Takeover – Game Design & Discussion

I played a bunch of games of Takeover tonight at our local monthly IGDA meeting, and have a few new rules that fix various problems we observed.

The first one is more of a clarification:

  • You may not rotate a piece in place. It must move to a different position on the gameboard.

Then a fix for the 2-player first-player advantage:

  • In a two-player game, each player should begin play with at least two blinks, and the second player should have a single blink with 2 sides in their color. The sides may not be next to one another. (We’ve found across from one another to be the best in our limited testing.)

Finally, another movement restriction that is probably not be strictly necessary, but which I think “feels” better:

  • You may not move the piece that your opponent moved in the turn immediately before yours.

Interestingly, we played at least a few 3-player games, and I felt they worked just fine. (Contrary to my previous 3-player game impressions.) The game definitely has the potential for kingmaking at any number of players over 2, but I think that’s probably okay.

Finally, we also played a variant where we ended the game as soon as a piece (any piece) was entirely filled with colors. (Not necessarily the same color.) Then the winner was no longer the player who filled the piece, but rather the player who had the most sides in their color over the entire gameboard. This was pretty fun! It would definitely be more difficult to detect (calculate) the winner programmatically, but might be worth the effort. Maybe it’s different enough to be its own game. I’m not sure yet, and will be playtesting it more.

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I updated the official rules with these new modifications. https://github.com/mgrider/takeover

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Pushed a fix for the first (only) github issue! (There was a race condition, so sometimes it wasn’t clear what would “takeover” what.)

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Proposed Animation for the take over follows:
When attached, the following happens on all faces that just attached (multiple takeovers at once might be difficult to understand if happening at the same time, but if they animate sequentially, that might also be confusing since they are being evaluated in parallel…)

  1. On the tile with more of a color, pulse down and back up to full color 3 times, getting faster continuously.
  2. On the tile with less of a color, flash white on face being taken over, fade down to off and then fade back up with color of the takeover.
  3. If tiles have even color, i.e. no takeover, the faces should simply fade half way down and back up to full color (i.e. ack the action, but no change to the board)

below illustrates point 1 and 2