Game: Avalanche

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okiedokie — 2008-08-06T03:35:32+00:00

Comic book ad from 1968 Plastic Man

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Goodsound — 2008-03-10T18:30:25+00:00

Parker edition with marble collecting tray

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Gernspieler — 2008-03-06T22:07:48+00:00

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Kodeir — 2007-05-24T10:54:22+00:00

Here it goes!

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10incher — 2007-03-28T21:18:36+00:00

Avalanche 1966

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cktjharris — 2006-09-01T04:39:24+00:00

The board is set up at an angle, propped up by a stick.

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cktjharris — 2006-09-01T04:37:46+00:00

The Player Boards. When you win a marble, place it on your board if you still have an empty space of that color.

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laiernie — 2006-06-06T17:53:34+00:00

rules on box bottom

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Regai — 2006-01-14T13:59:29+00:00

Photo from abstractstrategy.com (Used with Permission)

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Ninjabob — 2004-08-23T18:19:38+00:00

Thread: Session Report

Dan Bosley — 2003-01-20T18:20:38+00:00

After spending a whole dollar on buying Avalanche on E-bay, I brought it along to give it a play. Rick, Tim, and I played two games.

Avalanche is a kind-of dexterity game where you drop assorted coloured marbles into holes at the top of an almost vertical series of channels. In these channels are 4 levels of swing-gates, with a catcher at the top of each gate. If a marble lands in a catcher, it sits there. If it misses the catcher, it swings the gate the other direction, and goes down to the next level, where it either gets caught by a catcher there, or else it switches that gate too, and keeps going down. And as marbles fall down the channels, they may trigger other marbles to fall or get caught further down too.

Each player has a 9-hole card of 2 different colours (there are 3 different colours of marbles). Any marble that makes it through all the channel-gates down to the bottom can then be removed and placed on the appropriate matching colour on your 9-hole card. If you have extra marbles left over (or the wrong colour) that don’t fit on your 9-hole card, you have to save them until your next turn, when hopefully you can get rid of them (by leaving them on catchers when you drop them down).

First player to complete his 9-hole card with no marbles left over, wins the game.

The game is cute and fun as a quick 15-minute filler. And you find that chaos theory rears its head about 10% of the time during the game.

In a perfect world, the marbles and gates would behave just as they should. If you drop a marble onto a catcher, it should get caught. If you drop a marble to switch a swing-gate, it should switch it as it is designed to do so. And most of the time, the marbles and gates do behave just as you’d expect them to do.

But every once in awhile, chaos theory kicks in, and a marble bounces slightly funny, and doesn’t get caught when it should, or a swing-gate swings, but then ricochets and bounces right back again into its original position. So the marbles and gates occasionally do the unexpected - which can ruin your plans.

This happened to Rick in our first game. He dropped a marble expecting it be caught - but it bounced and chaos took over and it kept falling, in turn triggering others to fall. So the game didn’t end when he expected it to.

I then won the first game - being the organized individual I am, chaos theory did not attack me, and the universe behaved as it should.

We then played a 2nd game, and in the 2nd game, Rick did win.

Tim just felt avalanched right over in both games.....

Thread: Session Report

dougadamsau — 2001-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

David writes:

Bernie, David and Moray.

The other table still had at least a half hour to go, so we decided on another short game. Bernie reached for Avalanche, a game he used to play some years back and managed to acquire a copy at the back of some obscure shop (not a games shop). Moray & I had never heard of it, and it looked intriguing!

It's a game which features Red, Yellow & Green marbles. There are 6 marble place-mats, with little holes for the marbles to rest in. These feature the same 3 colours as the marbles, with a mixture of 3 of one colour and 6 of another. These placemats are shuffled face down and dealt 2 each (in a 3-player game) to the players, and then revealed.

The other major component is the marble slide, which stands at 60 degrees (closer to the vertical). The marble slide features 4 or 5 shutes down which the marbles can progress. Along the shutes there are simple mechanical (plastic) switches. If a marble hits the head of a switch then it is caught there. If a second marble hits the head of a switch it will roll over the first marble. If a marble hits the bottom of a switch it will cause the switch to... switch to the adjacent shute.

The shutes and switches are all open to inspection, so in theory it is possible to predict the exact outcome of placing a marble into any one shute.... in theory.

The rules are simple. To win, you must fill all the marble-holes in your 2 placemats and have no left over marbles. Each turn you get to place one marble at a time until you get a "result" - that is, something drops to the bottom of the shutes. It could be 1 marble, or several. Then your turn is over. The first player, on his first turn only, is allowed to place up to 5 marbles only. If you start your turn with marbles that you can't use then you must place them first before drawing new marbles. That's it.

In game one, Bernie was unlucky in that both his mats featured only Red & Yellow. This meant that it was in Moray's and my own interests to place Green marbles. This is what we did. Nevertheless, after a while, we found there was too much Green and had to start mixing it. Moray seemed to struggle to get more than 1 marble to come out of the bottom of the shutes, and lagged behind in game one. Bernie made a good recovery, but I ended the game with Bernie still holding an unusable (for him) Green marble.

David - Green / Red (3 only) / Yellow - Winner
Bernie - Red / Yellow - 2nd (2 missing marbles, 1 Green in hand)
Moray - Green / Red / Yellow (3 only) - 3rd (7 missing marbles)

The others still had "half an hour to go", so we played again. This time we each required only 2 colours, which made for a quite different approach. Basically, any 2 players could (for a while) gang up on the 3rd by placing marbles not usable by that player. But you couldn't win that way as eventually the 2 allies would have to play marbles from their other colours (which didn't match), hence causing a new alliance.

This was roughly how the game went, with alliances fluctuating rapidly between the 3 of us. It was a much closer game, which I thought Bernie would win. However, I had one last chance in which I had to get 3 Green marbles exactly to win. Possibly more by luck than judgement, that's what I got.

Bernie - Red / Yellow - 2nd (missing marbles ??, 1 spare yellow)
David - Green / Yellow - Winner
Moray - Red / Green - (missing marbles ??, 2 spare Red)

It's a fun little "action" game. Sometimes the switches swtich as expected, so the game is definitely not predictable, which adds to the fun factor.

David's rating:- 6

The others finally finshed, and we decided to play Mamma Mia and Easter Island between the 7 of us. First up for me was