Variants

I’ve been inspired lately to create variants of NXS.  I think ultimately that will be a good thing.  If I have several variants, it gives people options.  A potential customer is more likely to feel they are getting a good value if they are getting “X games in one!”  At least that’s my theory.

NXS on its own is a very flexible platform.  Even without variants, you have short, medium, and long game options, with two or three (even 4!) players.  There are several variants that are already up on the website.  Of particular note is the random opening variant.  Much like Chess 960, it allows each game to be a new experience for the players.

But I’ve also recently come up with a couple of variants that are even more out of the norm.

The first was inspired by Sovereign Chess.  I was really fascinated by the idea of players controlling shared sets of pieces, and I didn’t see any reason why that wouldn’t work with NXS.

Double Agent is a two-player game, but players set up for a three-player game as usual (using any board setup). The third “player” is the Double Agent, a hostile third party.

 

Special rules for Double Agent:

 

1. All special rules for three-player games apply (e.g. you must capture at least 1/3 of the needed territory from your opponent, and at least 1/3 from the Double Agent)
2. Double Agents are always considered enemy pieces. You cannot jump over them to capture. They block you from capturing territory if they are in the way.
3. Players take turns controlling the Double Agents. Assuming that Black and White are the two players, and that Red is the Double Agent:
   • White moves a white piece, then rotates a white piece
   • Black moves a black piece, then rotates a black piece
   • Black moves a red piece, then rotates a red piece
   • White moves a white piece, then rotates a white piece
   • White moves a red piece, then rotates a red piece
   • Continue alternating play (moving and rotating your pieces, and then the double agents) until someone has enough territory to win
4. You cannot move a Double Agent piece in a way that would put it (or another Double Agent piece) in danger of being captured.

The next variant is a true departure.  It was inspired by the many existing games that start with an empty board where players take turns adding a piece until the win condition is satisfied.  Games like Go, Hex, and Blooms fall into this category (and as a side note, you can play Blooms on a NXS board).

All Aboard! is a two player variant of NXS played on a single game board.  I would recommend selecting two colors for pieces (use all 14 pieces for each player), and use the third color for the board.

 

Players take turns either:

 

1. Placing one of their pieces on any vacant board space
2. Moving one of their pieces by the standard movement rules of NXS, or capturing an enemy piece using the standard NXS capture rules.  If you move or capture, you must then rotate one of your pieces.

Players are trying to capture territory by using a modified territory capture rule.

• Territory is captured by occupying an enemy hex,
• By having an unbroken line between your piece in enemy territory and your board edge,
• Or by having an unbroken line between two pieces in enemy territory.
• Captured spaces are only counted once

You no longer get credit for just having your piece on the board, and obviously there is no home territory to connect to.

 

Play continues until someone captures enough territory to win.  I would recommend 13-16 spaces.

And although it is not really a variant of NXS, as noted in my last post, you can play heXentafl on a NXS board using NXS pieces.

So, what do you think?  Do variants weigh into your decision when considering purchasing a game?

heXentafl

…or potentially, the ravings of a mad man.

I have been fascinated by Hnefatafl for some time.  For those not familiar, Hnefatafl is an ancient Norse board game that predates Chess by several hundred years.  It can be played on several sizes of square chess-like board, from 7×7 to 15×15, with the most common being 11×11.

Hnefatafl is particularly interesting to me as it is an asymmetrical abstract strategy game.  One player is the defender, and usually has about half the pieces of the attackers.  Despite this asymmetry, many variants are actually quite balanced.

I won’t detail the rules of Hnefatafl here, as there is extensive online material if you are interested.  There are also numerous variants, with differences in how the defenders win, if there are safe squares for the king, etc.

Suffice it to say, you typically capture an enemy piece by placing two of your pieces on either side of it orthogonally.  The defenders have a king that they have to get to safety.  This is usually the corner of the board (sometimes any edge space).  Often the king has a “throne” space at the center of the board, where he is harder to capture (and often no other piece can occupy the throne).  The attackers win if they capture the king.

Of particular interest to me is 7×7 Hnefatafl.  I have not played it, but by all reports it is a surprisingly deep strategic game despite the modest size (49 squares) and small number of pieces.

This got me thinking about the boards for NXS.  They are exactly 7 hexes across.  I began to wonder, even though a NXS board has only 37 spaces, could I design a hexagon-based variant of Hnefatafl that would actually be playable using only NXS boards and NXS pieces?

Thus the idea for heXentafl was born.  So, without further ado, I present:

 

heXentafl is played on a 4×4 hex grid.  The King sits on the central space, the throne, surrounded by three defenders.  Six attackers sit on the outer corners of the grid.

The attackers must capture the King in order to win.  The defenders must escort the King to any of the six corners in order to win.  The defenders move first.

All pieces except the King move in a straight line as many spaces as they like to an unoccupied space (like a rook in Chess).  Only one piece at a time can occupy a space.  A piece cannot jump over another piece.

The King can move into any vacant adjacent space, moving one space at a time (similar to the king in Chess).

Pieces are captured by surrounding them on two sides.  In the image below, white moves into position to surround the King and capture it, winning the game.

The corners present an interesting challenge, as they can’t be surrounded in the normal manner.  Pieces can be captured on a corner by surrounding them in the manner shown below.  Here black moves into position to capture the white piece.

You cannot “capture” your own piece by moving between two enemy pieces.  In the image below, the black piece is not captured when it moves between the two white pieces.

The Throne

The central space of the board is the throne.  Only the King may occupy the throne.  When the King is on the throne, he is harder to capture.  He must be surrounded on three sides as shown below.

   

heXentafl should scale up in size easily to larger boards.  Although at that scale, the king might need to be allowed to move more than one space at a time.

So that’s it.  That’s my (probably) crazy idea for a very minimal hexagon based Hnefatafl game.  I have played several games and so far I don’t think it is broken.  However!  I am no Hnefatafl expert by any means.  I invite anyone reading this to try it out, and please do let me know (nxs AT nxsgame DOT com) if it is completely broken, needs tweaks, etc.

 

Note to NXS players: this can obviously be played on a NXS board.  You can either use chess pieces, or use NXS pieces.  If you use NXS pieces, select a piece to be the King (a different color will help identify it), and then use any other pieces to represent the pawns.  Just remember that the normal move and capture rules / markings for NXS do not apply.

Update: You can now play heXentafl online at https://skudpaisho.com/ !

Procrastination

There’s a great series of articles about procrastination over an Wait but Why.  I struggle with procrastination.  It’s one of the reasons that NXS is taking me longer than it should.  These articles really do a great job at delving into the psychology of procrastination and putting it in a relate-able format.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html

A trip to Denver

Recently, a company called System76 was running a contest.  They wanted people to tell them what they were doing with their System76 products, in order to win a trip to Denver to visit their home office in Denver, Colorado.

I entered the contest by explaining that I had developed all of the code for the NXS online game, built the NXS website, and designed the 3D models for the board, all on my System76 laptop.

I was one of the winners of their contest.  I’ll be showing off NXS to some folks at their office.  I’ll post some photos on the Facebook site, and write up a little blog post about the trip.

Stay tuned!

PS: System76 sells Linux laptops, specifically ones running the Ubuntu operating system.

Influences: Part 2

In creating NXS, I wanted to create something that would combine the ideas of two armies attacking one another, with the fluid goal of capturing enemy territory.

Obviously, Chess was an influence. I wanted different pieces to have different movement characteristics. One of the few drawbacks of Terrace is that all of your pieces move in the same way. It seemed that the best way to have different “personalities” for each piece was to transfer that complexity from rules to the shape of the pieces (much the way Terrace had transferred it to the shape of the board). Originally I had conceived of hex-shaped pieces with different markings (somewhat like dominoes), but that quickly became the short and tall side pattern you see today.

Being able to move in the direction of the tall side was obvious.  Once I decided on that, simple math told me how far they could go (the number of short sides).  I felt that that gave each piece a nice balance between maneuverability, power, and speed. Sure, the 5-4 piece is a powerhouse, but it is slow. This also meant either not having a 3-0 piece (too weak), or making it invincible. I chose invincibility, and I really think that piece makes the game much more challenging and interesting than without it.

I choose hexagonal boards mainly because they weren’t squares, and they interlock cleanly. Sounds silly I suppose, but that was really all there was to it. I also liked the idea that each hex had more “liberties” than a square. Six sides rather than four. And although they don’t directly connect, there is no reason you can’t go diagonally out of the corner of a hex (see the capture rules), for 12 total liberties.  That diagonal is a knight-like jump, really, but having to jump two intervening spaces influenced how I handled blocking captures (one of my favorite rules). The ability to jump your own piece, but not an enemy piece was inspired by a similar Terrace concept (moving on the same terrace).

Deciding on how to capture territory was more of a challenge. I originally had one big board, but felt that I wanted more than 61 hexes (8 across), and that 9 across was just getting too large. I eventually decided that each player would just have their own board of 37 hexes. This also created the happy side-effect of being able to have three-player games! Each player having their own board also helped me decide on a territory capture strategy influenced by Reversi/Othello. Surround the enemy territory on both sides; either with two pieces, or with a piece and your territory.

Read Part 1

Influences: Part 1

So what was I trying to accomplish when I came up with the idea for NXS? What influences led me down the path that would eventually become NXS?

As I’ve already discussed, my inspiration for creating my own game was Terrace. I genuinely liked the idea of a game with much simpler rules than, say, Chess (one of Terrace’s key principles). Don’t get me wrong, I love Chess just as much as the next person, but the rules can be a bit daunting at first.

I was also learning Go at the time (and I had played Reversi/Othello in the past). I really enjoyed the idea of a more fluid goal like territory, as opposed to chasing the king in Chess. But I still liked the idea of two armies facing each other across a game board, as opposed to starting empty like most territory capture games.

It seemed to me that most games I had heard of fell roughly into those two categories; set up armies and try to capture a key piece or space on the board, or start with an empty board and try to fill or capture territory (getting a certain number of pieces in a row being a variant of this, in my opinion). So I set out to create a hybrid of these two concepts.

20 years!

I realized recently that I’ve probably been working on NXS for about 20 years!

I mean… 20 years, man.  That’s a long time.

Don’t get me wrong; I haven’t been *actively* working on it all that time.  The game has been relatively fully-formed and gathering dust, as they say, most of that time.  I’d drag it out of the closet occasionally, and strong-arm one of my friends into playing a game or two.  Or I’d get a burst of enthusiasm and work furiously on one of the three computer versions.  But all-in-all, from conception to today, it’s been about 20 years.

Putting it out in front of the general public.  Actively trying to get eyes on it.  3D printing a prototype.  Those are pretty big steps for me, and I’m excited to see it happening.

A bit on the history of NXS

I was inspired to create my own strategy board game because of the work of two men who I met many years ago.

They invented a brilliant game called Terrace.  Like so many others, I’d seen the game sitting on a table in the background of Ten Forward on Star Trek: TNG.  I thought it was a prop until I spotted it in the store of a local science museum (OMSI).  I was thrilled to discover that it was not only a real game, but that it had simple and elegant rules that belied a complex and deep game.

I was even more excited to discover that the inventors (Buzz Siler and Anton Dresden) lived quite close to my home town.  I fired off an email, like any good fan-boy, gushing about their wonderful game, inquiring about a computer version, etc.

As it turned out, they were very close to releasing a computer version.  Buzz was kind enough to invite me to come over to his home and try it out.  I met him and Anton, and gave them my impressions of the computer version.  They were even kind enough to give me a pre-release copy (on floppy disk, ah the good old days).

That experience stuck in my brain for a few years.  If these local guys could create their own strategy game, why couldn’t I?

Thus the kernel of the idea that became NXS was formed.

Welcome!

Welcome to “the NXS nexus” (super clever, isn’t it?)

This blog will likely be used for random musings on NXS, its development, strategy tips, commentary on games, etc.

Hopefully, it will also be a place for community engagement.