Ram Rush

The brief

Ram Rush is a two-player real-time tabletop game built for spectacle. You play one of two rams butting heads on a mountain ledge, adding chips to the battle lane in real time until one of you tumbles off the side. There are no turns. Both players move at once. It’s noisy and fast and meant to be watched as much as played.

It was built in Eric Zimmerman’s Game Design 2 class at NYU with Tori Smith, Beau McGhee, and Rook Liu. The original prompt was about deck-building. The thing that ended up working was something else entirely.

The approach

We started with deck-building, the way the brief asked us to. We pivoted pretty quickly. The thing that kept being interesting in playtest wasn’t the deck, it was watching two players panic in real time. So we shifted the design toward spectacle: short rounds, no turns, a stack of chips per player, and a single shared battle lane where everything was happening at once.

From there the design walked into punishments. Every chip you played did something to your opponent or to the lane, speed shifts, lane disruptions, small embarrassments. The punishments were what gave the game its character. The rams started butting heads because the punishments were what the rams were actually fighting about.

The work

Two pieces of the design lived on the table for the longest: the chip set with its icons, and what the game actually looked like in front of an audience.

The chips were the whole game on paper. Each chip carried one icon and one effect, easy to read at a glance, easy to slap down without thinking. We iterated on the icon set across multiple playtests until each chip’s intent was obvious from across the table. The setup itself was deliberately quick: two players, two ram pieces, one mountain, a stack of chips each. From explanation to first round in under a minute.

By the time we showed it at the NYU Spring Showcase, the game had become a small party. Two players would pull up, three or four spectators would gather, and the whole thing would resolve in two or three loud minutes. People would queue up to take a turn. We played it at Willoughby Walks later in the year and again at Wonderville’s Saturday Tabletop Series, same shape, same noise, same crowd.

How it landed

Featured at the NYU Game Center 2022 Spring Showcase, the 2022 NYU Game Center Parkade @ Willoughby Walks, and Wonderville’s Saturday Tabletop Series.

The thing that made it stand out at each of those was that it didn’t sit quietly on the table. It pulled people over.