The game is played on a grid with empty spaces (white tiles) and blooming spaces (green tiles). Each player controls a set of geomancers (red/blue circles) that can manipulate the terrain around them.
If a geomancer is standing on a tile when it blooms, the geomancer goes "KABLOOM!" and is removed from the game. You win by eliminating all of your opponent's geomancers.
[Controls]
- Click on a geomancer unit to select it.
- Use the arrow keys (or WASD) to move a selected unit. Each unit can only move a limited number of spaces per turn.
- After you have moved a unit, click on the highlighted tiles to flip them. Each unit can only flip a limited number of tiles per turn.
- While moving a unit, click outside the grid to end the movement phase early and switch into flipping mode.
- Deselect all units and click outside the grid to end your turn early.
[More Info]
- At the beginning of your turn, all your units will level up. A unit's current level is indicated by the number of dots on it.
- A unit's level determines the number of tiles it can move, and its range of influence.
- A unit can only flip tiles within its range of influence, and it *can't* flip tiles that are inside the range of an enemy unit.
- At the end of each turn, the "Game of Life" rules will be applied to the grid X times, where X is equal to the combined levels of all units in the game. See the next section for details.
- Green tiles block movement, and can be used to create walls.
- The tiles with a tiny dot in the middle are spawners. To capture a spawner, it must be within range of one of your units and *not* inside the range of any enemy units.
- At the beginning of each turn, a spawner will generate a new unit for the player that controls it. Spawners will not generate a unit if they are occupied or blooming.
[Game of Life Rules]
- An empty tile will only bloom if exactly 3 of its neighboring tiles are blooming.
- A blooming tile will only remain in bloom if 2 or 3 of its neighboring tiles are blooming.
Really cool way to adapt Life to a playable game. This feels like it could be as deep as Go, but way harder due to the difficulty of humans predicting Life patterns without a tremendous amount of thought and planning.
I really like Conway's Life, but I find the inherent behaviour too difficult to hold in our brains. I've experimented with CGoL but never created something playable that is not difficult.
Definitely needs some sort of indicator to let you know whose turn it is but I absolutely loved the use of Conway's Game of Life as part of the game's rules and mechanics.
Definitely takes quite some figuring out. I managed to destroy all of red before I got there, and there didn't seem to be any ending or way to restart that game at that point. I found it very interesting conceptually, though!
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