Alpha-Male 2!

Alpha-Male! was designed by me, Jonathan Virly. It was the first board game I designed for the Game Design and Production tutorials. The game revolved around the idea of a pack of wolves attacking a defenseless family wandering through the woods where the pack's leader, the alpha male, was killed and now the members of the pack must compete to determine who will take his place.

In the original game each player had a wolf piece and would move their wolf piece around a circular track all the while collecting alpha tokens, each space the players landed on could give them tokens, take them away, or affect what space they or their opponents land on. When a player reaches a certain number of tokens, as decided by a dice roll, they must land on the finishing space to win.

The game was very much dependent on dice rolls, not only did dice rolls decide how many tokens the players needed to collect but also whether or not they would win. So as a change to the game all aspects of randomness was removed from the game and replaced with mechanics that promoted more skill based play.


The game is played as such: 

1. All players begin on the starting space. 
2. Players must have a minimum of 10 alpha points before the end square becomes available to them.
3. Player with the orange marker goes first.
4. The players then spend alpha tokens to determine how far they can move, each alpha token paid gives one space moving clockwise around the board, unless effected by "interference". See interference. 
5. All instructions on the space landed on must be carried out. 
6. The game is won when a player with the correct number of alpha-points lands on the end space. 

Interference

• Head-butting/Lunging: a player can pay 3 alpha-points to “push” either another player’s or one’s own piece to go one square farther than their movement roll indicates. 
• Tail Biting / Backtracking: A player can pay 3 alpha-points to “pull” either another player’s piece or your own which decreases the movement phase.
• These techniques must be called out after a player rolls for movement but before they reach their designated square. It must be spontaneous, no planning allowed.
• A player may only choose to play ONE of these moves at a time per turn ( this includes the other players as well). Example: Jimmy CANNOT lunge 3 times on his turn but he CAN lunge on his turn then tail bite on Gary's turn.
• There is no limit to the number of players who can use these moves at one time. Example: Gary pays 6  tokens but before Gary can move 6 spaces Timmy calls tail bite, Cindy calls head-butt, and Jimmy calls tail bite (6-1+1-1=5). So now Gary moves 5 spaces. 

Additional Rules

• All players start the game with 10 alpha-points.
• Should a player land on the end square and does NOT have the required number of alpha-points then the end square does nothing and the player must continue around the track. 
• The players must land on the end space EXACTLY. If your movement role dictates that you pass over the end space then you must continue around the track.
• When a player runs out of tokens they are out of the game.
• When only one player is left within the game, that player is the winner.

As one can see by the rules the game has been changed from focusing on dice rolls to more resource management as one must pay tokens in order to move around the board and obtain more tokens but at the same time one must not spend too much, else they run out of tokens. At the same time you can tamper with other people progression but this comes at a cost but can very well ensure that a player gets knocked out of the game. 

Playtest 

Immediately I found that I had to change some of the instructions on the board as they involved instructions about dice rolls, which of course was taken out of the game entirely, they were replaced with instructions using tokens paid instead of dice rolls but the affects of the space remained the same. Further testing revealed that additional instructions on the board spaced need tweaking as the punishments for some of the spots was too severe, knocking players out of the game early on as they did not posses many tokens in the beginning. Other than that I found there was a good level of resource management but i would have like to have seen more interaction , or "interference", between players, so the cost for interfering with other players was decreased.