A Good Print-and-Play

 Hello, Dolly! - Deconstruction

Trent showed me the game "Hello, Dolly!" last class. "Hello, Dolly!" is a game about a sheep herder, although that may be hard to tell from the picture above. This game is one of the more abstract ones, but I tend to enjoy those more. Less set-up and rules, more deep gritty gameplay and strategizing! Not to mention significantly less cutting out of charts and pieces.

Anyway, the goal of the game is to get five sheep of your color off the board. The way to get the sheep off of the board is to surround the sheperd on three vertices with sheep. This is a little confusing until you know how the pieces all move. The white and black dice are the different color sheep, and the red die is the sheperd. We only used dice because that was what was available, but almost anything would work! As long as you can differentiate the pieces. For example, chess pawns and a bishop or some other piece would work well for this game, too.

The only operative action is this: Players move the sheep along the line until they hit another sheep, or the end of the board. A sheep can not be blocked off from moving in this way, however. The sheperd is then moved a number of spaces according to how far the sheep traveled. If the sheep traveled 5 vertices, the sheperd is moved 5 spaces. The sheperd is restricted to one-dimensional circular movement around the second hexagonal ring from the center (around the outskirts of the grey hexagon in the center). 

The resultant actions are the important things; a triangle of sheep is formed; a sheperd is landed in a triangle of sheep, resulting in the sheep being removed from play; a possible game-winning triangle is disbanded; one of a sheep's movement channels is blocked, limiting its movement opportunities, and thus, the sheperd's movement opportunities; and more, as you get deeper into the game.

The game takes place on a pointy star shape made up of a series of triangles. The sheep stay on the vertices, and the sheperd resides on the face of the triangle. The space is discrete, as the placement only matters vertex to vertex and face to face, two-dimensional (for the sheep) and one-dimensional (for the sheperd), and continuous. 

Besides this, the game is pretty simple. There isn't a lot of variance in the states and attributes of the objects, just where the sheep can go and if they are making a triangle or not. There isn't any sense of chance in this game. Everything can be pre-decided, there are no rolls (except maybe for who goes first). Despite the simplicity of the game (there is only 1 operative action), there is a lot of opportunity for strategy. Players must keep track of not only their own sheep, but also their opponent's sheep, and think about sabotaging their sheep triangles by perhaps cutting them off, or trying to speed past their triangle. 

Overall, this was a very fun game! I want to play it more, and I got a lot of inspiration from it. A very cute, easy to set-up, fun abstract game about sheep herding.