el-ixir - a two-player board game
El-Ixir is a board game with an element of randomness. It
is played by two players at the same terminal, although it is possible to
use a shared tmux for remote play.
The game should be playable on any vt100ish terminal whose
character set includes a certain subset of glyphs of IBM ROM BIOS, encoded
as Unicode. Terminals not meeting this requirement should be long
extinct.
The object of the game is to connect as many blocks in your colour
to the corners. The players take turns, being presented with four random
tiles each turn.
The game is controlled by pressing any key (not Shift or
Ctrl...); q quits.
- Moving:
- To make a move, choose one of the four tiles that were rolled for you.
Next, choose a direction (up, left, right, down) and length (1-4). If a
block of that length won't fit, it's silently cut to the longest length
there's space for. (Hint: it's almost always beneficial to choose length
4).
- Anchoring:
- If the block you placed causes some blocks to be connected to one of the
corners, you will be credited a point for every tile covered by a block in
your color that's connected to a corner by an unbroken line (via cardinal
directions only — diagonals are not enough).
- Embracing:
- There are two types of embraces:
- complete embrace, when your blocks either completely enclose a part of the
board or wall it in into a border
- anchored embrace, which trades the requirement of enclosing only parts of
the board that contain no free tiles for allowing braces that are
connected only diagonally. It is possible that a move makes both players
eligible for an embrace — your opponent has priority.
Whichever player gets the most points, wins.