Pompeii: A Game of Dice, Family and Natural Disasters

You are playing as two ancient Roman families who are trying to escape the burning ruins of Pompeii after the eruption of Vesuvius. Can you properly navigate your entire family through the burning ashes? Or will be you caught by the searing flames of Vesuvius? Take your chances in, Pompeii.

-Zachary Goldblatt-

Materials:

-One 6 x 6 Board

-Two Dice

-Twenty Hellínos Family Tokens (Blue and White)

-Twenty Romus Family Tokens (Purple and Gold)

-Twenty Volcano Tokens (Red and Black)

Rules:

1. Each Player takes turns placing their specific tokens on the Board

2. After both Players have gone, roll two dice. The first dice corresponds to the number of the X-Coordinate or bottom number line and the second dice corresponds to the Y-Coordinate or the number line on the left of the board. 

3. Place a Volcano Token on this square. Remove any previous tokens placed there. No Player may put one of their tokens on a Volcano Token.

4. This cycle keeps going until the entire Board is full, then the scoring phase commences. 

5. Players receive 2 Points for every all of their Token Groups which are two in a row, 3 Points for three in a row, 4 Points for four in a row, 5 Points for five in a row and 6 Points for 6 in a row. You may only use a token for one grouping and may not stack multiple groups in one larger grouping.

6. The Player with the most Points wins. 

Reflection:

Being the person I am when I was first presented with the task of redesigning Tic-Tac-Toe my original plan was to make it over complicated and complex so I tried to boil it down to what kind of games I enjoyed, those being European style board games. That is what first inspired me to do the Victory Point/Euro-Style scoring which created my first draft of the game. It was originally a very bland game until I thought about how by trying to make all of these groupings they somewhat resembled roads and that is what started the idea of possibly including a narrative. It was originally called Roman Roads and just focused on making groups of tokens. This was alright but quite bland and during one of the play tests, my partner recommended that I possibly include a wall mechanic to block off opponents. I liked this but wanted to make it random so I included dice and wanting to still include the Hellenic/Roman theme I eventually settled on the theme of Pompeii with each token representing a fleeing family member and by getting tokens in a row you are rescuing families. I think for such a simple game it actually managed to use this narrative to make it much more than just a glorified tic-tac-toe game. The event of having a volcano token rip your family in half brings about great feelings of frustration for one Player and glee for the other.