16 Jan 2003 sab39   » (Master)

So many ideas to follow up on, so little time...

... one of which I'm going to document here so that at least it doesn't get completely lost. I came up with an idea for a board game that I think would be at least somewhat interesting. So far I haven't done anything about it except for thinking up the rules, but there's not an obvious immediate winning strategy that I can see so far, so I think the game has a chance of being playable.

The board is a hexagonal grid of tesselated hexagons, something like this (the one shown is 6*6*6 giving 91 cells, slightly bigger than a chessboard, which seems about right - but alternative sizes are certainly possible). The game starts with each player having a single token, in the places marked by an X and an O in the linked text file. The starting player is chosen at random.

Players take it in turns to move. There are three moves available in the game:

  • Advance: Remove one of your tokens from position A and place two new tokens in positions B and C instead. B and C must be adjacent to each other, and both must be adjacent to A (that is, A, B and C must all be adjacent to each other).
  • Attack: This is permissible only when three tokens form a straight line, the first two (in order) being yours, and the last being your opponent's. The opponent's token is removed and replaced by a new token of yours.
  • Sacrifice: Remove any single one of your tokens from the board. This move is permitted at any time except when you have only one token on the board, in which case it is permitted only if there is no other move you can make.

Scoring is as follows: Each player gets a score equal to the number of tokens they have on the board, except that the player who went second gets an extra half-point as a handicap. The game is won when the difference between the two scores becomes greater than ten points (again, nothing special about ten, it could be any number that makes the game work well), or when one player is forced to sacrifice his last token.

If I ever get a chance, I'd like to write a web-based version of this game to see whether it actually works. But if anyone else is interested in the idea and thinks it might be worth pursuing, go right ahead...

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