A Game Too New For a Name

by Crazy Ivan

It's way too late for me to be up, but since I've been up all night playing a new Myachi game, I figured it would only be right to tell you about it before I turn in.  If I'm lucky, I'll be done before one in the morning, but I don't think I'll be that lucky.

So I should say in advance that this game is Bones' brainchild.  He came up with a basic concept the other day, but it took a few days and the input of a couple other Myachi Masters to refine it to its final form.  Bones, Bamboo, Lucky and I finally hit upon the right formula today.

The thing is, it will sound really confusing if I try to explain it and I didn't think to take pictures as we were playing, so I'm going to give you a quick explanation (that might sound confusing) but I'm going to give you simplistic graphics to help make it clear.

First of all, you'll need a few Myachis.  Each player will need 3 of them and the game is best with 3 or 4 players (though it could be fun with 2 as well).  You'll also need several bowls or targets.  We played with 7, but you could play with 5,6 or 8 and it would still be mad fun.  We had 4 players and used 7 bowls so I'd imagine with 3 players you'd probably want 5 or 6 and with 5 players you'd probably want 8 or 9.

We set them up like this, but there are a number of ways you could set it up and still make it fun:

So the you stand far enough away to make it a challenge and throw all three of your Myachis toward the bowls.  You want to land as many as you can in the bowls.  To make things clearer as we go along, we'll go through a hypothetical first round between Bones, Bamboo, Lucky and I.  And we'll all be using different colored Myachis in this example, though in real life you could just use whatever Myachis you have around.  It'll be easy to keep track of whose are whose.

So let's say Bones shoots first and he lands two Myachis in two different bowls.  After his turn, the bowls look something like this:

Bones gets 2 points for this shot.  But perhaps more importantly, he blocks those two bowls for the remainder of the round.  You can only score by hitting one of the empty bowls.  If you land in one of the two bowls that Bones' Myachis are in, he scores a point instead.

So let's say Bamboo shoots next.  He hits the middle bowl (which is mad important in this particular setup), but he also lands in one of the bowls Bones' Myachi was already in:

In this example, Bamboo would score one point (for the middle bowl), but Bones would also score a point because one of Bamboo's Myachis landed in a bowl he "controlled".

Bamboo would remove the Myachi in Bones' bowl so that when the next player, Lucky, stepped up to shoot, he would be facing a field that looked like this:

You can already see that this game gets tougher as it goes.  Now that it's Lucky's turn, he only has 4 bowls that he can shoot for.  Let's say that because he was nervous about giving Bones or Bamboo a point, he missed his first two shots, but his final shot landed between two bowls, half in one, half in the other:

Now this is kind of a weird situation in the game.  He only gets one point (because it was only one Myachi), but because it lands in both bowls, it blocks two bowls from the next shooter (poor little ol' me) so things become even tougher for the last shooter (in this game, it's definitely to your advantage to go first).

Let's say I hit one of the two empty bowls, but another shot lands short and lands in one of the two bowls that Lucky controls:

Now I've scored one point for myself and one for Lucky, so I'll remove the Myachi that's sitting in the lower right hand bowl.  This means that in this example, the score after one round is:

Bones: 3

Bamboo: 1

Lucky: 2

Ivan: 1

Now, you might be wondering what happens when all the bowls fill up.  But there's a rub.  When the next round starts, Bones picks up his two Myachis and faces this set up:

Now he can score points on any of the three bowls on the left.  Or, if he misses or a Myachi slides from one bowl to another, he might score a point for Bamboo, Lucky or myself.  Any Myachis he scores with will stay on the board, but on Bamboo's turn, he'll pick up the one in the middle and on Lucky's turn he'll pick up the Blue one.

If you're following the idea here (and it's possible that I'm struggling with the description... it's a quarter after one already), you can already see all the crazy stuff that can happen in this game.  You can accidentally score three points for the guy you're tied with.  You face different setups every turn.  You can control one bowl forever if you keep landing your Myachis back in it.  You can even fill up the last bowl so any player with no Myachis in scoring position will lose a turn (that's one you'll have to think about for a minute I guess).

We were playing to 15 points, but for a longer game you could play to 21 and for a quicker bout you could play to 10.  The coolest thing about the game is that you can play with different numbers of Myachis, different setups and numbers of bowls and different final scores so you can play this game a ton of different ways.

Anyway, I'll try to post a more understandable and official explanation of the game later when I'm not so tired (complete with video), but for now I hope enough of you understand this to play a few rounds.  You'll see really quickly why we were having so much fun with it.

Incidentally, if you have a good idea for what we should name this game, leave it in the comments section.  I think it only fair that Bones has final say on what it's called, but I'm sure he's open to good suggestions.

It was so fun we had to play 3 games in a row.  Lucky won the first one (when I scored a point for him).