Game Description: Yavalath

Last semester, I stumbled on the game Yavalath while browsing reddit.  This game is especially exciting because the rules are very similar to tic-tac-toe type games... except for an excellent twist!

Yavalath is played on a hexagonal board.  Each turn a player paints an empty hexagon their color.  So far, no twist.

If you get four hexagons in a contiguous line, you win.  No more moves are played.  Still no twist.

However, you are not allowed to play in such a way that you get exactly three hexagons in a row.  More than three is fine (and you win) but exactly three is not allowed.  Twist! :)

One problem keeps this from being strictly combinatorial: the board can fill up so that neither player wins.  In this case, you could just announce that the last player is the winner since no more moves exist.  The site gives an example of such a case:

Notice that this position would probably be the result of a sum, as there are an even number of white and black pieces.  Cool!

This is a game Cameron Browne generated with the program Ludi.  I know nothing about automatically generating rulesets, except that it seems to have worked out here.  Yavalath is very fun to play.  I challenged many of my students to quick games before class, and also over lunch.

TRUe Games Workshop: May 2014

An annoucement from Paul Ottaway:

This is the second official announcement for the TRUe Games Workshop taking place at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC from May 6-9, 2014.  Registration is open and even if you've let me know that you'll be attending, we would appreciate a quick email to Marcy at mchristianson@tru.ca if you haven't already done so.  The details regarding the conference are available at www.tru.ca/truegames

I would also like to point out for those making arrangements for accommodations that the Residence and Conference Centre has now released half of our room block but the other half will continue to be held until April 5th.

I wish I could go, but my travel budget is exhausted for this academic year.  This sounds like exactly the sort of awesome workshop that happened at BIRS in 2011.  Paul mentions there will probably be some focus on scoring games, and potentially position games as well.

SIGCSE 2014: Board games in CS2

I'm at SIGCSE for the first time and just saw a cool paper talk about including board games as part of CS2.  The group wound up using Quoridor, a combinatorial game. 

In fact, most (if not all) of the options they considered were combinatorial games.  This makes a lot of sense when you realize they were looking for the following properties:

• well-established, but obscure (strategies are known and discussed online, but the students probably didn't already know the game)
• simple rules
• non-violent
• race/gender/culture neutral
• discrete

Students were put into two types of groups:

• "Engine" groups: Implemented the ruleset
• "Player" groups: implemented a strategy

The player groups still had to keep track of much of the board state themselves.  Instead of getting the entire game state for each turn, they were just given the most recent change.

It was a great talk and very interesting.  One of the main takeaways from the group is that they would remove the engine group next time and just have all the players working on implementing players.

Here are the paper and the project's website.  There are resources for using their materials, with support for other games aside from Quoridor!