Reapers Challenge by RAK and Me (2025)

Many years ago, I would meet up with Robert A. Kraus (RAKgraphics) each year when he came to town to setup his both at ComicCon.  We were always bouncing ideas around.   He had a series of mini games called Coin Creatures, where you use coins as your game pieces and his endless cute Creatures were all over the board.

We put together a few full page games for that series.   Here is one called Reapers Challenge,  which guest starred Bob's famous Chakan character who was long ago featured in a Sega video game.

For each of these projects we wanted to give as much play for the price as we could,  so we included another whole game board on the backside,  and some alternate rules.   As long as all the rules fit on one sheet of paper.

This one is simple: move your pieces along the thick lines but capture by following the arrows.  The only other rules are: you can move any combination of pieces a total of seven spaces; you can't change direction except after capturing a piece or at a dead end; and you can't jump a piece on a line, you have to stop before it.

We weren't going for deep strategy,  just something fun and hard to predict.  The first few turns tend to eliminate most of the pieces, and then it turns into an odd survival run, usually with one player spiraling down the drain at the center of the board.

It's quirky and fun,  so it did what we wanted it to do.  I never had time to do much analysis.   The player setup is wildly uneven, with one player being at the end of the line at the edge of the spiral,  so you should probably play one game as X and one game with the O setup.

 

This weekend I was flipping through old notebooks and found my original sketch and prototype.  Fun times. 

Here was my original page describing it.  I still technically have a few copies available but it is long out of print otherwise.