A stick figure’s life is a hard one. It’s a life in an uncertain world with hazards at every turn: falling tools, hand manglers, explosions, body crushers, and bolts of electricity from the sky.
The Game of the Month for June 2009 is The Stick Figure Abuse Game. The Stick Figure Abuse Game is a game for two to five players. Your goal is simple: Be the first player to cross the eleven-row board. Since you can move as little or as much as you want to on your turn, it should be simple. Just move from the start to the finish and the game’s over, right?
Of course it’s not that simple. Each space has one of five warning signs in it. Every player has a random hand of cards with one of the five icons on them. If other players trigger a hazard (by playing a card) and you don’t dodge it (by playing the same card), you meet a messy end, go back to where you started the turn, and your turn ends.
The Stick Figure Abuse Game uses a custom board, a custom deck of cards, a few pawns, some pennies, and a nickel.
The rules are available at: http://www.invisible-city.com/play/522/the-stick-figure-abuse-game
The board and cards are available as PDFs in a 152 KB ZIP file at: http://www.invisible-city.com/file_download/157/
The Stick Figure Abuse Game has fairly simple rules. If you don’t mind the inherently violent nature of what happens to the stick figures (or reframe it to remove the violence and death), the game is appropriate for ages 9 and up. A 4-player game takes about 40 minutes to play.
Also, we've added a page of links to and briefs for all of the Game of the Month releases from January 2000 to the present. The one-page Game of the Month Archive is available at: http://www.invisible-city.com/play/521/list-of-all-games
