Boomerang Squads - Overview and rules
Boomerang Squads is a new application that runs on the Boomerang platform. It uses the same environment, controls and food-block mechanics as Boomerang Basic, but with a simpler, co-operative rule set that suits larger groups and sessions where people arrive at different times.
Squads appears on your Applications list as Boomerang Squads once it has been enabled for your organisation. If you would like to use it, contact us.
How Squads differs from Boomerang Basic
- Everyone collects. Every player is a Worker (an A player). There are no Manager (B) or Leader (C) roles, nobody is invisible, and there are no toolbars, private channels or broadcasts. Nobody can create blocks or switch dispensers off.
- Colours are squads. Players who share a colour form a squad of one to four people. There are six colours, so a game holds up to 24 players. The facilitator observes and is not in a squad.
- One shared quota per squad. Each squad has a single quota listing every colour of block. A quota board floats above the squad's basket, and a block only counts when it is placed in the squad's own basket.
- Co-operative win. The room wins only if every squad fills its quota before time runs out. The end screen ranks squads: those that finished by finishing time, then the rest by percentage complete.
- Quotas cannot be changed by the facilitator during a Squads game.
- Players can join a running game. Late arrivals can be dropped into the round in progress. See Setting up and running a Boomerang Squads game.
Because a "report player" in Squads names a colour, it reports the whole squad rather than an individual.
How squads are balanced
The dashboard fills colours breadth-first: every colour gets a player before any colour gets a second. Seven players, for example, become squads of 2, 1, 1, 1, 1 and 1. In later rounds a player keeps last round's colour only if that does not unbalance the squads.
The AI companion in Squads
If the session has an AI companion, it is briefed on the Squads rules. It treats a colour as a squad rather than a person, refers to people by name, and in a debrief looks at how each squad split its list and whether squads helped one another. Squad figures are never attributed to a single player.