So yesterday two days ago on Monday, I decided to work on designing a pen-and-paper version of Thumb Wars (or what I suppose some people just call thumb wrestling), which I’ve cleverly entitled ThumbCraft.
What I’d like to do is break down the simple gameplay of thumb wrestling into the quirks and aspects of a typical round. Let’s start with the rhyme:
One two three four, I declare a thumb war. Five six seven eight, try to keep your thumb straight
Okay, so there’s not a lot to work with in there (I was thinking about somehow incorporating counting to eight, but I’m having my doubts about that now). What we do have, however, is an important tip: try to keep your thumb straight.
So let’s say that part of the game is monitoring the “straightness” of you and your opponent’s thumbs. It’s the thumb equivalent of a life meter, so to speak, except that the value fluctuates depending on you and your opponent’s moves. We’ll table this idea for now, and move on.
For me, the typical round of thumb wrestling goes like this: Once the rhyme is finished, I usually attempt to trick my opponent (usually Bonnie) into dropping their guard. If your opponent keeps her/his thumb completely vertical, it’s essentially impossible to pin, as your thumb won’t be able to reach. To combat this, I usually go for a fakeout. I let my thumb waver into reachable territory, or sometimes let it lie flat altogether. When my opponent goes for it, I react quickly, pulling a fast reversal and pinning her/his thumb before they can pin mine.
So I’m seeing some interesting values emerge here. We have the value of the thumb’s straightness, which determines whether or not that thumb can be pinned. We also might be able to put a value on each thumb’s dexterity, which may determine whether a thumb can evade another thumb’s pin.
This is starting to sound interesting to me. I like the idea of a game where some values are public, while others are private, and I want to use dice in this game (partly because I’ve been reading about dice games, and partly because I just received some cool black Chessex dice). So, what if during a player’s turn, they roll two dice. One die’s value is thumb-dexterity, which a player keeps private, while the other die’s value is thumb-straightness, which the player makes public.
It’s only an idea, and not a particularly concrete one, but it’s somewhere to begin. My next step should be figuring out how these two theoretical values would interact with each other, and what decisions a player can make during each turn (if the game is entirely about dice rolling, there’s no strategy, no meaningful play, and no fun). After that, it’ll be time for iterative playtesting! Yay!!
» Thumb wrestling is universal from manowatt on Flickr. Thanks!