Friction on Ice (Cool)
Friction is a term I've stolen from a friend to describe the parts of a game that unnecessarily burden playing it. It could be an ungodly terrible rulebook, forced repetitive component manipulation, overly picky and ultimately useless rules regarding card location, or even a bizarre VP schedule broken out by the area of the board the VP comes from rather than the player allowed to earn the VP in question.
Friction is measured on a bell curve, and high friction doesn't necessarily correlate with not enjoying a game. All the examples above bear this out. But when a game use particularly clever systems to reduce friction I keep finding myself going back to it.
ICECOOL is one of the best examples of this I've seen in a long time.
In the game, you are a penguin who is playing hockey hooky in order to go eat fish. You set your penguin weeble in a contained playing surface with walls, flick them around, and try and go through doors. There are 3 doors that earn you a fish, and you're trying to go through each of them and earn victory points. One player is the hall monitor, and they earn points by hitting the other players. When one player gets all their fish, or the hall monitor catches all the other players, the round ends. Repeat until everyone's been hall monitor once, most VPs win, there's your game.
It doesn't sound like a game that would have friction problems to begin with, but it does because of one reason: it's a dexterity game.
When you introduce dexterity to a game, you're allowing physics to decide how things work instead of a rulebook. And physics won't conform to nice simple results.
Ice Cool solves these problems in a couple simple ways.
The first is that each part of the board that your penguin can be in has a red line drawn about an inch and half inside the 4 walls. When you start your turn, you're always welcome to move your penguin to closest spot on that red line, and shoot from there.
Easy, simple. I can explain it in seconds and anyone can get it. It allows you to create room for your hand, so you can shoot. It allows you to back away from a wall so you can hit a door easier. It lets you maybe get off other people's penguins so you aren't having to contort you hand to take the shot.
Many dexterity games you have to all agree how you'll do this. And then, how far can move your piece? Or what if other people are touching you? Is that too far? I don't think you were there. Hey, you've got plenty of room what are you doing?
But here it's: if you want, move to the red line. Cool.
The second is the doors. There are two aspects to this.
One, there's a gap in the cardboard in the doors. Maybe this was an unintentional artifact of production, but I wouldn't want it any other way.
The gap in the door means that almost 100% of the time, if your piece ends partially through the door, your piece will get physically stuck in the gap. And if you get stuck in the gap, you don't get the fish.
So there's never a question. You aren't eyeballing anything, arguing if the penguin really did or didn't fully go through the door or not or what percentage of the penguin beak has to be showing to prove that it actually did. It's just, oh, hey, you're stuck. No fish.
Also, if you are stuck in the door, which side do you come out on when you move to the red line? The rule is to look down on top and if you can see the penguin on both sides of the door you can go to either side. Otherwise go to the side it's on. It's the most finicky of all the rules, but it's still incredibly simple to understand and makes sense.
And pointedly: the rule is NOT that an EQUAL amount of penguin mass is on each side of the door. The rule is ANY amount of penguin. So again, there's no having to assess anything other than "Can I see penguin."
All this adds up to a game that you just play and have fun with. I've played a half-dozen games, all with the type of people who would, if they had the chance, argue with you about whether or not your finger can fit and whether or not an "equal amount of penguin" should be measured in surface area or weight. And nothing questionable has ever happened because the production and one simple rule make the game frictionless.