Pyramid Review
Rock!
Published by Out of the Box Publishing
Designed by Anita Janes, Max Winter Osterhaus, Ellen Winter, Al Waller, Matt Mariani, & Mark Osterhaus
Illustrations & graphics by John Kovalic & Cathleen Quinn-Kinney
60 full-color cards & two rule sheets (English and Spanish) in a tin box; $9.95
Out of the Box Publishing has taken a lot of simple ideas from something small to something clever, and it doesn't get much simpler than a round of rock-paper-scissors. While the title has been somewhat abridged, the company has launched a card game called Rock!, which pretty much marks the first innovation for "Rochambeau" in the last 2,200 years.
The deck contains 60 cards, and these are divided into two even piles of 30. Two players each take a deck into a hand and simultaneously flip over their first cards so the pieces lie next to each other in the middle of the table.
(It's important to take a moment here to clear up a critical point: the rules to rock-paper-scissors. The participants both smack their fist into their hand three times. On the third strike, they form one of the three symbols. If the fist remains clenched, that's a "rock." If the middle and index fingers are extended, that counts as "scissors." And if the palm is flattened completely it's considered "paper." A rock symbol beats scissors because the stone can be used to smash the scissors, while the scissors beats paper because cutting paper is . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: August 8, 2008
Copyright © 2008 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.