You are a small colored dot. Don’t feel too bad, so is everybody else. You expand territories by placing tiles with paths on them…and so does everybody else. You claim a territory by following a path across it. If there is a path in front of you, you must follow it. At first, you get the territory tiles you place, but if somebody crosses it after you it becomes theirs. You can tell which territories you have collected by their background color. The game ends shortly after somebody leaves the board.
My simple entry into this blitz took 4 hours. All of the “graphics” are generated in the main file. There were not outside frameworks used. This my first Lua and first Corona program (though far from my first program…I’ve been programming for a while). I wasn’t able to figure out tweening or events in that short timeframe. But I got far enough to run a code-stepped demo game (images attached).
Image 0 – Contestants in their corners
Image 1 to 6 – Everybody builds their own row
Image 7 – The red player places a tile that forces the blue player to move too. The blue player crosses a formerly red tile (2nd row, 4th column) and claims it…but then falls of the board. The game ends with a score of 4 (red) to 3 (blue).
Code: https://github.com/JosephCottam/Pathalogical
I like a board game called “Tsuro.” I often wondered what you do with it differently if it were electronic…so I tried to make it in four hours. Pathalogical is very similar to Tsuro in tile placement and path following. BUT Tsuro has no concept of tile ownership.
Variants I want to explore (roughly in order)—
* Collection of tiles off the board to choose from
* Rotate-able tiles
* More players
* Encode concepts of “valid” and “invalid” moves
* Partial ownership (two players cross the tile one time each, each player gets a half a tile)
* Player-set start location
* Fancier tile graphic generation (curvy paths; red is city, blue is ocean)
* Explore rule variants to not following Tsuro so closely (e.g., “resurrection” if you go off the board)
* Different board/tile ratios (e.g., board where there are more/less spaces than available tiles)
* More complex tiles (one-way paths, self-loops, morph-on-cross, etc)