It was 2011, in Inisheer, that Patrick McAfee and I first kicked around the idea of developing a board game that incorporated the principles of dry stone walling. Just recently I had more opportunity to create an actual playable version of the game, based on ideas BEM Sean Adcock and I discussed over dinner, while we were in France with several other skilled wallers doing a project near Nice.
We experimented with various versions of the game. The one in the photo involved replicating an Irish wedge wall. The rules were purposely kept simple. Each player picked out 5 pieces of about 100 cardboard shapes I'd previously cut out and placed in a bag so that no one knew what they were getting. A turn consisted of playing a piece on the table and picking a new piece from the bag until all the pieces were used. You weren't allowed to see the opponents pieces.
Shapes put down by a player had to be placed in a vertical orientation and had to touch at least two other cardboard 'stones'. A point was scored if you could fit a piece down so that it was touching three other stones. Two points scored if you could fit a shape so that it touched four stones, and so on.
There was a lot of other rules we considered and a lot of ideas played around with to make the game less dependant on having an arbitrator or "what have you" to determine whether pieces were on the proper vertical axis or actually touching its three neighbours.
The game still needs developing and the rules of the game definitely needs improving because Sean was winning most of the games I played him.
