Here’s an idea for an original board game about 160000 samurai fighting it out.
Each samurai is roughly the size of a lentil. Hideyori’s samurai are made of wood and Tokugawa’s samurai are made out of metal. The metal pieces should not be magnets themselves but magnets should attract them to more easily separate the two types.
Ideally, there’s an easy integer weight relationship between them (for example the wood pieces being exactly ten times lighter than the metal pieces). Same weight is also okay but that’s going to be hard to fit with the following contstraint: the volume should be approximately the same. Wood is way lighter than metal normally.
Lentil shaped is actually a pretty good shape because we don’t want them to roll all over the apartment but we do want them to not snag too much, to “flow” like sand can do.
It’s also great if one side has flatter wider disc-ier pieces and the other has more cubey polyedral “taller and narrower” pieces. Like a very beveled/rounded cube might be perfect.
The mounted board is 90×90 cm (approx three by three foot). It doesn’t have hexes or anything like that, but clearly mark the two starting zones and the midline. At this scale each piece represents one single Samurai controlling maybe a six or seven meter area or so.
Players move the pieces with a tiny li’l toy rake. The side with the flatter discier pieces has a rake with tall, gappy teeth that are less likely to catch the more cubey pieces, and the side with those cubey pieces has a more finely-toothed rake that is offset from the table so that the flatter discier pieces will pass under it.
Players can rake in real time until either player shouts “Stop!”. Then that player can scoop up pieces. Fill and level a 25 ml scoop.
Separate the contents with a magnet or the rakes. (Maybe the weight/material differences are unnecessary with the two weird rake shapes.) You can weight them and using the weight differences you can figure out which side has the fewest and loses that “scoop skirmish”. They loose all those samurai and the winning side loses half. Return the survivors to where they were.
This means that you want to scoop as close to half and half as possible, without going under half. If you have two thirds of the samurai in the scoop you are trading one for one. And if it’s even more lopsided you’re losing out.
After each scoop skirmish, weigh all the samurai who are dead. When a total of 40 000 or more have died (adding both sides together), the game is over.
You get one point for every samurai you killed and a 15 000 point bonus if half your surviving samurai have crossed the midline. Both players can claim that bonus in the same game, that’s fine. Most points win the game.
If the game wasn’t over, both players place their hand in like, uh, a “ready zone” or something and when they see that the opponent also has placed their hand there, they can reach for the rake that they’ve put down in the “rakke zone”, pick it up again, and start playing. Do that same “ready zone” / “rake zone” protocol when the game starts too.
Ship the game with the weird rakes, with a regulation-sized scoop, and with two “cemetary bowls” to store the dead samurai. Magnets and scale sold separately. If anyone wants to manufacture this for real, whether it’s bigger run to sell or just single copies, feel free to drop me a line. Or don’t; if you just wanna go ahead that’s fine too. Your time is yours. This text is CC-BY-SA.
Kind of a harrowing game that gives a glimpse of the massive scale of Sekigahara.