What atari 2600 games can be played on Paper?

[+Propane13]

Completely Random thought-- what Atari 2600 games can be played on Paper? 3D Tic-Tac-Toe is a given, but I just had the completely odd thought of how funny it would be to say I was playing Pitfall II "by hand".

 

Must be something in the water. My plant is turning orange.

-John

[sku_u]

Hangman

Basic Math

[Mindfield]

A lot of things can be played on paper depending on how elaborate you want to get.

 

When I was a kid, I couldn't get enough of the arcades, so I used to design board games based on arcade titles. Among other things, I designed a Donkey Kong Jr. board game out of heavy grade card paper and pencil crayons, complete with the first DKJr level, pieces for the monsters and all the fruit. You'd take turns rolling dice both for yourself and for each of the monsters. Of course, there weren't any rules in place to decide which vines the monsters would decend, but the concept was there, anyway... :-)

 

Yeah... I had a lot of free time and pent-up artistic yearnings back then. :-)

[SS]

Pac-Man could be played on cardboard.

 

[NovaXpress]

Don't tell me you guys never played Combat on paper. Draw two tanks and some barriers, then set your pencil down, smack it so it slides and leaves a mark on the paper. Try to hit the opponent's tank without hitting a barrier.

 

And of course I'll never forget how to make a paper Football.

[StanJr]

absolutely asinine as it sounds, we played Zaxxon on paper. We had like 12 sheets of hand drawn playfields and you would guide your finger "ship" through the playfield, and make shooting sounds. The person in control of the game would determine hits and misses and if you got hit by an enemy ship. Looking back on it, it was pretty damn stupid, but at the time (6-7 grade) it was as close to video games as we could get in school. Who needs a gameboy?

 

[NovaXpress]

By 6th grade you should have been playing Dungeons and Drag . . . I mean talking to girls! Yeah, talking to girls.

[+Nathan Strum]

Space War.

 

Seriously.

 

Indy 500, too.

 

We used to play them in Jr. High School, in about '77 - '78. This was before any of us actually owned a video game system, much less anything portable (although Mattel Football was showing up around that time).

 

Here's how you do it.

 

For Space War (although we were actually using Star Wars ships, naturally) you take a sheet of paper, and draw several planets on it, and maybe some asteroids and comets, making sure there are planets on opposite corners (your home planets). Make the planets different sizes, but not too big (no more than maybe two inches). On one corner of the page, next to your planet, draw small pictures of your ships (for instance X-Wings). On the opposite corner, the other player does the same. Each one draws about six ships. Keep the ships small. About 1/2 inch or so.

 

You each need a couple of pens. One for moving, one for shooting. Ball points work best for moving (no "clicker" though). Felt pens are for shooting (must be fine-tip). You each take turns.

 

To move, you place the tip of the pen on the paper, and place one finger only on the end of the pen. You then push the pen around the paper (not as easy as it sounds). Where you stop (or where the pen falls over) is where you re-draw your ship (crossing out where it had been).

 

To shoot, it's the same idea - one finger on the top of the pen, but instead of moving it, you "shoot" it towards the other guy's ships. If it leaves a mark that hits his ship, you get to draw an explosion over it, and he's down a ship. You can't shoot through planets (or asteroids, or any other objects you draw when setting up the game).

 

You have to take turns, and you can only move or shoot during your turn. First player to take out the other guy's ships wins. As the game goes along, you have lines and scribbles all over the page, which makes it harder to manuever and shoot.

 

To play Indy 500, it's the same basic idea.

 

Draw a race track on a sheet of paper. We would make ours really twisty, with narrow passages, "figure 8" intersections, land mines, jumps over chasms, and oil slicks.

 

You'd each have a car (drawn from overhead, like Indy 500) and to move, you would have to push your pen around the track (again - one finger). Wherever your pen stopped moving is where your turn ended. Or if you went off the track or hit an obstacle, it would be a "crash" and your turn would end, and you'd re-draw your car there.

 

The first one to successfully complete however many laps the race was (ususally five) would win. The oil slicks were drawn with pencil, so when you hit them, you'd skid. Also, by the time you'd each gone around the track a few times, the other pen lines (and drawings of exploding cars) would make it harder to push the pen around.

 

Maybe this sounds silly now, but at the time it was a lot of fun (and something we could play in the library while "studying"). We could make up our own galaxies and race tracks, and it was all free. Next best thing to pencil fights.

 

I wish I'd kept some of those drawings...

[+Nathan Strum]

Well, it took me so long to type that, Stan and NovaXpress both beat me to it. But it's nice to know I wasn't the only one.

 

Maybe at the next game expo, we should get a tournament going.

[awsomo3000]

adventure can be played on paper seeing as its mostly just mazes.Thats a pretty cool idea actualy.i should try it, AND I URGE THE REST OF YOU TO DO THE SAME!!

[Rob Mitchell]

Very creative .. each of you!

 

well .. Codebreaker is my suggestion for playing with paper. My wife and I did this recently at a pizza joint and mugs of beer!

 

Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA

[NovaXpress]

Basic Math

[moycon]

We used to play what would be considered a knock off of combat back in grade school that was actually pretty fun.

 

You took a plain sheet of note paper and folded it in half along the width.

Then you would both draw a land mass on either side of the paper. The middle would be the ocean. You were allowed so many of each type of weapon. Like say 10 tanks, 10 battleships, 10 planes, 10 Anti-aircraft guns etc.... All your weapons would have gun turrents.

A book or folder was put up in the middle so you couldn't see what your opponent was drawing.

 

Once the set up was complete. You removed the folder so the entire battle field was in view. You took turns using a ruler to "shoot" at your opponents by placing the ruler on the gun turrents and tracing a straight path over to the other side. You had to make sure you didnt hit your own equipment. It seems to me variations would include the fact that certain equipment could only shoot so far... Like say 6 inches for a tank, but could use your turn to move a piece of equipment, like say a tank, 6 inches in order to get closer. 8 inches for a plane , but could also move plane 8 inches (Yes it was played with pencil)

 

Man we used to have a ball playing that!!

[elviticus]

Stellar Track

[maibock]

We made a similar game in which we used giant blank newspaper size paper and taped them together on the kitchen floor. We'd then draw out a map with mounains, roads, forests and a huge ocean in between. We then painstakingly cut out little tanks, ships and planes for our war in different paper color for each side, and put everything in place.

 

The war was played by using the aforementioned "finger on top of the pen and flick" technique. We used different size pens and pencils for each craft(planes used a taller pen which moved further than the shorter tank pencils). Unfortunately the game was so massive, we were never able to finished a war

[Robert M]

Don't tell me you guys never played Combat on paper. Draw two tanks and some barriers, then set your pencil down, smack it so it slides and leaves a mark on the paper. Try to hit the opponent's tank without hitting a barrier.  

 

And of course I'll never forget how to make a paper Football.

 

 

Yes! Paper combat was all the rage when I was a kid. Better than a pencil though is a roller ball pen. With practice you can hold the pen upright with one finger and push it along making it roll on the ball tip. Playing that way you can even put crude shields around items by writing a heavy line thus making a groove that the pen falls into and gets deflected.

 

Good fun!

[Big Player]

In fourth and fifth grade I played plenty of paper Combat games. The early ones were like Missile Command, where one player had to defend the ground with bases and the other attacked from the air.

 

Another version would have the players each create a large spaceship on each end of the paper. The goal was to hit the other players reactor, which would be located in the center of the ship. A hit on a ship would erase a portion of it. You had to work your way into the core by taking out a bit at a time. It took a while, because it took multiple flicks of the pencil to move your shot across the page. And you could defend yourself, if you could hit the players shot with one of the guns on the ship. But it wasn't easy to hit the small shot and it used up your turn, when you could be attacking.

 

I had forgotten all about these games. It's funny how many of us played them. Do kids still play them now?

[Justin42]

I don't remember playing -- or seeing -- anything like this in the early 80's growing up... of course, I was at a private school and we either had the systems or drooled over the systems.

 

Sounds like I missed out on something, some of those sound pretty fun!

[+FujiSkunk]

If board games or psuedo-board games count, some of you might remember the games that came with cereal for a while in the '80s, "board" game versions of games like Frogger and Galaxian. I remember being inspired by those and coming up with a few other "video board" games made with paper, scissors, crayons, and a whole lot more free time than I have now.

 

I think the best one I did was Spy Hunter. I actually put a lot of thought into it. One player would control the good guys, including the hero car and the weapons vans, and the other player would control the bad guys, including all the villain vehicles. All the villain cars were included, and so were the weapons vans. Dice rolls determined who got to move where and by how much, and proximities would determine who killed whom, based on which villain cars where in play and what weapons the hero car had at the time. It wasn't exactly what you would call fast-paced, but it was a complete game.

 

I also made a paper version of Paperboy (there's an irony in there somewhere), but it was more of a free-form thing and little more than an excuse to draw whole neighborhoods from a three-quarters view. At one point I had an entire fictional city (a suburb or two, anyway) mapped out, with one hapless little paperboy in charge of the entire delivery route.

 

It's probably obvious by now I didn't have much of a social life growing up.

[Paul Slocum]

I played live-action Adventure when I was a kid.

[+Propane13]

So, how would one go about playing Kaboom?

 

-John

[keilbaca]

So, how would one go about playing Kaboom?

 

-John

 

Well, after you play it a while, you can see the bombs when you close your eyes, so I usually just imagine myself play it... helps you get better when you actually play in the faster levels

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Jammed

[Lauren Tyler]

Man, I could think of so many great 2600 games that could be made into paper games (or board games for that matter! )

[Lauren Tyler]

A lot of things can be played on paper depending on how elaborate you want to get.

 

When I was a kid, I couldn't get enough of the arcades, so I used to design board games based on arcade titles.  Among other things, I designed a Donkey Kong Jr. board game out of heavy grade card paper and pencil crayons, complete with the first DKJr level, pieces for the monsters and all the fruit.  You'd take turns rolling dice both for yourself and for each of the monsters.  Of course, there weren't any rules in place to decide which vines the monsters would decend, but the concept was there, anyway... :-)

 

Yeah... I had a lot of free time and pent-up artistic yearnings back then.  :-)

 

I remember in fifth grade, there was this kid who came up with the idea of creating his own paper 'board' games, where he made a die out of paper, cut out little pictures of cars as the game pieces, and the goal was to be the first to complete a race, with various spaces telling you to lose a turn, go back one, etc.

 

Man, what I would give for the abililty to design my own board games.