As I write this, thousands of people are heading home from SPIEL ’22 with new games, warm memories, and (ideally) healthy bodies, but before diving into those treasures, I thought I’d instead cover a game not present in Essen: Trampoline Park, by designer Nima Hekmat, who leads Iranian publisher Soren Game Studio.
What’s the connection between this game and that event? If you’ll recall, a couple of Iranian publishers had planned to have a presence at SPIEL ’19, but German shipping companies refused to accept goods from these publishers due to U.S. government sanctions, so the company representatives had only those games they could fit in their luggage. Thus, even if Soren Game Studio had planned to attend SPIEL, it likely would have had only a few games on hand, making the trip less meaningful.
In August 2022, Soren Game Studio sent a copy of Trampoline Park to someone outside Iran, who then forwarded the game to me, and thanks to this generous freight forwarder, I can present an overview of this game and bring attention to a designer and publisher who currently lack the marketing opportunities of others due to no fault of their own.
Two-player game
In Trampoline Park, you secretly represent one of the six teams of trampolinists, and as soon as you control three trampoline spaces of the same color or letter, you win.
In the image above, yellow controls two E spaces as well as the purple B, but the third E is controlled by blue and that 5 will be hard to dislodge. Green controls the brown C because it has a 5 on the space, while blue has only a 3. Ties are unfriendly, with no one controlling such a space. (Note that the team colors are separate from the tile colors.)
All six teams are in play no matter the player count, which runs 2-4, and you place them in a random order, with the tiles numbered 2-5 being shuffled in each stack. Place the referee token on any launching space — the middle tile on a side, then place the top disk from each stack in clockwise order next to the six launching spaces.
On a turn, you have 6 energy to spend to launch a trampolinist into the park. To do this, you spend energy equal to the trampolinist’s weight (2-5), then 1 energy per space that trampolinist covers, starting with the launching space and continuing in a straight line from there.
Highlighting the energy costs
For example, to enter the green 2 in the upper left, you must spend 3-6 energy to land on the numbered spaces. You cannot reach a space with an X. To enter the black 3 in the upper left, you must pay 1 energy to jump the green 2, which means you’d spend 5-8 energy. If you don’t spend all 6 energy on a turn, you bank the remaining energy for use on future turns.
After everyone has entered a trampolinist — or two trampolinists in a two-player game — you move the referee one launching space clockwise, then lay out a new set of tokens starting from the referee. If you would place a fourth trampolinist in a launch queue, remove the first one from the game. The starting position for the round also rotates clockwise.
If you land on a space where one or more trampolinists stand, the energy you spent to land on that space is converted to bounce energy by subtracting three from that total. If the green 2 lands on the yellow 3, it conveys only 2 bounce energy, so the yellow 3 doesn’t move; if it lands on the white 2 in that same line, it has 3 bounce energy, so the white 2 is bounced into an adjacent space of your choice.
Tokens of the same color are a team, and you must bounce them together, so you need to hit the yellow E with 6 or more bounce energy to dislodge those two yellow tokens. Tokens of different colors can be bounced out individually or together, but you need sufficient bounce energy to do so; in the lower right, for example, you’d need 8 bounce energy to dislodge both the green 5 and blue 3 on the same turn.
The only chain reaction occurs in the central white space. To bounce the black 4 in the middle, you need to bounce a 5 onto it. A 5 in the middle will not move again. Each space can hold at most six tokens, and a token can never enter the park and land on a tile that holds a token of the same color.
Four-player game
Okay, that was a big ol’ exposition dump, but I hope it conveys how thinky this game is. Trampoline Park isn’t a game of perfect information since you don’t know your opponents’ identity or the order in which every token is stacked, but enough information is public to make your head spin, especially in your first game or two as you come to grips with how many energy any particular move costs, whether tokens on a landing space would move, and how you can take control of three matching spaces.
In the board state above, for example, what color is on the verge of victory and how can you stop that from happening? That question is a bit of a cheat because while playing the game, you start to get a sense of who owns which color. Sometimes the player doesn’t even attempt to bluff, but instead just moves tokens of that color onto matching tiles, forcing others to respond — yet often you can respond with a simultaneous defense and attack, whether that’s using one of your tokens to attack and therefore gain control of a tile or using a token you don’t own to make a useless move.
In the image above, white controls two As, yet that’s not really a threat since it would need to land 6 strength on the remaining A or dislodge the green 5 with a white 5 to win. White also controls two brown tiles, but the third brown tile can be reached only from two launching spaces, neither of which have a white token (and it would have to be a 4 or 5 token to boot). Thus, white is not the answer to that question.
First edition graphics
I’ve played Trampoline Park eight times total, twice with four players and six times with two, although two of those games were the two-player variant I’ll describe in a bit.
As you might imagine, the four-player game is far wilder than 2p since three other people have a chance to wreck whatever plans you have; in addition, only two of the team colors are unclaimed, so you’ll be putting more opposing pieces into play. Every play has you wondering whether that player controls the color moved or the color bounced…or is possibly trying to clear out an area with a lower number so they can take it over more easily. Every move is suspect, and it’s challenging to consider the possible victory conditions for all six colors before taking a move.
As a result, I preferred the game with two — and the two-player variant worked even better for my tastes since you do away with bluffing. In the variant, you set up like normal, lay out the first tokens, then give each player three of the team cards to determine which colors they control. Each players takes the token stacks of their three colors. To win, you must control three tiles of the same color or letter with tokens of the same color.
On a turn, enter a token of one of your three colors onto the board, then place the top token of the other two colors into different queues. If a color is in a queue, you can’t place it in that queue again. If you can’t place a color into a queue (because all six queues already have a token of that color) or one of your three colors isn’t present in a queue, then you lose.
As a result, you’re forced to spread out your attacks, but you can use a token of one team to bounce a token of one of your other teams into a space it otherwise couldn’t reach, ideally setting up two threats at once that the opponent must resolve. The two-player variant is still mind-blowing, but you have far more control over the board state and which queues are gaining which colors. (In the regular game, you often need to time attacks because you know that in the next round, the referee will be there, which means the blue token on the top of the stack will be here, which means you can jump it there to bounce this other token over yonder.)
No matter the player count, energy management is vital, and you might spend the first turn or two moving something small to save 2-3 energy. In the four-player game above, I was orange and had to feint on a turn with a tiny token to collect enough energy so that on the subsequent turn I could afford to move that orange 5 at the bottom onto the blue F to dislodge the white 5 and win.
As is often the case in games with color and symbol victory conditions, you can more easily see a threatened color win than a symbol win — or at least that’s what we repeatedly experienced. Maybe a revamped graphic design could make the letters (or other symbols) pop more…
For more thoughts on the game and many examples of jumping and bouncing, check out this overview video, which ends with a plea for non-U.S. publishers to consider licensing this game to make it more widely available on tables around the world:
