Sicilian Shoot Off

Although our original design called for players shooting their pieces and landing them onto pizza slice shaped targets, after today's trial run, we changed that. We realized that most of the pieces tend to go too far, and the triangle shaped pizza was not helping that problem. The initial idea was to change the "slices" to a round pie, but once again we found that this design was too small. Then the idea of a square Sicilian pizza pie came up. Each player would lose "bites" from their perfectly square pie depending on game play.


Today we were using smaller checker pieces than we had intended. The smaller pieces are lighter and fly farther than we had intended. Thus we've decided to double the amount of pieces each player gets to flick from 5 to 10.



After realizing the flicking motion packs a little too much of a punch for these light pieces, we've decided to explore other alternatives to pushing the pieces. We are currently tossing around two ideas. One is to implement the use of a pushing device almost like in shuffle board (show in above picture as a pencil). The pushing device gives the player a little bit more control over how much force they apply. The device can be type of pen or pencil with the pizzeria's telephone number on it. The other option would be to continue flicking the pieces as originally intended, but to attach Velcro to both sides of the checkers. We've realized that the idea is somewhat similar to shuffleboard, so we tried using a makeshift shuffleboard "shuffler" (see above photo) using a ruler and a binder clip.





We also realized that a pizza box does not open up in a way that creates a slanted ramp that we were looking for. The remedy for this problem is quite simple, but yet, still needs to be included in assembly instructions. We simply fixed the box closed using 2 paper clips, one on each side (see photo to the right).









Over the weekend we will need to:
-buy felt to create removable pieces of the Sicilian pie
-test out how the surface of the felt changes the gameplay as far as the pieces sliding/stopping on it
-test using poster board instead of felt, while still applying Velcro to the bottoms.
-use paper layouts to explore different game designs as far as amounts of tiles necessary, and the amount of "special" tiles that would make a good balance of gameplay