Pastures New

Pastures New is a simple pencil and paper game for two players. The players take it in turns to fill a grid and create a landscape, they then take control of the land by placing castles, scoring points as they control the various types of terrain. The player with the highest score at the end of the game wins.

Pen and paper

I’ve been thinking about various pen and paper games recently, the sort that you can play on a long journey, when you don’t have access to a lot of space, and so have to make do with a pad of paper and a pen, or maybe just with your own mind. I was triggered into this train of thought by a post on the xkcd blag, concerning Ghost, which is one of this type of game.

It’s a nice constraint to apply to games, you limit the space, playing pieces are severely restricted, and the rules need to be simple and concise enough to remember. The problem with this format is that simple games can be easily solved (look at noughts and crosses), and that means they quickly becoming boring to the hardened game player. Saying that, these games are not always played perfectly (and you can visit my earlier link for proof of that, as it is possible to win), and that can provide incentive to keep playing.

So, realising that any game you create within this space will likely be solvable, you are looking to balance the difficulty to solve versus the complexity of the game, and hoping that you can come up with something in the middle that is both fun, and worth playing.

I’ve been working on a few ideas, and will hopefully post some of the best of them soon, and then develop those showing most promise from their initial drafts. Wish me luck.