Internecine Ice Cream Infighting

We all like ice cream. There is nothing like a 99 Flake on a hot summer’s day with its soft, Mr. Whippy—thank you Margaret Thatcher, crunchy cone, and a stick of fabulous Cadbury’s Flake chocolate. And the ice cream man with his ice cream van would like to do nothing better than sell you that 99 Flake on a hot summer’s day. But if there is another ice cream man with his ice cream van fouling his pitch and stealing his sales, what is an ice cream man with his ice cream van to do? Why go to war, of course! Plus, the closer an ice cream man with his ice cream van is to another ice cream man with his ice cream van, the easier it is to sabotage his sales, his product, his pitch. This is the subject of Whippy Wars, a storytelling game of over-the-top action, convoluted plans, disruptive interruptions, clever ripostes, and more, all in the pursuit of ice cream sales. Now there really is such a thing as ‘Whippy Wars’ and worse, such as the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars, which the designer will definitely tell you is not the subject of Whippy Wars,* which is instead, a game of cartoonishly violent action.

* If you really wanted to roleplay the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars, Fiasco is a better option.

Whippy Wars is published by Black Armada, best known for the Lovecraftesque storytelling game and Last Fleet, the best roleplaying game for telling a story like that of BattleStar Galactica. Whippy Wars requires between two and four players, some six-sided dice, a stacking tower such as Jenga, and some index cards to record notes. Each player should give his ice cream van a name, a look, and ideally an ice cream van chime with which to advertise his wares. He can also name his Ice Cream Man as well. The aim of the game is for each Ice Cream Man is to eliminate his rivals, make the most money, and avoid prison.

At the start of the game, each Ice Cream Man begins play with between two and twelve Ices to sell and between the Ice Cream Men there are a number of Punter dice equal to the players. These are rolled and represent groups of Punters that an Ice Cream Man can sell Ices to and which can down or even leave the Ice Cream pitch. In each round, an Ice Cream Man has three things that he can do. The first is a single Action from which he can gain a benefit, the second is an Intervention in response to another Ice Cream Man’s Action, and the third is set up a Trap. Penultimately, blocks are pulled from the Jenga tower by the Ice Cream Man who took the highest-level Action and gets to keep them. If the tower should fall, the rozzers turn up and investigate. If a player rolls less than the number of Jenga pieces in front of him, his Ice Cream Man is arrested and goes to jail. If it is higher, the evidence is not enough to get his Ice Cream Man arrested and he can continue selling Ices, gaining Punters, and queering the Ice Cream Pitch for his rivals. At the end of a round, the players get to roll for Loot. The player whose Ice Cream Man made the most Loot and did not go to jail wins the game. If everyone goes to jail, everyone loses, including the Punters because there is no one to sell them Ices.

Actions, Interventions, and Traps are rated From Level One to Level Five. The higher the Level, the more outrageous they are, but the greater the benefit they grant and the greater the number of blocks a player has to draw from the Jenga tower. For example, at Level One, ‘Marketing and Bureaucracy’, an Action might be to offer an exciting new flavour or bribe council officials to get them to give an Ice Cream Man a good pitch, and the benefit will be to take a Punter die from those in the middle or add extra one to those in the middle and roll it, whereas Level Three, ‘Serious Pranks and Petty Criminality’ could be to break into a rival Ice Cream Man’s van and steal their stock or glue his van’s hatch shut and march his Punters to your Ice Cream Van, and the benefit would be to steal an Ices Die or a Punters Die from target player. Thus, Actions and Interventions get more and more outrageous and even dangerous, and similarly, so the Traps. On the first turn, the players have access to just the Level One Actions, Interventions, and Traps, but the other levels become available on subsequent rounds, so that by the fifth round, the Ice Cream Men will put their rivals in hospital and blowing up their Ice Cream Vans, using anti-tank weapons and portable singularities, and so on. Thus, there is an escalation to Whippy Wars which quickly makes the action ridiculous and the play quick from start to finish.

Play in a round starts with the player who rolled the higher initiative. He narrates an Action and then the other players have the opportunity to respond with either an Invention or pass. A player only gets a single Action or Intervention per round, but an Intervention can also be taken against another player’s Intervention. Interventions are resolved narratively and the player whose Ice Cream Man comes out top will gain the Benefit. Play continues until each player has taken an Action and an Intervention, the Intervention used to mess with another player’s Intervention or saved in the round to target an Ice Cream Man not yet targeted. At the end of round, each player designs and notes down a Trap that can be set off against an Action or Intervention by another Ice Cream Man.

In addition, Whippy Wars includes guidelines on the nature and physics of the violence in the game. It is cartoon violence, that of pianos falling from the sky or stepping rakes, and so on, rather than the extremes of ignoring gravity when walking or running off cliffs or painting train tunnels on walls. When the players cannot agree on a narrated outcome, then they should take a vote on it.

Physically, Whippy Wars is lightly illustrated and a little untidy in terms of its layout. It is easy to play, requiring no preparation, but perhaps could have done with an example round of play. That aside, Whippy Wars is ridiculously absurd and silly, but in a small, parochially British way because it is about something as ordinary as selling ice creams.