Week 8 ~ Cows&Leopards against Humanity

This is Episode 8/10 of the Hacking 10 games in 10 weeks project.

Published in

Hacking 10 games in 10 weeks

7 min readFeb 3, 2019

Can you make a game in one hour?

I threw this question to a room full of people at the V&A FridayLate last week. They had signed up for a game-making workshop. Little did they know it was an untested experiment. A few nervous nods. I asked them to play one of The 10 Best Games in the World and then hack it into a new game. Same thing that I’m doing in this project. But what can you get done in an hour? We didn’t know.

Turns out giving people a very short time means they don’t ruminate over ideas. Instead, they run with the first workable one and see where the prototype leads. In other words, they jump into the game-making process without letting plans and assumptions get in the way. Just hack it. People ended up with decent game prototypes, comparable to the ones other people made in longer workshops, of two hours or even a day.

So the day after I challenged myself to go through the same tight process and hack Cows & Leopards into a coop game.

What is this game really about?

Cows & Leopards is a traditional game from Sri Lanka for 2 players, where one plays with 2 leopards and another with 24 cows. Beginning with all tiles outside the board, the players take turns first placing the tiles inside and later moving them from one intersection to another. Every player has a different objective. The leopards must capture all the cows (by jumping over them) while the cows attempt to immobilise the leopards.

So says the Cows & Leopards page on BoardGameGeek.

I gave workshop participants 15 minutes to play and analyse a game they would then hack, so I tried to stick to the same time for my own analysis.

The first thing I noticed were the triangular wedges sticking out of each side of the board. They seemed odd. Even though they have a role to play in the original Cows & Leopards, I decided I would hack them off to keep the board simple. Also, why are some diagonal paths not viable? 🤔

Once I started playing, the game revealed itself in two phases:

I would call this Placement and it’s when cows and leopards take place on the board, one per turn. Until all cows have entered they can’t move, and according to the book leopards can’t capture them either (which contradicts all the other Cows & Leopards rules I found online).
When all cows have entered, the Hunt phase starts. Cows can finally move and leopards can hunt them down. Leopards catch cows by jumping over them in a straight line to a vacant spot just beyond (like in Draughts).

Whether leopards can or cannot capture cows during the Placement phase makes a big difference! If you let leopards capture from the beginning, then you’ll need a lot of cows, many of which will be sacrificed while trying to trap the leopards.

In the other case, cows will be able to corner leopards quite easily, as the leopards can’t jump over them in the Placement phase. I suspect even 12 or less of them could win the game with this restriction in place.

While the let-them-capture rule seems more suited to the balance of forces on the board (2 leopards against 24 cows) the wait-until-all-cows-are-here rule is intriguing. In the Placement phase leopards are essentially escaping a bunch of bullish cows (so much for being natural predators). But if they can survive until the Hunt starts, then the roles will revert and the game will dramatically change. I’d like to make a game with these dynamics at some point.

First attempt

Players work together to move 12 cows (coloured discs) on a 5x5 grid, chased by a couple of automaton leopards (dice).

Leopards get hungrier every time they move (-1 on the die) and starve when their energy level reaches zero. They replenish their energy (+1) each time they capture&eat a cow. You can adjust the leopards’ starting energy for an easier or harder game.

You win when all leopards are starved.

Start by rolling the dice to place both leopards on the grid: for each leopard, the first roll determines the X coordinate, and the second roll the Y.

Players then take turns to place one of their cows anywhere on the grid. All 12 cows must be placed on the board before they can move. After each cow’s turn, a leopard moves.

How leopards move

First of all, which leopard (of the two) should move? This could be decided:

By chance: roll two dice, first X second Y, and the closest leopard to those coordinates will move.
By hunger: the hungriest leopard (lowest number) takes precedence.
By proximity: the leopard closest to cows takes precedence.
A combination of the above?

Once you’ve determined which leopard will move, the next question is: in which direction? Here the options are:

Towards the closest cow.
If a capture is possible, then it must capture.
A random direction, determined by the dice roll.

How leopards capture

I thought the capture mechanics could be made more realistic, as jumping over a cow to capture it doesn’t seem quite right.

How about this? A leopard captures a cow by moving on the spot where the cow sits. Moving onto a cow will cost the leopard -1, and eating it will gain the leopard a +1 (so net zero).

Alternative gameplay

Instead of moving a single leopard after each player’s turn, players could all do one action (placing/moving) and then both leopards would move. This eliminates the need to work out players’ order, as well as the need to determine which leopard will move. This may also encourage players to work together more and coordinate the cows’ movements.

Does it work?

No.

I tried to tweak the cows–leopards balance. What if we have only 9 cows? Or maybe 8? Let’s experiment with 6… I tried with a bigger board. Still, the leopards were clunky and predictable, and it wasn’t fun to play against them.

Then in a (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ┻━┻ moment, a new spark:

What if cows and leopards united against a common threat?

Second attempt

Suddenly it started to make sense. I could keep the strengths of cows (surrounding) and leopards (jumping) from the original game, and use them against humanity. Because let’s face it, the biggest threat to any animal on the planet is us.

Humans ($ tokens) don’t move but they steadily colonise the board. You will use a deck of 10 cards numbered 1 to 5 (two cards for each digit) to operationalise the colonisation. In other words, to place a human on the board, draw two cards: the first determines the X coordinate, and the second card the Y.

One player controls 3 leopards. They can get rid of humans by jumping over them, but only if there’s a single human on a spot. They cannot jump over stacks of humans on the same spot, but they can capture multiple humans if they’re scattered over multiple spots (like in Draughts).

The other player controls 6 cows. They can get rid of humans by surrounding them. Even those humans stacked up on the same spot.

At the beginning of each turn, draw four cards to place two humans. Skip if a spot is already taken by animals. Then both players take action by either placing or moving one of their tokens.

Both cows and leopards may move tokens on the board only after all their tokens are on the board. This means leopards can move after 3 turns, and cows after 6 turns. Leopards can jump over cows (to speed up movement), so those cows will be temporarily taken off the board and must re-enter on the next turn.

If humans colonise 3 spots in a row, they occupy the whole row and eliminate the animals on it. This effect can snowball, so be very careful.

How does the game end?

You lost when the animals can’t possibly contain the humans.

You win when you remove all the humans.

So did I make all this in an hour?

Not quite.

The first attempt was produced in 53 minutes: 15 minutes to study the original game, and 38 to prototype and solo-playtest it.

Then I spent the rest of the afternoon, a good three hours, making useless tweaks. 🤦‍♂️

So here’s the moral: when you’re stuck trying to solve a problem, making small tweaks won’t help. Instead, try and flip the problem with a bunch of bold what if questions ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)

Thanks for reading so far!

If you are interested in playtesting this game, email me m@tteo.me and I’ll send you a print&play!
If you’d like to make a game but have no idea where to start, check out this tutorial: how to make your first game in less than 2 hours (11 minutes read, apparently).