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Come Out & Play 2008 in New York

Start Time: Sunday June 8 at 2 PM
Starting Location: Sara D Roosevelt Park by the basketball courts at the corner of Houston St and Forsyth St
# of players: 20
Duration: 1 hour
URL: http://www.sortasoft.com & http://www.tinymantis.com
Designers: Joshua DeBonis and Nikita Mikros

Pigeon Piñatas and their cronies are taking over the city and it’s your responsibility to rid our fair city of this nuisance. Team up with your friends and grab some wiffleball bats to pummel the piñatas to oblivion. You'll be bestowed with power-ups, self-satisfaction and sweet, sweet candy. We regret that no actual pigeons will be harmed in this game, but plenty of piñatas will be massacred!

The Rules
Setup
Players are split into 4 teams of 5 players each. Each team gets 5 ping pong balls and 5 blindfolds. 2 piñatas are hung within view of each other.

Teams
Each team member is given a colored blindfold, according to his team. Hawks: Red Falcons: Blue Eagles: White Buzzards: Black

Core Gameplay
Players can get in line for either of the piñatas. They must stand behind a line marked on the ground approximately 15 feet away from the piñata. When a player gets to the front of the line, he is blindfolded by a ref, spun around a few times, and takes one whack at the piñata with a wiffleball bat. If the player is carrying an upgrade token, he may trade it in now to the ref. Players may combine upgrade tokens.

The piñatas are filled with candy, upgrade tokens (poker chips with the name of the upgrade written on them), money (ping pong balls), and points (bouncy balls). After he hits the piñata, the player who is "at bat", and any players in line may run to grab anything that comes out of the piñata. If a player leaves the line, they must return to the end of the line. The candy is just for fun and players can eat it.

Upgrades
A store will be set up at the side of the play area. Here players can trade in ping pong balls for upgrade tokens, and turn in bouncy balls for points. The points will be tallied on a large banner.

Teams can buy the following upgrades with ping pong balls, to be distributed among their team however they’d like:

Weapon Upgrade token: 1 ball (allows use of a bigger, heavier bat) 2 hits token: 2 balls (allows player to swing twice) Sighted token: 3 ball (allows player to swing without a blindfold)

Winning
Once each piñata is destroyed, another will be hung in its place. After all the piñatas are broken, the team with the most points wins.

Strategy
The strategy in the game is to determine what line to wait in at what time, and also how to most effectively use your upgrades. Players must also strategize about when to run after fallen goods and when to stay in line.

Bio: Nik Mikros
Nik is a child of the arcade, in his youth every Friday afternoon was spent in Times Square's "Playland" and the ride down from school was pregnant in anticipation of the next great thing to come out of Atari. He's been obsessed with making games since the day he discovered the secret Apple IIe lab at Bronx Science.

In 1997, he joined with John Mikros to found Flying Mikros Interactive, creators of eccentric and eclectic electronic entertainment for the Internet, PC and Mac platforms. One of their PC titles "The Egg Files," was selected as one of ten finalists in the 2002 Independent Games Festival.

After his time with John, he became a partner at Black Hammer Game, inc. where he served as creative director and lead game designer for "Supremacy: Four Paths to Power" a 3D strategy game for the PC platform published by Matrix Games. Supremacy was chosen as a finalist in the 2005 Independent Games Festival. Before that he was technical director for "I-SPY Challenger" a Game Boy Advance title published by Scholastic.

Fast forward to the present. Nik currently runs "Tiny Mantis Entertainment" a unique game development firm in the heart of Chinatown, New York City. He received his MFA in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts in 1993, and a BA in Fine Art from Queens College in 1989. Nik has taught various game design, multimedia and programming classes at the MFA Computer Art Department at SVA for the past 9 years. He has also taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Seton Hall University, and Harvestworks.

Bio: Joshua DeBonis
Joshua is a game designer and the president of Sortasoft, an indie game development studio he founded in 2004 for the purpose of creating unique and original games which focus on gameplay and creativity. Through Sortasoft he has self-published Funky Farm and Retro Records, and served as a game design and development consultant for numerous other game developers.

Joshua organizes the NYC board game designers playtest group, a monthly meeting which facilitates playtesting of board games and receiving critical feedback from other designers.

Joshua has a BA in Jazz Performance from Western Connecticut State University. He is a jazz saxophonist and underground hip hop MC.

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