Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

[Tony Vigil <tjvigil66@xxxxxxxxx>]

At GenCon, Wizkids demoed a new board game called Oshi.  Oshi is a simple yet strategic game of moving your pieces into position to push your opponent's pieces off of the board.  The Oshi game board consists of simple 9x9 grid.  Each player starts the game with pieces that come in three sizes with point values that match their sizes... 1, 2 and 3.  Unfortunately, due to Oshi's board layout and the number of 1 pointers required for each player, the game isn't 100% compatible with the Icehouse game system.  Minor modificaitons were required to make it work with standard single color icehouse stashes and typical checker boards.

To play the modified version of Oshi, each player needs a single color stash that is different from their opponent's stash.  The pieces each player needs is as follows:

2 three-pointers
2 two-pointers
5 one-pointers

This is how the board is set up with player one in the top left corner and player
 two in the bottom right corner...

[_][_][3][2][_][_][_][_]
[_][_][1][1][_][_][_][_]
 [3][1][1][_][_][_][_][_]
 [2][1][_][_][_][_][1][2]
 [_][_][_][_][_][1][1][3]
 [_][_][_][_][1][1][_][_]
 [_][_][_][_][2][3][_][_]
 
Each square can only occupy one piece.  One each of your turns, you must select one of your pieces to be moved.  The selected piece must be moved at least one space in a single direction - left, right, up or down.  No diagonals are allowed.  The piece can move a number of spaces equal to or less than the piece's point value.  If any pieces are in front of the selected piece, they are pushed forward along the same path.  However, you can only push a number of pieces equal to or less than value of the selected piece.  The first player to have 7 of their points pushed off of the board loses the game.

One more stipulation... if one of your pieces is pushed by your opponent, you can push back
 but your selected piece cannot end its movement in the same location it was at when your last turn ended.

I've come up with a couple other possible rules that might make the game more interesting, but I need to flush them out a bit more and test them out.

1) as your selected piece's movement, you can choose to not move the piece but rather lay it down on it's side pointing left, right, up or down.  The piece cannot be pushed in the direction that the piece is pointing.

2) As your selected piece's movement, you can choose to hop over pieces at the cost of  sacrificing one of your other pieces for each piece that you hop over.  The total distance your selected piece moves is still limited by the selected piece's point value and you can't land on a space that already contains another piece.

I'd like to hear what you guys think!

- Tony