Playoff Hockey
Setting: The National Hockey League, circa the printing of the game.
Game Play: Both interesting and true to the sport. Each player chooses six cards to represent his team. You need a Center, two Defensemen, a Right Wig, A Left Wing, and a Goalie. You then lay those out on the table in the starting positions for a hockey game (very nice illustrations in the rulebook, by the way). The goal is to get possession of the hockey puck, skate your team forward and shoot for a goal. Play ends when one person runs out of cards. At that time, whoever has the most points wins.
This game does use custom dice to resolve actions, but even though I personally hate games which require additional materials, I didn't mind this as much because the dice were clever. These were six-sided dice with two blank sides, a puck, a whistle and an NHL logo. Whenever you are trying to shoot, you roll dice equal to your card's SHOOT stat. Count the number of pucks and NHL logos. If the logo matches the shooter's team, it counts double. The Goalie rolls dice equal to their BLOCK stat. If you beat the goalie, you score a point. Pretty simple and very quick.
Other than that, all you really need to figure out is what to do with the cards. Each player has a hand of three cards. They must draw one and play one per turn. The cards will allow you to SKATE a player forward so they can take a shot (or if they don't have the puck, they add +1 die to the player who has it), SHOOT, PASS or STEAL. Of course there are actually a lot of variations. One card might say: "OFFENSE: SKATE wingman, PASS puck to CENTER, SHOT at +1". If you don't have a useful card in your hand, you may discard any card to SKATE or SHOOT (but only if you have the puck). One last thing: they don't include a puck counter, so they recommend you use a nickel. | |
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