Atomic Goats

2-6 players

Your mother told you to never become a goat herder, and now you wish you had listened to her. Fallout from a nuclear power plant has transformed your herd into bleating glowsticks. Can you put all your goats through the scrubbing facility in time?

Components

• 6 Pasture Boards (marked with a 3x2 grid, grid spaces numbered 1-6)
• 1 Scrubbing Facility Board (marked with 12 Goat-sized spaces)
• 1 Fallout Track (marked for rounds 1-10) and 1 token
• 216 Goat Meeples (72 brown, 72 yellow, 72 bright green)
• 72 Player Tokens (12 per player, color-coded)
• 1 Resource Deck (60 Resource Cards)
  • 6 suits (Bribery, Labor, Food, Favors, Medicine, Education), 10 cards per suit, cards are valued from 1-10.
• 1 six-sided die

Setup

1. Each player receives a Pasture Board, 12 Player Tokens, and 12 yellow Goats. Players place 2 Goats in each space of their board.
2. The Scrubbing Facility Board and Fallout Track are placed in the center of the play area. The token is placed on the first space of the track.
3. The Resource Deck is shuffled, and each player draws five cards.

Play

Scrubbing Phase

The first player lays down a card from his/her hand. The next player must lay down a card that can beat the previous card. He/she can beat the card either by:

a. Playing a card of a higher value
b. Playing a card of a winning suit, as follows:

“Favors” beats “Bribery”
“Bribery” beats “Labor”
“Labor” beats “Medicine”
“Medicine” beats “Education”
“Education” beats “Food”
“Food” beats “Favors”

Note that a “10” card can only be beaten by another “10” card in the second scenario.

If a player cannot beat the previous card or has run out of cards, they are eliminated, and play continues with the next player. The last player not to be eliminated gets to place one of their player tokens and one of their yellow/green Goats on an empty space of the Scrubbing Facility Board.

Once a space has been filled, players discard their remaining cards and draw five new cards. Play continues until all 12 spaces are filled.

Irradiation Phase

Each player can rearrange their Goats on their Pasture Boards. A maximum of three Goats can occupy any grid space on the board.

Players take turns rolling the six-sided die. The die roll determines which grid space (1-6) the player must irradiate, using the following procedure:

1. Green Goats are removed from the board.
2. Yellow Goats are replaced by green Goats.
3. Brown Goats are replaced by yellow Goats.

Clean-Up Phase

Players replace any of their yellow or green Goats in the Scrubbing Facility with brown Goats, remove their player tokens from the Scrubbing Facility Board, and return their freshly scrubbed Goats to their Pasture Boards. The Fallout Track is advanced one round if possible.

Scoring

Green Goats are worth 1 point.

Yellow Goats are worth 2 points.

Brown Goats are worth 5 points.

The player with the most points at the end of 10 rounds wins.

Where is my lunch
In an old, but still operational, atomic reactor the workers must be careful with their lunch. In the reactor live a lot of mice, eager to eat the lunch. Each player plays a worker and controls one cat. When a cat comes close to a mouse, it will move, a lot. Mice can use doors (as cats) but can also go through holes. Each mouse that comes close enough to the lunch will move (slow) towards it, and finally eat it. Players should guard their lunch, or score points by moving a mouse into the lunch of an opponent.
The object of the game is not, for the cat to catch the mice, but to chase them towards lunches of the opponents.

Material:

• Board, with square fields, 9-12 rooms and corridors (depends number of players).
• A cat for each player
• 10 mice, numbered 1-10
• 6 lunch markers per player, valued 2-5 (2-3-3-4-4-5 points)

All mice are put in the reactor, evenly distributed. Every player places his cat somewhere in the reactor but not next to a mouse, then in reverse order, every player places two lunch markers. A lunch marker may not be placed in the same room as the players cat.
Mice move in 8 directions. Cats move in 4 directions (not diagonal).

During a turn a player:
A. Places a new lunch marker somewhere in the reactor (only first four rounds, all lunches are placed then)
B. Moves his cat up to three empty squares (not into lunches, not into mice) A cat move puts the mice into action! Every mouse that is in a square next to the cat (after every step - all 8 directions) will run away 3 squares, square by square decided by:
1. Through a hole (unless another cat directly on the other side)
2. Straight away from the moving cat
3. Into a lunch (that is the end of the turn). This scores POINTS (value of lunch) for the player of the cat. Even if the mouse runs into this players lunch. Lunch is removed from the board.

When the cat move is finished, every mouse, starting with number 1, will move towards the best lunch (highest number) it is close to. It has to be at most 2 squares (also diagonally) away. A mouse will not move next to a cat. If possible it will move around, otherwise stay were it is. Every lunch reached in this fase scores ONE POINT for the current player. Lunch is removed from the board.

When one player has no more lunch markers on the board, the game ends. The current round is finished.

Final scoring: Lunch points + points for lunches left on the board at the end of the game.

The central room of the board is the atomic reactor. Best to stay out… Cats and mice move double speed there (energy!) and lunches have double scores (nice for endgame scoring)

Nuclear Family

A competitive game for 4-6 players

A nuclear accident has contaminated the Earth, mutating the entire population. Humanity will survive... in some altered form. Is your two-headed radioactive amphibian better adapted than your opponent's giant clairvoyant androids?

Components

• 6 Genetic Templates: A colored playmat with spaces for four gene cards.
• Colored cubes in each of the six colors
• Environment cards: Each describes a condition, situation, or event along with one or more Type indicators (Speed, Toughness, Wit, Battle, and Diplomacy). Examples:
  • Cosmic Rays (Toughness)
  • Martian Invasion (Battle or Diplomacy)
  • Giant Insect Attack (Speed or Battle)
  • Mad Scientist (Wit)
  • Radiation Storms (Speed or Toughness)
• Gene cards: A deck of unique cards, each describing a phenotype and the bonus or penalty applied to an environment type. Examples:
  • Giant (Battle +2)
  • Scaled (Toughness +1)
  • 2-Headed (Wit +2)
  • Clairvoyant (Diplomacy +2)
  • Insane (Toughness +1, Battle +1, Wit -2)
• Replication cards: Several copies of each Gene card, sorted for ease of access.
• +1/-1 markers
• Sequence cards: One Start and five blank
• Six-sided dice

SET-UP

The players sit in a circle, and each player takes a Genetic Template and the cubes of the matching color.

GAMEPLAY

1. Deal a sequence of Environment cards in the middle, face-up, one less than the number of players.
2. Deal four Gene cards to each player. Each chooses one, and placing it in the top empty slot on the Genetic Template, then passes the remaining to the left. Repeat until each player has four Genes.
3. Randomly distribute the Sequence cards; the player with Start takes the first Environment card from the table and places it between him and the player to his left. Continue until there is an Environment between each pair around the table.
4. Resolve Environment cards in order. Only the players on each side of the card are involved. If there is more than one Type, each player chooses which to use. Each rolls two dice and adds modifiers: higher total wins. The winner places a +1 token on each Gene used in the Environment; the loser, a -1.
5. Breeding: For each gene slot, if neighboring player has 2 more points on that slot than you, and more than the other neighbor: replace your gene with a Replicated copy of the other player's Gene, marking it with a cube of his color and copying any other cubes on that Gene.
6. Mutation: Each player rolls a die. On 1-4, replace the corresponding Gene (removing all markers on it) from play and replace with a random new one.
7. Deal new environment cards atop the old ones, repeat from step 4.

The player with the most colored cubes in play at the end of three rounds wins!

NOTE

This implements a genetic algorithm, a standard AI technique for finding the best suited features for an environment.