donkirkby

Friday, August 05, 2011

Sly Corporation

Here's a board game design project that turned into an art project. In the distant past of 2003, I found a copy of Sly at the Salvation Army and picked it up because I'm a big fan of the designer. The box lid for SlyIt's a game system designed in the 1970's and distributed by Amway of all things. Funky colours like avocado and harvest gold, and the box is pure nostalgia.

The game system came with six games, but of course I went looking for new games that other people had designed or adapted to play on it. I never found any, but I did find it mentioned in an article by Ron Hale-Evans on game systems, along with Rock Paper Scissors Spock Lizard and the piecepack. I've since published a few piecepack games, but I never found any new games for Sly. Even my plaintive cries for help went unanswered.

Since the following eight years haven't produced any more games for Sly, I recently decided to do something myself. I thought I would try adapting Eric Solomon's Corporation. Corporation being played on the Sly game systemIt's a nice-looking game published by nestorgames. They have a great set of abstract games for sale, and they manufacture everything on demand.

The game adapted very easily to Sly, so I foolishly said to myself, "Wouldn't it be fun to publish the adapted rules and make them look just like the rules for the original six games in Sly?" Since I enjoyed designing the programmer cake in Inkscape, I decided to use it again for this project. Of course, it took me ten times longer to lay out the rules than it did to do the original adaptation. Learning how to use Inkscape feels a bit like learning pointers in C. Very useful once you understand, but you can't help feeling that your brain was slightly damaged by the experience. Rules for Corporation next to rules for an original game from SlyI'm pleased with the result, it looks pretty close to the original. If you have Sly, you can download the rules and add them to your copy. If you're really keen, you can design or adapt your own games, and use my files as a template to format the rules. Just don't make me wait another eight years, please.

3 Comments:

At 4:52 am , Blogger CDRodeffer said...

I tried to post a comment before, but I guess it didn't "take."

Anyway, I'm sure you're aware that Nestor games now offers Realm (another system very similar to and related to Sly) for sale. I'm not sure what color mix of pieces come with the Nestor edition of Realm, but some of the Sly games may be playable with his equipment.

 
At 12:56 pm , Blogger donkirkby said...

Hi Clark,
I had noticed Nestor publishing Realm, but I hadn't thought it through, since I already have Sly. I checked the piece distributions, and Nestor sells a pack of two extra colours that would let you play all the Sly games with his Realm set.

 
At 1:40 am , Blogger Unknown said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

 

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home