Mar 20, 2006

WHISTLING TRICOLEUR

* On each turn, a player must either move or capture.
* A move is any number of unoccupied spaces in a straight line.
A moved piece must end geometrically closer to at least one enemy piece.
* A capture is either
(a) by whistling: a piece moves as above, and any enemy piece of the
appropriate colour which was adjacent to the line of movement,
but not adjacent to the starting or finishing cell, is removed.
But only A takes B takes C takes A.
(b) by crushing: a piece adjacent to any enemy may capture and replace it.
* Capture is compulsory, but it is mover's choice among alternatives.
* A player loses when he has no pieces left.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABC
1 . . . a c . . . 1
2 . . . . b . . . . 2
3 . . . . . . . . . . 3
4 A . . . . . . . . . C 4
5 B C . . . . . . . . A B 5
6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0
11 b a . . . . . . . . c b 1
12 c . . . . . . . . . a 2
13 . . . . . . . . . . 3
14 . . . . B . . . . 4
15 . . . C A . . . 5
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABC

This is one game with a scissor-rock-paper mechanism, where fights must be carefully balanced with pieces of different status in order to succeed.


[update May 2011] There is an older, 1990, game called Tanagra that uses a similar capture mechanism.

3 comments:

Yehuda Berlinger said...

Cute.

I have been working on dozens of "tri-color" games, where the pieces combine to form other colors.

For instance, let's say that instead of replacing the captured piece, you replace both pieces with another piece that combines both.

To simplify, assume A is red, B is blue, and C is yellow.

Red captures blue, blue captures yellow, and yellow captures red.

Instead of capture and replace, if red captures blue, replace both with purple. Purple is both red and blue. It can capture both blue and yellow, and can be captured by both red and yellow.

If it captures yellow, it becomes brown. If it captures blue, the blues cancel and it goes back to being only red. Same for if it is captured.

And similar for green (blue + yellow) and orange (red + yellow).

Yehuda

João Neto said...

That's an interesting idea for extent tri-color games. In fact, each new formed piece is a stack of combined powers that can grow according to its past moves (could they lose powers? what kind of capturing mechanism could do that?)

It seems that the main drawback is that it implies a much great number of different pieces (especially if we have 4+ different pieces at the start). Perhaps that is, in a way, solved using the stack approach.

Yehuda Berlinger said...

Re: stacked approach. Indeed. Think of a bottom lit board with glass stackable pieces.

Yehuda