PIIRI
Posted on 2023-07-20 15:57
I posted about this boardgame in 2020 after building the board and pieces; it’s an asymmetric abstract boardgame based on the imaginary game Thud from Terry Pratchett‘s book of the same name. My initial goal was to reconstruct the game described in the book to the best of my ability; I had read about some of the other similar attempts some years earlier, but as far as I know I didn’t really utilize that knowledge in my own design. For example, the initial layout of the units was something that I stumbled into when considering Pratchett’s vague description of the starting position.
Anyway, this first version showed a surprising amount of promise, and I playtested it a bunch in late 2020, polishing the ruleset. Despite being quite happy with what I had then (and having built the above physical board and pieces from 2 cheap chess sets, acrylic paints, coins and pieces of old sock), the worry that the game balance was off in some hard-to-see way gnawed at me and I left the game to wait for later. There were a couple playtests every now and then over the years, but nothing substantial after that initial excitement. One cool detail is that I got a chance to briefly show the game to Vlaada Chvatil when he was visiting the Finnish event Ropecon last year. Thanks for taking a look, Vlaada!
As one might have noticed, this year has been quite active for me boardgame design -wise, and it seemed like a good idea to finally finish my Thud-like. I had already pondered on taking the game away from its origins, because I felt that it was enough of a separate thing that presenting it as a “fangame” would’ve felt a bit unpleasant. I did some more playtesting (thanks to quantumpotato for suggestions and playtesting help) and adjusted the rules quite a bit based on this – the 13×13 board became 11×11, one faction lost a fairly powerful move that seemed to be either overpowered or too weak, and the central Monolith piece became movable. I also changed the names of the components and the game to represent divergence from its origin, and thus Piiri was born.
I’m a bit wistful about the original 13×13 version of the game, so it might be that I’ll return to it at some point to give it another try. However, this 11×11 version seems to work ok, and as such it makes sense that this is the “official release”.
Download the game on itch.io!
Tags: Games, Boardgames