Hat Game
This game is from ldjam.com, which is currently unavailable.
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An aperiodic abstract tile-laying game for one to six players.
Print and Play: Download the PDF, print the board and tiles, cut and punch the tiles, and play: either solo or with up to five friends!
I was inspired by the new "hat" aperiodic monotile, and particularly a variant with pipe/path decorations (see below) to make a game about delivering goods using these unusually shaped tiles to lay out a path. Initially players were attempting to connect two points or connect the start point to goals to represent delivery, but as I developed the game I found that the paths really liked to curve back on themselves in interesting ways and really *didn't* like to make long routes, so I decided to lean into what the shapes were doing and encourage players to attempt to better tile the plane (or interfere with other player attempts to do so). I think this made for a better game, but a consequence is that the "delivery" theme has become extremely abstract. So it goes: themes are inspiration.
In my mind the different symbols are hats the players are delivering, but clear colorblind-friendly presentation won out over whimsy there.
Tools used:
* Inkscape
* Libre Office
* A printer, scissors, and a weird heart-shaped hole punch
Free Fonts used:
* Chunk
* Liberation Serif
Acknowledgements:
* “Hat” aperiodic monotile paper by David Smith, Joseph Samuel Meyers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss, see https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/hat/
* “Hat” with pipe decorations originally created by Carlos Luna-Mota, see https://mathstodon.xyz/@carlos_lunamota/110171345407668765 – my tile is adapted from their printable tile available at https://www.printables.com/model/448090-aperiodic-monotile-pipes/files (CC-BY-4.0)
* Triangle graph paper from https://incompetech.com/graphpaper/triangle/
* Symbol colors selected from the “Tol” colorblind-friendly palette, found at https://davidmathlogic.com/colorblind/
Print and Play: Download the PDF, print the board and tiles, cut and punch the tiles, and play: either solo or with up to five friends!
I was inspired by the new "hat" aperiodic monotile, and particularly a variant with pipe/path decorations (see below) to make a game about delivering goods using these unusually shaped tiles to lay out a path. Initially players were attempting to connect two points or connect the start point to goals to represent delivery, but as I developed the game I found that the paths really liked to curve back on themselves in interesting ways and really *didn't* like to make long routes, so I decided to lean into what the shapes were doing and encourage players to attempt to better tile the plane (or interfere with other player attempts to do so). I think this made for a better game, but a consequence is that the "delivery" theme has become extremely abstract. So it goes: themes are inspiration.
In my mind the different symbols are hats the players are delivering, but clear colorblind-friendly presentation won out over whimsy there.
Tools used:
* Inkscape
* Libre Office
* A printer, scissors, and a weird heart-shaped hole punch
Free Fonts used:
* Chunk
* Liberation Serif
Acknowledgements:
* “Hat” aperiodic monotile paper by David Smith, Joseph Samuel Meyers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss, see https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/hat/
* “Hat” with pipe decorations originally created by Carlos Luna-Mota, see https://mathstodon.xyz/@carlos_lunamota/110171345407668765 – my tile is adapted from their printable tile available at https://www.printables.com/model/448090-aperiodic-monotile-pipes/files (CC-BY-4.0)
* Triangle graph paper from https://incompetech.com/graphpaper/triangle/
* Symbol colors selected from the “Tol” colorblind-friendly palette, found at https://davidmathlogic.com/colorblind/