Pac-Man: The Tabletop Game

Posted: 2009 March 31 | Author: sean |

The theme pulled out of the hat this week was (for the first time!) my suggestion: “Inspired by Pac-Man.” Ryan and I went perhaps a little too far past “inspiration” into “copying,” but created a fun tabletop game for two to five players and takes approximately twenty minutes to play.

Supplies

• Many, many white poker chips
• Slightly fewer red poker chips
• Colored cards cut into playing pieces (see below)
• Dice: D4, D6
• A big table or set of tables
• An indeterminate number of pipe cleaners

How To Play

Setup

Frankly, this took so long to do, it’s prohibitive from anyone actually ever playing this game again, but we pushed a number of tables together until we approximated something like the maze structure of a Pac-Man screen using the pipe cleaners. We then put as many of the white poker chips as we had down as both “spaces” on the board, as well as pellets for the Pac-Man to eat, interspersing them ever so often with red “energizer” pellets. The ghosts’ starting and respawn location was at the center of the board.

Play Sequence

Each player picked a piece — one as the Pac-Man, the rest as ghosts. The Pac-Man started in the center/lower part of the board, while the ghosts began in their spawn point. At the beginning of each turn, the Pac-Man would roll a D4 to determine how many spaces he or she could move in any viable direction, and how many pellets he or she could eat. The ghosts would then each roll a D6 to determine how far they could go on each turn. If the ghosts catch up with the Pac-Man, he “loses a life, the ghosts return to their spawn point, and the game proceeds with the Pac-Man respawning where he just died (albeit with one less life).

If a Pac-Man ate an energizer (red poker chip) pellet, he or she had two turns in which he would be able to roll a D6 instead of the D4 to move, and the ghosts would have only a D4 to roll instead of the D6. If the Pac-Man catches any of the ghosts while under the influence of a red energizer, the ghost is “eaten” and returned to the spawn point.

Goal

Like real Pac-Man, the goal of the game is to clear each screen. Once the Pac-Man has lost his or her life three times or all of the pellets on the board have been eaten, the game is over.

Lessons Learned

Like I said at the beginning, this was fun and a faithful adaptation of Pac-Man, but probably too faithful — unlike some of the other games this week, ours suffered from trying to adapt the constraints of the original game to such a degree that our own unique twists were relatively minor (the dice-based mechanic, switching the D4 and the D6 at times during the game, etc.). Suggesting using another game as an inspiration for a game jam was an experiment on my part, and we probably should have emphasized to everyone (including myself and Ryan) that “inspired by” should mean just that, and remaking an existing game just isn’t that fun.

If I had to do it over again, I’d probably go only very loosely inspired by Pac-Man, and make a game that somehow involved trying to shave off Billy Mitchell’s mullet.

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