely stressful when we would get down to one final president (there's a "panic mode" rule we implemented that if you a president is the sole survivor on the board, they can double their movement) and it would be Trump's turn to attack.
But, with Grover Cleveland (the Green Team version) running around collecting Amendments, and Andrew Johnson essentially "farming" attack dice, and James Monroe acting as our chief summoner, we were able to slowly chip away at Trump's health.
Some of the abilities were key to his defeat as well - Clinton has a risky move where Trump rolls THREE attack die instead of two - but if the total is 12 or higher, it does that amount of damage to TRUMP instead of the presidents on the board. (If it's 12 or lower, it inflicts the damage on the players AND does 4 points of damage to Bill.) We used that twice, and it paid off once, and hurt us once.
I thought before we started that Pink Team would end up being my favorite (It's got Lincoln, Obama and FDR, after all) but it turned out that after Zachary Taylor was killed off, no other Pink cards came into play.
Team Blue ended up being the true heroes, with Jimmy Carter being the last president we had on the board. Somewhat anticlimactically, Trump himself - a black dice roll - was the deciding factor.
Trump was able to defeat 13 of the presidents (oh, and each president death also ticks the MAGA counter up one). The MAGA counter was at 48 at the end of the game, and when it gets that high, with each Trump Attack phase, the fear of pulling out the red dice was palpable.
 |
| dead presidents |
 | ||
| Trump's defeated foes |
 |
| He was REALLY close to beating us. |
All in all, this was a lot of work, and it's a lot of setting up, and a lot to keep track of while playing. And there's still a lot of tweaking and changes that will probably need to be made to the game play (it's wildly uneven with the movement, and the amount of colored spaces on the board is probably much too high).
But it was also a lot of fun. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment