It’s Friday and I haven’t exercised my brain lately. So today I am doing a Design Me challenge.

Design Me challenges are all about exercising your brain. Like soccer players need to practice when not playing games, so I believe designers should practice their design skills. A Design Me challenge is a great way to exercise your designer mind. So let’s exercise our minds using this combination of theme, mechanics, and victory condition from Boardgamizer:

FBI tile placement with a dexterity aspect! Piece of cake!

If you have never checked out Boardgamizer, go do so right now! You just might be inspired for your next awesome game design.

MANHUNT

Manhunt is a tile (card) placement dexterity game for 2 to who knows how many players. Let’s say 8. So 2-8 players. Each player is given an objective card at the beginning of the game. On each card are two goals. The first player to complete both goals will win this fast-paced fun and interactive game!

Components

This game has very few components. They are:

• 8 Objective Tiles
• 46 City Tiles of varying terrain
• Manhunt tokens
• Objective tokens
• Rulebook

How To Play

Deal each player one Objective tile. This represents that player’s victory condition. Shuffle the City deck and place it face down near the edge of the table. Flip one tile face up and place it in the center of the table. Then flip two more tiles and place them face up next to the deck.

On your turn you will either choose one of the two face up tiles OR you will draw a tile off the top of the deck. Then you will flip, drop, toss, or whatever you need to do to get the tile onto the table. However, you simply cannot place the card on the table.

No matter where the tile lands it becomes part of the city.

Of course you will want to try to do certain things. Let’s look at the tiles and then discuss some strategy:

Some sample tiles. The lines that separate the colors represent roads.

Some of the objectives require you to earn Manhunt tokens. To earn a Manhunt token you you to get your tile to cover up a cross-hairs icon. For each icon that you cover you will earn 1 Manhunt token.

Some of the objectives require grouping colors together. So if you can get a group of four brown city sections together then you might meet your objective.

Some objectives could be to get roads together. If you can get three road sections to line up you might meet your objective.

When you complete an objective you should take an Objective token and place it onto your objective tile to indicate that the objective has been met.

So using roads, city sections, and cross-hair symbols you can have a slew of different objectives to meet. The first player who can meet their objectives from their tile will be the winner.

Design Thoughts?

I have successfully exercised my mind and created a tile placement dexterity game that I think could be a fun 10-15 minute filler. I have not played Jason Tagmire’s Maximum Throwdown but I imagine this is similar to that. Sorry, Jason, if this is a rip-off of that. Or I suppose this is similar to FlowerFall. If you think a game like this could be fun, then I suggest you check out Maximum Throwdown or FlowerFall.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to exercise you designer mind!