City Blocks

City Blocks
Designer:	Holly Gramazio
Year:	unknown
Players:	30 - 50
Stuff required:	50 blocks, 25 in each of two colours - say, yellow and grey. A 10x10 or 11x11 rhombus-shaped hex-grid. Black marker pens. Print-outs of the instructions for players.
Crew required:	One for setup.
Preparation:	Half an hour, more if you need to colour the blocks yourself.
Time required:	A couple of hours.
Place required:	A table or other flat surface, preferably indoors.
Activities:	Building, drawing, ambient, teamwork.
This is a playable game - it's finished, tested and ready to play.
This game is made available under an Attribution-Noncommercial Creative Commons licence. (What does this mean?)

Add a building to the growing boardgame city, and help your team to get from one side of the board to the other. Roughly based on the boardgame Hex, this game sits in the corner of the room and is built up slowly over the course of the evening.

Instructions for Players

Pick a block at random out of the box. Don't feel around – just grab the first one you touch. If it's grey, you're on the grey team. If it's yellow, you're on the yellow. Only one block per player!

Turn your block into a part of the city, using the marker pens – a house, an office block, a bridge, a piece of public sculpture, whatever you like.

Place your block on the grid. If you're on the yellow team, you're trying to get the two yellow sides to be joined up by yellow buildings. If you're on the grey team, you want the two grey sides to be joined up by grey buildings. Arches and long blocks can go on the ground, or can be used to join two pieces of either colour.

Come back later to see how your team's doing, and feel free to collect your block at the end of the event and take it home.

The first team to join up their sides with their buildings is the winner.

Instructions for Organiser

Get fifty or so wooden blocks, in two colours - we used these, spraypainted yellow and grey.

Make a rhombus using hex shapes, 11x11. You can generate hex grids here, or print them out from the images here.

Stick the rhombus onto a table, and mark the opposite sides as "belonging" to a particular team - on ours, two sides were yellow, and two grey.

Put all the blocks, jumbled up, in a box with a hole in the top, so that people can reach through and pick out a block without seeing what colour it is.

Stick the instructions for players on the table, or a couple of nearby walls. Perhaps play a couple of rounds yourself, so your decorated blocks are there to give the other players ideas.

Files

Download Cityblocks.doc

A word document containing rules for City Blocks, to be edited and printed.

Variants

Try allowing play to continue after the first two sides have been joined up - if both teams manage to join their sides (which, if you have arched pieces, is possible), the most beautiful city wins.

For fewer players, have a smaller board; for more players, a larger one (and more blocks).

Play History

City Blocks was played at Sandpit 6.

Flickr gallery

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(These are the ten most recent Flickr photos of City Blocks. To add your own, just add the "ludocity:game=cityblocks" tag to your Flickr photos.)