Workshop Yesterday: Playmobattle Creator's Commentary

Let me explain. Three years ago, I worked at a toy store.

That store sold the popular European toy line Playmobil. When I was young, I considered Playmobil to be Lego for chumps and babies - an opinion I hold to this day. The store organized its Playmobil along a massive shelf that constantly needed adjusting, front-facing, and aligning.

Playmobil is identified by a four-digit serial number in a coloured lozenge. The colour roughly corresponded to the theme of the toy. I saw a grid of modular pieces with printed information. I saw a pre-built resource system - the price tags. I saw an excuse for employees to keep going over there. I saw a game.

The previous post is the complete text, unedited from the product of that one fevered evening three years ago when I banged this out.

I played once, but it proved too difficult to manipulate the pieces on the shelves without rearranging everything. It was also too hard to identify which pieces were whose. It kinda choked and died - like most of my first playtests - and we never returned to it.

I note now, on reviewing the piece, that no victory condition is included. I assume it's when a player destroys all his opponents' pieces, but I should have wrote that down. I also should have defined a few terms. I present it here, in lieu of original content, for posterity's sake.

In an ideal world, where no one minds Post-It notes on their toys, I think this could have been an awesome game.