This article originally appeared in Pyramid #29
3 Cheapass games:
Very Clever Pipe Game
2 or 4 players
Designed by James Ernest
$7.50
Give Me The Brain
3-8 players
Designed by James Ernest
$5.00
Lamarckian Poker
2-6 players
Designed by James Ernest and Dave Howell
Free
Cheapass Games publishes over a dozen games, now - these three are my favorites.
The Very Clever Pipe Game is indeed quite clever. You've probably seen games where you have to connect pipes to win - it's been done before. But this version has two different colored pipes on each card - and two different colored backgrounds - and the pipes keep disappearing.
To start, deal out 40 of the 120 cards - there's a "deck-building" variant, also. The first player decides which goal he is trying for (white pipes, black pipes, white backgrounds, black backgrounds), while the other player chooses a goal from the remaining three.
The cards are twice as long as they are wide. Black pipes must match black pipes, and white, white, so sometimes an unplayable square is left on the board. It's okay - it becomes a column rising in a dimension perpendicular to the game. Any pipes leading to it are assumed to be capped at that point.
When you complete a closed pipe - so that all ends either lead to caps or back to each other - remove any cards the closed pipes pass over. You collect your color, but even if you completed a pipe of the other player's color, that is also removed and handed to him. Whoever has the most cards collected at the end of the game wins.
If you're going . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: April 10, 1998
Copyright © 1998 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.
