Game #20: Cow Tipping by FL

This may be obvious, but are "Bull Cards" also "Cow Cards?"

FastLearner wrote:

What do you think about removing them from the cards altogether, and just providing a reference. It's the same scale (standard triangular numbers), it just starts at different points for different vehicles.

I think that'd be a bad idea. Better to list the numbers on the side of the cards as you have them. Then there's no question and it's extremely easy to score.

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Yeah, I actually don't like "homies" that much myself... the idea is more like "cool guys," but I couldn't find a short and easy term for them. Any suggestions, anyone?

T-cows? Fonzies? I like T-cows as a play on T-birds, but I dunno if anyone will get it.

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[Regarding bulls] I very much like the two cows idea (as I mentioned above)... but again it may make luck too strong a factor. I'll have to try that after a few playtests where they're just wild.

I think making them worth 2 cows is an extraordinarily bad idea. A bonus for collecting 3 Bulls is ok. A bonus for collecting 1 bull is not ok- it's luck. The extra reward for collecting Bulls is because you didn't use those bulls one at a time in sets.

I recommend something like if you use 3 (2?) Bulls in 1 gang, draw a Car card and put it into your score pile.

Your game has really got my brain in gear!

As for your idea of having different combinations of cards yield special actions, I would be careful not to go too far as it can complicate things and people won't really remember them all.

Maybe you can have such a thing as a "run gang" of the clown cows has an extra bonus against tipping a clown car, or a "run gang" of beauty cows does great against a hair dresser vehical. Or maybe you have a hamburger van, and the bulls get an extra special bonus (out of control anger).

However, your idea is really pulling me towards it:

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Basically, some of the cow cards will also serve a second purpose... they'd be spaced out such that you don't want to play them very often (like in one suit they'd be the 3 and the 8, making long runs hard to create if you use their special powers instead). The special purpose would have to do with managing the traffic -- one, for example, could cause an accident that moves a car backwards along the road, giving the player more time to get his gang together. Another might push a car forward, and another might remove it from the road altogether (so no one could score it). They'd have different numbers in different suits so they'd spoil sets as well.

Maybe if you write on the cards that if you have this card then you get the special power, it may not be too complicated for people. Regardless, managing the traffic is something that could really start to make this game shine.

I recently bought the game "Guillotine", it may inspire you for some ideas. A lot of the ideas in the game centers around shuffling the position of nobles. For example, maybe a special power could be switching positions with a vehical or moving a vehical two spaces forward pushing all the rest back (going backwards also sounds really neat as you can prevent your opponent getting a certain car). Removing vehicals from your opponent, like you mentioned. Things like that.

Maybe you can have a van that has calves in it, and each player who has the most bulls in successfully played hands in front of him, must tip it or suffer loosing cards.

All the best with your game.

This looks like a quick, fun game for the whole family, and something I'd be interested in playing. I like the "cow revenge" theme, although I hope the people are no longer in their cars when pushed over the ravine...

The rules were very clear to me; the inline pictures helped enormously. I think the passing the Elsa marker opposite of the turn is a really neat mechanism, with the delay helping create tension. It should produce those agonizing moments of where the car your saving up for is tipped before your chance to play again. I also like moving the vehicles down in difficulty when another vehicle is removed.

With four players, I can see cases where you would get at most two turns to tip, if everyone draws from the deck instead of the discard pile, and especially when tipping begins and players refill their hands up to 7 cards.
Is this enough or too little? It would mean about 10-15 vehicles tipped in the first round if everyone that could tip does tip. In the three person game, I wonder how many cars would be left for tipping in the second round, since players would have more opportunities to tip?

Maybe there is someway to have the three person game let players tip every three turns, but in the 4 and 5 person game, you can tip every other round, since with more players the cards you want will be scarce or inaccessibly deep in the discard pile.

This could also be really fun as a two-player game, but that would mean reworking the Elsa mechanic, otherwise you can tip every single turn.

Oh, and how about calling the Homies the "Dudes"?

Again, cool game, nice job!

In reading all the new posts I too wonder if in high-player games you don't have that many turns anyway, so only being able to tip with Elsa may indeed much more frustrating than in lower player games.

I have two ideas: The first isn't mine, but I put a vote for the Elsa-Gives-A-Bonus style thing. The second idea is as follows: if Elsa was a common marker, and somehow you had to forgo your draw to pick her up and tip. It would change the dynamic a bit, but I offer it as an idea.

The Road is actually going UP isn't it? The Easier to Tip is as the Hill gets steeper right? Not exactly a big deal, but I'm theme-guy and it eems like it should make sense.

As for Special Things, I have the following comments. One I would really avoid putting word/descriptions as much as possible on the cards. I think you have a nice simple game that without a lot of special words could easily be enjoyed by multi-lingual without paste-ups.

The other idea I have is maybe each Gang has a Favorite Color. It would really only work with Runs, but maybe a run of Beauties likes the Blue cars, so gets a bonus. It's simple and it doesn't require complicated wordings.

Maybe an idea for Face Cards. One each of the Suits is a Leader (someone mentioned Clyde as one of the Bulls). This would give the Art a bit of differences. Maybe the Face Cards give either a bonus or specialness.

Either way, I would suggest to try to keep it as simple as possible to keep it moving. I think a lot of complicated rules would make it harder to teach and maybe too complicated for what it is.

ensor wrote:

Oh, and how about calling the Homies the "Dudes"?

D'uh!! A "dude" ranch!! Thanks, ensor, for showing us the obvious!

And, feeding off the other posts, I'll throw my support behind the "Elsa gives a tipping bonus" idea, and/or the "take Elsa and tip instead of taking your turn" idea. I think either works well.

How about this: Each bull is the head of a suit (a clownie bull, a beauty bull...okay, that may not work). When included in anything other than a run of that suit, they function like a normal bull (1 wild card), but in a run of that suit, they have some additional bonus (+1 to strength? worth 2 cards?). Just brainstorming aloud...

As jwarrend mentioned - this thread is exploding. So I'll throw my comments in here before they are utterly redundant.

Fun theme and a great twist on rummy. One of my groups of friends plays quite a few rummy games and I think this would fit right in as a regular.... I'm not sure if it would displace "May I" (one of several contract rummy derivatives) as the default game, but it has potential. I really like the meta-scoring mechanism.

There are a few little things that my gut reacts negatively to, but for a rummy game I'd have a hard time passing judgement on them until playtesting. So, this is more a list of things I'd pay attention to in play testing.

The whole drawing the barn ends the game makes me a little nervous (especially in conjunction with the elsa concerns). If I am counting and reading correctly today I think you have the following situation: if you are playing a 4 player game, the player left of the first player doesn't get elsa until 9 or 10 cards have been drawn. I'll let someone else work out the probabilities, but if the barn being drawn in the first 10 cards happens too often I think it will turn people off.

I'm sure there are some other great options for ending the round/game, or a round. Perhaps even just not replacing the cars on the road (but still having them travel), rather refilling the spaces once all the cars have been tipped. Do this some number of times. In a lot of rummy games, the hand ends when someone runs out of cards, not sure what effect that would have here.

Also, just something to keep in mind, phase 10 and May I have 10 rounds, which sometimes can seem like 4 too many, 2 seems to be very few since the end of the round is random... still hard to say without playing a bunch of times.

As I said, I think there is some really great potential here, the core mechanism is shaping up nicely.

ps. Per some of the previous comments I'm going to have to go look up guillotine. Thanks for the tip.

Well, we managed to get Cow Tipping to the playtest table, and I think the diplomatic way of saying it was that many of your concerns were validated.

However, there was also wide agreement that there was nothing that could not be fixed, and a number of very good suggestions floated around. It's a long list, which might seem discouraging, but look at it this way: we were interested enough to make a long list of suggestions!

Comments (in no particular order):

It might be beneficial to use different fonts on the different suits, maybe something that is suit-specific (like, frilly for the beauties, rough for the dudes, etc.)

The rules need to clarify when traffic moves forward after tipping (we assumed that it was after a player completed all the tipping they wanted to do)

Replace the "3"'s on the sets with either "X"'s or with different numbers on different cards (perhaps the number of cards in the set)

Put the Home card in the vehicles deck, not the cattle deck (this was highly recommended to extend the length of each round).

Paired with this was to then allow players to either draw two face-down cards or one face-up card (a la Wyatt Earp)

Reduce the strength of all road cards by 1 (making the last card require a set of 1 card to take). There was some discussion as to whether or not motorcycles would therefore be free to the first person to tip, or whether there would be a minimum of 1 card required to tip.

There was strong support for keeping your cards (both your hand and your vehicles) between rounds.

I think there was wide disapproval for the "Elsa required to tip" rule. One interesting alternative was that Elsa allows you to draw an extra face-down cattle card for each vehicle you tip, as you're tipping them. So, you'd tip a car, draw a card, tip another car, draw another card, etc.

Straights should not be straight flushes, and flushes should be a third criteria. I don't think anyone tipped a vehicle on a straight during the game. A suggested flush strength of 7/6/5/5/4/4/4 was made based on the current road strengths, which would be reduced by 1 if you incorporate the "lower road strength by 1" suggestion.

Don't skip a player when passing Elsa in a 5-player game. We didn't see the benefit of doing that.

Make a larger cattle deck. We ran out rather quickly.

Reduce the vehicle variety (both color and type). This may not be an issue if the cattle deck were larger. The idea was that there was too much variety and too little time to even care. You typically tipped whatever was available rather than if it matched your color or your type.

Discarding should be the LAST action a player takes, as it will signal to the other players that he/she is done.

To simplify the rules a bit, have the first action a player takes is to draw their hand to 8. That way, you don't need a "draw back to 7 after tipping" rule.