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Mechanic Monday: Relative Positioning

It’s Monday! Time for a Mechanic.  Something something theatre, my childhood blah blah, yadda the joy of teaching yadda, anyway.  You get the gist. We were all there, we were all moved. On to the mechanic!

Relative Movement Rules
In GREEM, two players begin with an equal number of pawns, all isolated an equidistance from one another.  A pawn may move a number of spaces equal to the number of its allies within three spaces. A pawn must always move within a row or column that contains another allied pawn.  A pawn may capture another pawn if it is the only pawn that could do so. The game ends when all of one player’s pawns are eliminated, or if the advantage between remaining pawns meets or exceeds five.

This is one of my most placeholder-filled sample rules, and it’s because it should be quite a simple game, so the unknowns loom disproportionately large.  But you can go a couple of directions with this: it can be a square grid, a hex grid, a ring grid, a quadrilateral but non-square grid, whatever. You can futz with any of the above numbers, or do away with the capture or directional  limitations. Really comes down to the experience design: what do you picture players being able to pull off in a cool, fun way? I dunno, it’s late, and this is well-trod but shallowly explored territory for me, so no need to tumble personally down the rabbit hole.  Have a non-hellish rest of the week! Til next time!

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