Sorry and the Parchisi games

Sometimes, the super simple kids games are the most fun. Maybe they are not worth analyzing, maybe they are. But here we go. Sorry! is an odd game. At first look, there is nothing to it. And yeah, behind the scenes there is nothing to it either. But when I sat down to play a session just now, to get some images for this little set of articles, THIS happened:

It's like the game knew I was going to write about it, so it handed me a big negative 4. "Here, you can start off by NOT going anywhere." 

 

On the funny side, after Anne and I picked up this copy of Sorry! about a year ago, for the first few months we didn't notice that the 4 actually says move Back 4. Not Ahead 4. Umm, shouldn't the four be a different color to maybe make it stand out from the forward-moving crowd?  Okay, negative four did make the game slightly more variable. And at a dinner a few months later, Doug let us know that the slides let you knock out ALL the players along the slide - even your own - not just the one you land on. You don't always remember all the rules over the decades, or maybe you were playing house rules way back then.

In any case, Sorry! is a simple roll-and-move game, which is a variant of the Parchisi (Parcheesi, Pachisi) game that goes back to medieval India.  The main thing that Hasbro added is switching the dice for a deck of cards with fixed numbers.  I am pretty sure that they also added the slide spaces.

What is really unexpected about Sorry! is how often the two player game ends up less than five spaces apart at the end.  There is no reason that this little deck of randomness, with so many ways to send pieces halfway around the board or all the way back to the start, with about 80 spaces around the board, should EVER end up so close.  But it does, over and over again, easily 75% of the time our two-player games end up less than five spaces apart.  With more players, it does get more unpredictable, but not as much as you might logically expect.

And, as if on demand, tonight's one illustrative game ended just three spaces apart.  How?  Why?  A typical game moves a piece ahead 1 to 12 spaces, sometimes back four, we regularly swap places or get bumped plus or minus 20 or 40 spaces ... and the darn thing almost always ends up as a close game anyway.  It feels like this is mostly due to trying to hit the final space by an exact count.  What a brilliant case of a simple rule magnifying the game balance.  You spend a lot of time waiting to get that last 2-space card, while the opponent sneaks halfway around the board, and sometimes gets there first.

Whee.

Variations: 

- The rules have always included a version where you deal five cards to each player and you get to choose which cards to play.  And you play for points.  After some tests, we didn't feel that this made the game any more fun.

- I personally despise the rule where you need a one or two to start a piece.  All it does is wastes time.  Start a game by drawing 8 cards neither player can use?  No thanks.  We just draw the cards and leap out into the race.

For fun, here are the different rule sets in PDF form, straight from Hasbro: 1939, 1972, 1992, 2003.

Related:

Trouble is a similar game with Pop-O-Matic dice. 

Anyway, while I have also played a variety of Parchisi games, and have found some great sites on the history of that game, even museum exhibits of gorgeous old roll-out cloth Parchisi boards from centuries ago, Parchisi just feels a bit dull, nothing but rolling and moving and an occasional bumped piece.  Clearly it is a well-balanced game, or it would not have stuck around for so long.  Meanwhile, the kid game of Sorry! is hilarious fun for no apparent reason.

To continue exploring the Parchisi family of games, here is a good resource.  Enjoy.