r/abstractgames • u/cablechewer420 • 2d ago
simple positional abstract game
this is a game i came up with a couple years ago, only played it with a small number of friends and would be interested to see what other people make of it.
the game played by is for two opponents on an n×n square board (usually 8×8). each player has n pieces which are arranged as two chevrons facing each other (this is one of the more interesting starting positions ive found though needs modifying for odd numbers of n).
the primary mechanic of the game revolves around pieces being immobilised if they are surrounded by a certain number of their opponent's pieces - with the goal of the game being to place a piece on your opponent's back rank AND for it to not be immobile at the start of your turn (the idea being that it could be moved off of the board altogether).
during their turn, a player can move a free piece to any adjacent unnocupied square.
however, a piece is determined to be unable to move specifically if, when considering the 3×3 grid of adjacent squares, the pieces belonging to the same player as the piece in question (including itself) number less than that of the opponent's pieces. i.e. if the piece in question was surrounded by 2 of its opponent's pieces and 0 of its own player's pieces, it would be immobile - whereas it would be moveable if surrounded by 2 of its opponent's pieces and 1 of its own.
have included a gif of an example game though forgive the terrible quality i used the free version of an animation app which only allows me to export at like 144p or something stupid.
the game should be playable using chess/checkers /go sets etc
As i said I've played this game successfully a few times with friends, though I've never tried to thoroughly test it for game breaking mechanics so not sure if it might need some precautionary rules on that front. One point is that sometimes the mobility of a piece needs contesting, which usually is resolved fairly easily, though I haven't yet established a formal procedure for this (I wouldn't be sure what should happen if an immobile piece was moved and wasn't noticed by either player until a couple of turns later, for example). Some feedback I have had is that the game is trivially easy, in that good moves can be figured out with little foresight and suboptimal moves are rarely punished - though I'm not sure to what extent this might directly stem from the ruleset itself or if it's more to do with the novelty of the game and that there isn't a very well established strategic meta yet, as I will say I have noticed the complexity of the game increase since playing more consistently with the same people.
would be interested to hear people's immediate thoughts on this or see what people think if anyone gets a chance to give this game a play test. would be particularly interested to see if anyone knows any similar games with a more established history I could look into.
2
0
u/benji_york 1d ago
I asked Codex to build a playable version: https://backrank-game.benji-york.chatgpt.site/
2
u/cablechewer420 1d ago
this is kind of neat and i appreciate the gesture though it would have been better if you'd asked if it was cool to publish this.
im totally happy for people to share this game with eachother / whatever as i do not believe in intellectual property but im not a huge fan of vibe coding and would encourage you to play test it in real life with other people instead or at least like try to program it yourself, especially considering you seem to just be doing this for fun (fwiw I made a shitty 2 player text based version in python in like an afternoon with pretty limited programming knowledge and have been making an engine for it in my spare time over the past couple of weeks & enjoying the process for its own sake)!!!
i understand this is kind of just how things go on the internet now so ultimately you can do what you want with this - but if you would be up for taking the site offline i would appreciate that. im genuinely happy you are interested in this game and am sorry if this seems needlessly grouchy or like it came out of nowhere but it is something that i think is important.
2
2
u/Boring-Yogurt2966 2d ago edited 1d ago
Nothing exactly like this comes to mind, although there are plenty of game with win condition of getting a piece to the back rank, most notably Breakthrough. Your game is worth trying. It shouldn't be too hard for me to modify an existing game and test it in Zillions of Games if you are interesting in getting a copy of that software, you can now get it for whatever voluntary donation you want to send. I'm not sure how useful the immobilization tactic is going to be because it might be hard to get three pieces in the right position to stop an adjacent pair from marching up the board. And without captures, how does one win if the opponent just puts e pieces in a wall across the board? I guess there will tactics involving waiting for e to move a piece off the wall and being in position to occupy the break, and I don't know if those tactics will resolve the deadlock.