January 30, 2025: Edible Melee

Winter is prime cookie baking season. And when people like us get together, gaming happens. So why not combine the two?

 

First, you'll need a copy of Melee. If you don't happen to have it (you should!) Steve Jackson Games has the PDF available for free on Warehouse 23.

 

Next, you'll need the board.

 

You'll need a lot of hexagons. Hexagonal cookie cutters are available pretty much anywhere that sells cookie cutters. If you want to build a full Melee board, you'll need 99 cookies. If you do this, make them small to avoid indigestion, or perhaps go with a more limited board size. Or, of course, have a lot of players.

 

You may want some special terrain. A simple icing of confectioner's (powdered) sugar with just enough milk to make it gooey, but not so runny it drips off the cookies, can be easily colored with food coloring. Blue, of course, is water. Green (perhaps decorated with green sprinkles or sugar) makes grass. Spare or broken cookies can be crushed and stuck on with icing for rough terrain. You can tint some icing brown for mud, black for a pit (or just leave that cookie out of your map!), red for fire (possibly with crushed red and orange hard candies on top), purple for magical effects like Gates, etc. I even have some little bones left over from a Halloween cupcake kit. I've put those to good use!

 

Finally, you'll need figures.

 

There are several options: If you have a suitably tiny cookie cutter, you can make gingerbread meeples! The candy aisle (if you have a 5 Below near you, they have an excellent candy department) can supply everything from giant snakes that look suspiciously like gummy worms to gummy dinosaurs, gummy giant frogs, etc. Alternatively, you can make little square cookies and draw figures on them with an icing pen like the art on the Melee counters, and either lay them flat, or use a bit of icing to glue them to other cookies in a vertical position.

 

Lay out your map, line up your figures, and you're ready to play! The rules are just like Melee, with two exceptions:

 

One, when you defeat an enemy, you get to eat them!

 

Two, to make the game more interesting, at the end of each player's turn, that player can eat one of the map hexagons. But 1) You cannot eat a hex that has a figure (alive or dead) on it, and 2) The map must remain contiguous – that is, no islands.

 

If you try this, or if you have done something similar, let us know on the forums!

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