Contest entry for the 2018 Summer Design Contest
Swarm
Players: 2
Board: 6 by 6 grid board
Pieces: Each player has 20 cubes of a single colour each
Short Description: be the first to swarm the board and win the game.
Set up: Using the same faced backs, set the tiles up in a 6 by 6 square and each player places 6 of their cubes on their side of the layout. Only one cube can ever be on a tile.
Movement: Pieces can move one square per each movement in any direction.
Winning: have all 20 of your pieces on the board at the same time or have the opponent reduced to one cube. If all tiles have cubes on and no swarming can occur, then the game is over and the player with the most cubes on the game tiles wins. It is a tie if both players have 18 cubes present.
Turns: Each turn, players will both roll a six sided dice (known as a D6). Players have movement equal to the dice roll. So if a player rolls a three, they have three movement actions to take that turn. Players have to move their cubes the full mount determined by the dice, no more and no less. All movement does not need to be the same cube but any cube that moves cannot end the turn on the tile it started on. So a movement of two cannot be used to move a cube 1 tile left then one tile back right. a roll of a two for example could mean one cube moves two spaces or two cubes move one space. The player with the lowest number will go first that round and will use all their movement actions. The next player will do the same with the movement they rolled. Next turn is rolled for again and movements spent in exactly the same way. This is repeated until a winner is chosen.
Swarming: To swarm, you need to have a cube of yours on two opposite sides of an opponents, to the left and right or above and below. You cannot swarm on the left and above for example. These need to be tiles touching the tile the opponent is on, so cannot be three tiles away on either side etc. When a player swarms another, the cube swarmed is removed from the board and replaced by a cube of the opposite player. So if reds place a red cube to the exact left and exact right sides of a blue cube, the blue cube is removed and replaced by a red one. The new piece is now part of the red players swarm and can be moved and used to swarm as well as get swarmed.
Obtaining more cubes: There are three ways to get your cubes onto the board. The first, is swarming as described above. Second, when rolling to see how much movement each player has and who goes first that turn, each player can place a cube on their edge of the board if both players roll the same number. When this happens, each player places a cube on their edge (starting with the player who went first last turn) and then the D6 are rolled again. This may make more cubes enter for more duplicate rolls but it can never be more than three additional cubes in any turn from this method. The final method is rolling a 1. As always, cubes when being placed are done so on the owning players table edge. Combining method two and three can result in two cubes being played each time a double 1 is rolled but this is only permitted once per turn. Any further double ones will result in the method two addition until that limit has also been reached