How Our Hack Day Changed Fun Forever

06 March 2015 by Terrence Donnelly

"Through determination and perseverence and tech and smart people and a guy who knows some stuff about business, anything is possible." - Elon Musk (I think)

Hack days. A Silicon Valley born tradition that even some of the largest tech companies in the world hold on a regular basis. We set out to see just what happens when you put a bunch of software engineers and an entrepreneur in a room for 24 hours. The following is an account of exactly that.

"Our goal here is to truly innovate. To strip away the many layers of limitation that surround our daily lives." - Joshua Imel, President of Teeps during a motivational speech moments prior to the kick off of our first inaugural Hack day.

Diving right in, we knew we were onto something great. We had a lot of cutting edge gadgets to incorporate into the project.

As we sat down at the conference table tossing our thinking pennies into a cup, we came to a startling realization. This was it. This was our vision. This is the IP we were all looking for. I've always said that the simplest ideas are the best ones, and boy was I right.

"Viva La Minimalism" - Hayden Lanham, Lord of Commerce (He does sales)

As with any minimum viable product, we knew to start small with a big bang. We headed over to the drawing board to mock up some UI/UX and flow.

Now on to the elevator pitch. "Bucko Ball is a skill based, fast paced, penny tossing game with the aim to make the world a better place, all while challenging your favorite buckos."

After tedious measurements...

Additional measurements...

And a few pivots...

We gave birth to brilliance.

So here's how it works:

Set Up

You and a few buckos draw up a score board with a column for each round you intend to play
Line up approximately 15 paces away from the goal
You each have 5 pennies and 1 dime (Dan always shoots the dime first)

Game Flow

A player tosses their coins at the goal one at a time
Once a player tosses all their coins, they retrieve them from the goal
The next player approaches and follows the above two steps
Think of the flow as a for loop, you're just iterating through players

This is what it's all about.

Scoring

Sinking a dime counts as 5 points, straight up
Sinking a penny counts as 3 points
Accidental penny bounce-in counts as 2 points
Accidental dime bounce-in, you're out of lucko bucko
Tapping the outside of the goal with a penny counts as 1 point
Tapping the outside of the goal with a dime, you're also out of lucko... bucko

Call to Action

We encourage you to play this, and beat our highest recorded score of 18 points over 5 rounds.
Tweet photos of your (REAL) scoreboards with #buckoball - We'll know if you're lying or cheating cause we invented the game.
Tweet @buckoball to report bugs or request features.