Gelatinous For Two

At Gen Con, I spent most of my time running dice games. One of the most popular was Philip J. Reed's Gelatinous. It's a lot of fun and very tactile – you get to roll handfuls of dice and stack them into a cube. An oooky green cube. What's not to like?

A few times, though, we had a shortage of players. Gelatinous specifies at least three players, and, Gen Con being Gen Con, at some sessions only one person showed up. There are solo rules, but they don't work exactly like the multi-player Gelatinous, so they're not good for two-player games.

That's when I realized that, since players don't really make any decisions – pass 1s to the left, 6s to the right, put 3s on the cube, all determined by the roll of the dice – you don't really need live players. Three computers could play Gelatinous with each other if you gave them a way to push the dice! When only one person showed up for the session, but really wanted to play Gelatinous (and who could blame them?), we tried it with a dummy player: I set out one of the coasters, which have the rules, with the starting seven dice. When the dummy's turn came, the other human player (who was closer) rolled the dummy's dice and moved or stacked them as appropriate.

It worked perfectly!

We played quite a few games of Gelatinous with only two living players. Thankfully, the dummy never won (though it did get close). It would be embarrassing to lose to someone who doesn't even exist!

I strongly recommend buying Gelatinous, and if you run into me at a convention, I'll be happy to play a 2-player game with you.

-- Jean McGuire