Cam's Custom Game Boards

Aggravation, is a board game for up to six players in which the object is to be the first player to have all four marbles reach the player's home section of the gameboard. The game's name comes from the action of capturing an opponent's piece by landing on its space and sending the opponent back to their base to start over again.

Its distinctive features are that the board accommodates up to six players, it uses glass colored marbles as playing pieces, and it incorporates shortcuts. There are no safe holes where a player's marbles cannot be captured other than the player's own base and home sections. Capturing each others marbles send's that person back home to have to restart again, is the aggravation that names the game!

The game starts with each player placing four marbles in his/her base. After the order of play is determined through the rolling of the die, each player rolls a single die on each turn to determine the number of spaces to move. All marbles remain in the base until either a 1 or 6 is rolled, which entitles the player to move a marble from the base to his/her start, the first step before entering the track. While this is considered a turn, and the move takes place in lieu of moving a marble that number of spaces, a six, if rolled, entitles a player to another turn whenever a legal move can be made. It is not a legal move for a player to pass one of his own marbles. The winner is the first player whose pieces all reach home by exact count.

Shortcuts

Each of the brightly colored circles near the center of the board is a "shortcut." A player landing a marble by exact count on one of the colored shortcuts has the option, on the next roll, of jumping from shortcut to shortcut, counting each jump as a single space, thereby speeding the path to the player's home.

The hole in the center of the board is known as the "super short cut." A player who is able to land a marble in this location by exact count only from the starting row, has the option of taking a route even faster to home. The super short cut, though, has the drawback in that it may only be exited by rolling a 1. A player may exit the super shortcut on the shortcut of thier choosing.

Aggravating

A player who lands a marble on a space occupied by an opponent's marble "aggravates" that player's piece and sends it back to that player's base. A player's piece may be sent back to base whether it is on a "start" space, the regular track, or a shortcut. No piece is safe from being sent back to base until it reaches home.