Pipeline

Introduction

As I've mentioned in an earlier post I've recently been inspired by some older games for this blog. Mainly, family games that have been moderately destroyed because of water damage. I'll try to post about games that I rediscover, as well as the games that are pretty much destroyed. Previously I talked about the two games I acquired: APBA Baseball (1951,1975) (which was almost entirely ruined), and Pipeline (1988) (which had the board and rules discarded). This post is going to talk about rebuilding the Pipeline game, as well as pulling pieces from two more games over this weekend: Solarquest (1985) and Midnight Party (1989).

Pipeline (1988): "A game that combines strategy, tactic(s?), and luck -
making this game absorbing, challenging, and fun!"

Pipeline

My intention in these posts is less about game play and more about reconstruction (without expense), but here's the gist of game play (fully available on BGG):

The objective is to create a pipeline from the center of the board ("oil well") to an oil tanker's "loading dock" square. Each player draws a hand of 5 pipes and plays one per turn, replenishing only when their hand is empty. The oil derricks are meant to obstruct straight paths to victory.

This was Games Magazine's 1992 Game of the Year, and was a bit of an anomaly because it is the only game ever produced from its designer and publisher. Personally I don't recall great game experiences playing this, but it seemed like a good game to try cleaning up first.

Pieces destroyed:

• Game board
• Rules

Pieces recovered:

• Game tiles:
• 120 Straight Pipes
• 37 Elbow Pipes (I had 38)
• 27 T-Pipes
• 11 Cross Pipes
• 5 Plugs
• 4 tile stands
• 1 6-sided Die (only to determine starting player - really?)
• 1 Cloth bag

As mentioned previously, all the pieces were first washed off cleaned up and counted. This also gave a good way of assessing the condition of everything. I also threw the cloth bag into the washer and dryer.

Cleaning tiles and tile racks.

Alterations and Reconstruction

I'm reconstructing these games solely with the intention of making the games playable again at this point, and not trying for accurate game reproductions. If a game garners enough interest (or if the product is more meaningful to me), I'll aim toward investing more into making the game look nicer, but for the time being the board is constructed with heavy card stock, drawn over using a ruler and rapidograph pen.

Originally these were fixed to the board. I made them
into additional tokens instead. [Instagram]

Another thing I'm doing for the purposes of this game is componentizing the pieces a little more. When first drawing out the 15 x 15 board (as 9 5x5 squares), I came to the realization that drawing the oil well and oil derricks would restrict the grid to only be used for this game, and would additionally restrict the configuration options. Considering my memories of this game are pretty meh to begin with, I wanted to make the pieces a little more flexible if there was a better way to configure the board.

Pipeline was never a very flashy game to begin with :-/

The original board also had colors set in the board for the players, but this seemed unnecessary considering people would sit in front of their part of the board anyways. I may add color back in, if only so people can diversify their loading dock positions, but it hardly seems worth it at this point.

Next Games / Conclusion

All that's left of Solarquest and Midnight Party.

When I went home this weekend, my intention was at least to pick up Solarquest, since I was terribly curious how much of it was salvageable. My dad had started moving games to the garage, so I saw another game that I chose to clean up as well called Midnight Party. Solarquest is a similar game to Monopoly but set in space (and with other differences), while Midnight Party is a Wolfgang Kramer game, a game designer best known later on for other games like El Grande, Torres and Tikal.

Hopefully I'll be writing about at least one of these games in the coming weeks. I do know both of these games have much more involved game boards though, and I would prefer to see if there are good ways to construct comparable game boards. So we'll see how much difficulty there will be in reviving these games.