A toy game from the 2016 game design advent calendar.

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This is a game paced by the magic of self-organized criticality, a personal fascination. Each cell of the boards has some number of tokens stacked atop one another. When one of these towers is 4 tokens tall, it may topple, distributing its 4 tokens to its 4 neighbors. As we add tokens to the boards, we'll see periodic cascades of varying sizes. We tie the action of the game to these cascades, we give the player some control over the state of the board, and so the players kinda control the growing chaos of the game. Poof! Role-playing game.

Requires:

• 4 players + GM
• A ludicrous number of game tokens
• A 3 x 7 grid for each player, like so:

Rules:

Begin play by randomly setting each cell of each board, including the shared center cell, to 1-2 tokens.

Each player choose 3 freeform words or phrases that describe their character. These might be adjectives, skills, archetypes, or anything at all, but here are called skills.

When you attempt something unsure, choose:

• Fail, but add one token to any cell on your board. However, no cell may have more than 4 tokens. For each relevant skill, add an additional token to any cell.
• Succeed partially or at cost, and topple any tower on your board or in the center cell. If you end up toppling more than one tower, succeed totally and at no cost, and add a token to any cell of your board for each additional tower toppled.

When you topple a tower (a cell with 4 tokens), move one token to each of its 4 neighbors. You may immediately topple any other towers on your board, new or old, and continue to do so as long as towers continue to be created.

• Towers on the inside edge topple into the shared center cell. Towers on the left, right, and outer edges of your board have nothingness as a neighbor; tokens moved into the nothingness are lost.

GM:

The GM should do what GMs do in most games: arbitrate the rules and act as the world and opposition. The rules are entirely player-facing, so NPCs and monsters are simply forms of opposition; that is to say, reasons for player action to be unsure.

Notes:

The idea is to pace the action in such a way that tension ebbs and flows, building as the boards become unstable (prone to toppling, with lots of towers), and falling as the players topple their towers for successes.

This should not require any extra effort; if the rules do their job, the players fail and fail and partially succeed and fail and then blow the roof off the sucker.

There is likely some player strategy in deciding where to add their tokens. Close to the inside will make it likely their towers topple into the center, which may affect the other players. Close to the outside keeps this from happening, but may cause tokens to be lost to nothingness.

--Karaktakus the Toppler of Towers

Prompt/cover photo: Wikimedia Commons