(Click this image to see a larger version.)
This game is under development, and the rules and components are not final.
Alley Cats (formerly "Spokes") is a board game for 3 to 5 players, age 13 and up. Playing time is intended to be 60 to 90 minutes.
You must contend with the other messengers to get the gravy (the best-paying deliveries) and try not to get stuck with the gristle (the worst)! To improve your delivery efficiency, you can buy fancier bike equipment when you've made enough money to afford it. Better equipment can improve your speed and help you survive the various hazards you will encounter while cycling around town.
The player who combines the most deliveries with the highest profit wins!
Random Hazards and changing Traffic Lights can unexpectedly slow a player down and even cost him money. Spending some of his profits to improve his bike can make a player more efficient by increasing his bike's speed and its resistance to Hazards.
At the end of the game, the winner is the player who has the highest combination of successful deliveries and profits: each successful delivery and each $5 of profit represent one Victory Point.
The large board shows the town map. Gray lines are roads, blue circles are pickup points (now obsolete), numbered red squares are delivery points. The house-in-a-square symbols are the player's Homes (now obsolete), one per District except for the Downtown District.
The blue, red, and green dividers are a river, a freeway, and a railroad track which divide the six Districts (and which have no other purpose). Longer roads cross these barriers via bridges and overpasses to connect the Districts. Intersections labeled "Hazard" are Hazardous Intersections where Hazard cards will be placed. The Districts are labeled by colored blocks; their names are Bixville, Wallerton, Aurora, Sundown, The Maples, and Downtown.
Each Player Board shows the color of one Player. Bike Upgrades that the player has purchased go in the Upgrades section. The Cargo Capacity track (now obsolete) has a marker that shows how many Packages the player can carry at once. The Speed track has a marker that shows how many blocks the player can travel in a single turn.
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Deliver to: 19 Midtown Blvd. Four-hour delivery: $10 Eight-hour delivery: $5 |
Each player places his Speed marker on the "2" position on the Speed track on his Player Board.
Shuffle the Packages and place them, face-down, in a stack beside the Town Map.
Place a Traffic Light token, green side up, on the central intersection of each district.
Spread the Bike Upgrades face-up in the Bike Shop area.
Place the money beside the board. This is the Bank.
Put the Hour Marker in the 8am spot on the Clock.
Players select Packages as follows:
The Timekeeper chooses first, taking one Package of his choice from the set. Then each other player chooses one Package, in clockwise order from the Timekeeper. Then each player selects a second Package, in reverse order: that is, the player to the Timekeeper's right selects a Package (he has now just selected two in a row), and each other player in counter-clockwise order takes one Package, ending with the Timekeeper. Repeat this process, reversing direction every time, until all players have P Packages in their Deliveries area.
Each player must take P Packages as described above. But immediately afterward, each player may choose to add more Packages to his Deliveries. Again starting with the Timekeeper, each player who chooses to may take three more Packages from the top of the shuffled deck, examine them, and keep from one to three of them. The kept Packages are added to the player's Deliveries, and the rest are discarded. Note that each player who chooses this privilege must keep at least one of the three Packages.
If a player chooses to stop in the middle of a block to make a delivery, his travel from the previous corner or intersection to that point counts as one block. Similarly, if a player starts his turn in the middle of a block, his travel to the first corner or intersection also counts as a full block's movement.
Players may choose freely which way to turn at intersections and corners. Players may also pass by not using some (or any) of their movement in a turn.
Traffic Lights can slow a Bike Messenger's movement. If a Traffic Light is red when (and only when) a player arrives at the Traffic Light, the player loses one block of movement in that turn. No movement is lost if any of these things are true:
Example: the Red player has a speed of four and would normally move four blocks per turn. On this turn, he reaches a red Traffic Light after moving one block. The Traffic Light costs him one block, so he can move only two more blocks in this turn.
If there is no Hazard card at the intersection, the active player must draw a Hazard card from the top of the shuffled deck of Hazard cards, and place it on the intersection, face-up. Then he must deal with the Hazard: some Hazards can be ignored, others may slow down a player, end his turn, and/or cost him money.
After placing a Hazard and dealing with it, the player may continue with his turn if he has any more blocks left to go. The Hazard card remains at the intersection until the End of the Day (see below).
If there is already a Hazard card on an intersection when the active player arrives there, he does not draw a new Hazard card, but suffers the existing Hazard.
When a player delivers a Package, he immediately receives the payment for the delivery (in money from the bank), removes the Package from his Deliveries area, and sets it by his elbow to be counted at the end of the game. (I will add an area for "Completed Deliveries") to the Player Boards.)
The payment for successful delivery is shown on the Package, and is larger if the Package is delivered in the morning (before Noon) than in the afternoon.
Bike Upgrades can increase a Bike Messenger's speed, increase Cargo Capacity (obsolete), or grant immunity to certain Hazards. The price for each Upgrade is shown on the Bike Upgrade chit. When a player purchases an upgrade, he pays its price in money to the Bank, and moves the chit from the Bike Shop area on the Town Map board to the Upgrades area on his Player Board.
Per-player limits are also printed on the chits: for example no player may purchase more than three Gear upgrades. Within those limits, a player may purchase any number of upgrades in a single turn.
Better Gears - Each player has a Speed marker on the Speed track on his Player Board; at the start of the game, the marker is on the "2" position. Each time a player purchases a Better Gears Bike Upgrade, he moves his Speed marker forward one position on the Speed track. The marker indicates how many blocks a player can move his Bike Messenger on each turn. When the marker is on the last position on the Speed track, the player cannot purchase any more Better Gears Bike Upgrades.
Players calculate their scores as follows. First, each player counts his successful deliveries. Each successful delivery is worth 1 Victory Point. Then each player counts his money, and receives 1 Victory Point for each $5. (For example, a player with $23 would receive 4 Victory Points for his money.) The winner is the player with the most Victory Points. If there is a tie, the tied player who delivered the most Packages wins. If there is still a tie, all tied players have won.
Distant deliveries (more District boundaries to cross) will pay better than near ones, but the pay will be scaled according to how long a delivery takes. The best payoff comes from morning deliveries, but because players will have many Packages to deliver each day, they will be unable to deliver them all in the morning, and so must plan a route for maximal payback.
Players can press their luck and go for the big bucks by choosing to take more than the required number of Deliveries per Day. Success will be rewarded with more completed deliveries (each of which is a Victory Point) and more money, which can be used either to purchase more Victory Points at the end of the game, or to purchase Bike Upgrades during the game.
"Alley's Bar & Grill" offered this kind of player interaction. At the end of each day, players would meet at Alley's (a virtual location, not on the map and requiring no effort to reach) to negotiate with each other to swap unfinished deliveries. But I dropped this kind of interaction in favor of the much more lively "card-draft" at the Start of the Day.
So I kept Hazards in the game, but changed them to be generic (affecting all players impartially) rather than being something that players do to each other. I was afraid that the game would reward long, boring calculations. Hazards make the game less predictable, and help prevent "brain burn" and long downtimes, and offer a way for players to press their luck by not buying Bike Upgrades, thus saving their money at the risk of suffering more Hazards.
I am still uncertain about how easy it will be for players to purchase Bike Upgrades. At this point, I think all upgrades will be available to all players (that is, they won't be scarce) but there may not be time or money enough for any one player to purchase all possible upgrades. Players must choose whether they want a speedy bike, or a durable bike, or perhaps neither in the hopes that the money saved will compensate them for the hazards encountered and the deliveries missed.
Greater trust will carry an advantage: most likely a trusted player will get higher fees for deliveries for that company. Perhaps if trust falls low enough, a company will refuse to do business with a player.
The point of the company tracks is to differentiate packages, and make the same delivery worth more to one player than to another. This would add some tension to the delivery-drafting at the Start of the Day.
I am not currently planning to add the Company Tracks feature to the rules, but I'm recording it here so that I don't forget about it. I want to see how the game plays without it first. If the game seems dull, I'll add it in and see if it provides a useful "spark" to drive the game.
April 6, 2005 - Added Hazardous Intersections to the map and made Hazard card placement automatic, instead of being a player action. Added the bit about players rendezvousing to exchange deliveries.
April 7, 2005 - Changed the scoring: Got rid of Victory Points, and gave the win to either the player who made the most deliveries, or the player who made the most money. (I'm still undecided. It's a matter of which one will give players the most angst in making choices during the game.)
April 8, 2005 - Big changes today. Packages are picked up from face-down stacks, so the players don't know what they're getting, and they are kept secret from the other players. The winner is the player with the most money. Removed the player-rendezvous rule and replaced it with the common trading session at Alley's at the end of each Day.
April 9, 2005 - Added the Design Discussion section. Later in the day, changed from a single Bike Shop to one Bike Shop per District.
April 11, 2005 - Made up my mind and changed the game's name from "Spokes" to "Alley Cats." Thank you, sedjtroll and Nando!
More importantly, I have removed all Bike Shops from the board and instead made the Bike Shop a "virtual location," like Alley's: a place that players can visit without actually moving their Bike Messenger tokens. This was Seth's suggestion, to unclutter the map.
Finally, I belatedly realized that players do not need to keep track of the hour when Packages are picked up; only the day. So I got rid of the Card Racks and added two sections to the Player Board, for Today's Pickups and Yesterday's Pickups. A "Sort Packages" phase was added to the End of the Day for paying for and discarding Packages past their deadlines.
May 1, 2005 - I have run my first live playtest, and learned about a lot of things that don't work. Accordingly I have revampted the game quite a bit, with helpful suggestions especially from Nando. Homes are gone, Pickup points are gone, Packages are acquired by "delivery-drafting" at the Start of the Day. The delivery-draft is the primary form of player interaction, replacing delivery trades which wasn't working out because useful trades just didn't occur often enough. Packages no longer have to be segregated by origin-district, which helps simplify game setup. Traffic Lights have been added.
Last modified April 16, 2005 by rmh