Purple Duck Storeroom: Arbakampsi

The latest installment of PDG’s “Pay what you want”-series is 10 pages long, 1 page front cover, 2 pages of SRD, leaving us with 7 pages of content, so let’s take a look, shall we?

Arbakampsi is a game invented by the Zendiqi of the Patchwork-planet Porphyra and consists of one board with 64 spaces in 4 colors, 2 sets of 30 tokens of two different colors and 1d6.

The objective of the game is forming lines of 4 on the board, creating “borders”. In the central space, the wager is placed. Said wager may be increased by the player “Arba”, whereas the second player, “Kampsi”, may decline this increase of forfeit. he may refuse the raising 4 times.

Arba is the elementalist and is first to go. Arba names a number from 1 to 4, then rolls the d6. When rolling under the announced number, Arba subtracts the number from 6 and places the appropriate amount of pieces on the board. If Arba has e.g. announced “2” and rolled a 1 on the d6, then Arba may place 4 tokens on the board. If Arba rolls over the announced amount, Kampsi may return one token to Arba and Kampsi’s turn begins.

Kampsi, the second player, represents the Deists and may name numbers from 1 to 5. Both players may pass the die to the other. Lines of 4 tokens are worth 1 point. Having a majority in one of the colored rings is worth 2 points and completely controlling a ring is worth 3 points.

In-game, your characters may know these rules via skills and we get 3 feats as well – one lest you 1/day penalize a foe by -4 before he/she/it rolls, grant yourself a bonus of +5 before you roll or reroll one non-d20. The second fat allows you to reroll one natural 1 and a +8 bonus to one d20-roll after winning a game of Arbakampsi before sleeping again. This should have a caveat that only serious matches count, otherwise fellow players may lose by design to grant their ally the bonus. Finally, the third feat nest you a board as a starting equipment, allows you to place 3 free tokens on the board and nets you a +2 bonus to social skills in negotiations where the game is involved.

We get stats for the two mundane versions of the board as well as to a djinn-enhanced board, a magical rigged die and a shield with an Arbakampsi-board painted on it that can turn into two different magical shields for 1 round – depending on your luck.

The pdf also offers a neat full-color artwork of an arbakampsi game-board – essentially you just need hexes and 5 colors and there you go – simple to create!

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are excellent, I didn’t notice any glitches. Layout adheres to a 1-column b/w-standard with purple highlights that has large enough letters to potentially fit 4 pages on one Din A4-page. The pdf comes fully bookmarked for your convenience – nice at this length!

Author Perry Fehr has actually created a fun little game to introduce to your game that makes for a nice mini-game of luck and strategy, supplemented with neat game-rules to boot. While I consider the second feat herein broken, the game per se and its mechanics should make for a fun diversion or something you could easily play in a solo-game or while waiting for other players to show up etc. – fun, cool and relatively easy to learn for any price you like? Now that’s a neat offering and well worth a final verdict of 5 stars.

You can get this awesome little supplement here on OBS for any price you’re willing to pay!

Endzeitgeist out.

Comments