Gem Hunter

For the tomb raider at heart

What is Gem Hunter?

Gem Hunter is a simple collection game played with 2-4 players on a tile-based layout for a board. The objective of the game is to figure out where every gem lies and to have collected the most gems by the the time all gem tiles have been flipped up. 

There are, however, several obstacles that block your progression and cause you to lose gem stones along the way. Once all tiles have been flipped up, a winner is decided based on each player's gems. There are 40 empty space tiles, 40 gem tiles and 20 trap tiles. The ideal manner for the game to be played includes the tiles being set up in a 10 x 10 grid. However, the size of the grid is dependent on the players involved and the space available to them.

Gem Hunter is another fast-paced simple collection game brought to you by the Innovative Innovators which is sure to provide hours of fun for the whole family.

Game Time

A game of Gem Hunter can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour or more depending on the strategy each player displays as well as the random arrangement of the tiles.

Contents

• 1 D-4 Dice

• 4 Player Tokens

• 100 Game Tiles (40 Empty Space Tiles, 40 Gem Tiles, 20 Trap Tiles)

Set Up & Rules

• All 100 tiles (or as many as players have decided on) must be shuffled and laid out face down on a 10 x 10 grid (or to the specifications of players).

• All 4 players take turns to roll the dice. The player with the highest roll begins. If 2 players roll the same highest number, they roll again. 

• The player with the highest roll then proceeds to choose a tile to enter the board on. Should this tile be a trap tile, the player is kicked off the board and must try again on his next turn. Play passes on to the left of the player.

• As all players enter the board, the objective of the game is to collect the most gems while avoiding trap tiles. To do this, players roll the dice and move the appropriate number of spaces in any direction (including diagonal).

• NOTE: No player is allowed to land on the same tile as another player. Simply move to another tile beside him/her.

• If a player lands on a trap tile in-game he/she loses a gem collected and must skip his/her next turn. If the player owns no gems, he/she must simply skip their next turn.

• Should a player land on an empty space or a trap tile, they turn over the tile once the effect has occurred. Gem Tiles, however, remain flipped up.

• Once all gem tiles are turned up, the player with the most gems wins the game and is crowned the "Gem Hunter"!

• Should 2 or more players have the same amount of gems once all Gem Tiles are flipped, they are both/all winners. There's no competition when you're gem hunting!

Game Overview

Gem Hunter is a fun collection game to be played with multiple players sometimes even extending the 4 player limit (should there be player tokens to represent each person). It is ideal when played with friends and works best when laid out in a 10 x 10 grid. The goal of the game is very simple as players move from tile to tile strategically planning out their moves in order not to get stuck in one of the 5 different traps and lose a gem as well as their next turn.

The true strategy in the game comes from remembering which tiles are empty spaces and which tiles are hiding traps. Through a simple elimination process, the left over tiles are the ones which hold the gems. 

There are 5 different types of trap tiles, although all have the same effect (cause the player to lose a gem and hinder his/her progression for one turn). These are the 5 trap tiles:

Pit Trap

This trap tile causes the player to fall into a pit of spikes. The player narrowly manages to escape but getting out of the pit is harder than it seems. While falling, the player happens to drop one of his/her gems and is unable to find it in the darkness of the pit. The time it takes for the player to get out of the pit causes him/her to forfeit their turn.

The Spider Web Trap

With a giant spider lurking around the game board, someone is bound to fall into her deadly spun webs. It is truly a challenge to get out of one of these. As a result, you drop a gem in the struggle to detach yourself and lose a turn attempting to figure out an escape. 

The Quicksand Trap

Oh no! Not the quicksand. Should a player find themselves being sucked into this treacherous vacuum-like sand pit, they have no choice but to suspend their movement and lay there while slowly inching their way up to get their body parallel to the ground. This tricky movement causes a gem to get sucked into the quicksand pit as a result and the intricacy that it takes to navigate out of the trap forces the player to lose a turn. 

The Scarab Beetle Trap

A never-ending army of scarab beetles set out to bury you alive. However, remaining completely still will cause them to pass around you. For the length of turn, you must remain dead silent without motion or so much as blink so that the beetles don't even notice you. There is always one beetle though who finds his way into your pocket and crawls away with that shiny something left in there. 

The Mummy Trap

Possibly the deadliest of all traps, the mummy is a bandaged zombie who wants revenge for the agony it's being put through on being released from its ancient sarcophagus. Your only option is to run when the mummy is on your trail and to dodge through corridors and in and out of chambers to lose the mummy altogether. It takes the length of a turn to dodge the mummy and in your haste you most certainly manage to drop a gem. Be careful though, no one says the mummy can't simply pick up your trace once again. 

Creative Process

When modelling the idea for our collection game, most of us were thinking along the lines of a game similar to Raider of the Lost Arc where every player is Indiana Jones and must go into a tomb to collect all the gems. Should you land on the same tile as another player, a roll of the dice on the part of each player determines which player loses all their gems. Our excitement with the idea simply grew as we began to sketch out all kinds of tombs some with chambers to hold all the gems and some with multiple floors to travel through secret passage ways.

We figured that since this was a collection game, the best way to go about creating a board game was through Clue-style movement across the game board. We though about the prospect of each player having to collect 5 of their own colored gems and the first to collect all 5 of their gems would be declared the winner. Gems would be placed all over the map and in rooms which would be navigated to. We continued to design all kinds of complicated trap mechanics and board navigation tools to make gameplay more and more fun as well as challenging through player interaction. Eventually, we realized that our game projection was simply far too wild to build in the time frame we were given.

Besides our time constraint, we had also decided that a complex game would require complex rules which didn't happen to serve us too well the last time around when we scored poorly for overly complex game mechanics though we had a solid concept. The plan this time around was to make the game as simple as possible while maintaining a creative concept for the idea behind the game. The result was a 100 tile board game where the players were free to distribute tiles according to any grid they wished. As a result of the tile manner of gameplay, we soon realized that we really didn't need a game board as a grid and we decided to scrap this idea in favor of simply tiles which could be shuffled before each game, in turn, maintaining the replay value of Gem Hunter. 

Conclusion

I am truly proud of the result of one week's work on a board game with simple rules and simple game mechanics which proves to be a lot of fun when played with friends. Gem Hunter is most entertaining in its simplicity and can be comical if played with the right set of friends.