1. It's difficult for me to tell which spaces are open for play and which aren't -- the border is hard to parse. (Is that this cell's border, or the adjacent cell?) This isn't really an issue during placement, but it is an issue for signalling that a cell has been "captured," which is hard for me to tell.
2. Hexagon grid is absolutely the right call. :)
3. The influence mechanic is very opaque: it's very hard for me to predict what will happen next, which makes me feel like I'm playing a little "intuitively," instead of planning out my moves with intention. Some way to see "this is the current state and this will be the next state" would help with that, but I think as long as influence is a continuous quantity it's going to be difficult to visualize and predict.
4. Making the board itself hexagonal (ala Hexxagon) will give you an odd number of cells, preventing ties. Might also be nice to smooth out cell-strength discontinuities around the top and bottom edges.
5. Balancing the first-player advantage by making the first move a "weak stone" was very confusing to me, because an adjacent move by player two will "capture" my initial stone with a single stone of theirs. I didn't understand this until I saw your comment about it here. I think the pie rule would work well in this game, but it's hard for me to reason about since edge moves are offensively weaker but defensively stronger... I'm not sure how well it would shake out, if you haven't tried it already.
1. I can try experimenting with the border thickness. Selectable tiles would have a light gray border, instead of the dark green/blue border.
3. I'm planning to add a way to view the 'next state' in the next version of the game. But still trying to figure out a good way to visualize the 'influence' of each tile, besides the color.
4. Yes, also will try out the hexagonal board shape. And give players more options for the board size too. I think it's the right size for smaller screens like a mobile phone, but desktop users might want to play with more tiles.
5. Thanks for suggesting the pie rule. I looked into it, but think it'll be too confusing, especially for 1st time players. The 'weak stone' would be easier to understand for new players - perhaps except for those with a Go background :)
First, I understand you were trying to make an approachable presentation, but the rules as you presented them are incomplete (how does influence work? what is a "threshold"?), and I think for a board game that's a big mistake. What makes games like those cool is that rules work deterministically, even for games that involve randomness. Having to guess the rules is something I actively dislike.
Second, have you considered a square board instead of an hexagonal one? Using Go terminology, it feels like the groups have too many liberties.
Other than that, the game is pretty good. I feel it captures the attack/defense territory-based gameplay of Go perfectly.
Have you tried to measure the first move advantage?
edit: Wow this thing is a drug. Hard AI is deceptively good, I managed to tie a game 25-25 after several attempts, but you definitely can't afford to be sloppy if you want to stay afloat!
Thanks for the comments! I appreciate the thought put into it.
1. My original thinking was to keep the game simple for casual players. But now I see that there are many who want to get into more depth :) Will work on it to make the rules of the game clearer and give an option for more visual indicators.
For now, here are some explanations (which might beg more questions):
influence - at the end of each turn, the average color of a tile's neighbors is calculated, and the tile gets 30% of that color (retaining 70% of its original color)
threshold - once a tile gets 50% of the way to max-blue or max-green, it gets a dark border and is not selectable. 0% is white.
2. I originally thought about square tiles, but then it would be more complicated to figure out the 'influence' on diagonally adjacent tiles. Hex tiles eliminates that issue.
3. There is a strong 1st mover advantage in this game. To compensate, the 1st green tile is actually at 55% color. I tried to balance the game so that hard AIs on both colors would roughly capture equal number of tiles.
Interesting. Instead of just using shades or green and blue, would you consider displaying numerical values too? I was confused about how close the tiles were to flipping to my color.
29 (me on gree) - 21 (hard AI). Took me many tries! I think I'm starting to understand though. Might be fun to have a "replay" system like on hateris - https://qntm.org/files/hatetris/hatetris.html
It seems like there's a bug if you drag your mouse from the board area, off the board, then back on; it will automatically select the first unclaimed tile the cursor hits. I just progressed the game to a 14-36 loss by just waving my mouse randomly without a single click.
It seems to require some fairly fast movement, but I did accidentally trigger it a few times when I was trying to play for real.
Love it! Got through easy AI pretty quickly, still working on medium, only a few rounds in.
Echoing/jumping off of a few comments:
- I love the hex grid. Hexagons are bestagons and I bemoan the fact we went decimal and dozenal.
- I actually don't mind the intuitive play style that much. It's kinda fun and mitigates overthinking
- however, more obvious visual indication when a cell is locked would be nice
- It might be interesting to see a more quantitative indicator of the influence of a cell. The shade alone is hard to parse. However I disagree with numbers (or maybe make it a setting toggle). I'd personally prefer a purely visual/geometric.
- One way to possibly indicate would be coloring sub-shapes inside the hexagon. Not sure if that would look too busy.
- This game is super addicting. Nice work all around!
Thanks for the comments! I was going for a more intuitive play style, glad you like it.
I also recognize the need to better see the 'influence' level of a cell, especially for players who want to get better at the game. Maybe scaling the size of the colored hexagon in each tile would work. So the colored hex would grow with 'influence', and once it reaches the border it would become locked
The small board size and easy AI combo was too easy as a starting point. But I started to lose against the Medium AI. The animations are a bit lengthy. I think the ideal numeric indicator would show the number of turns (stone placements) before the space "locks" itself to a particular color.
Appreciate the feedback!
The number of turns before lock is an interesting indicator. There are some corner cases that I'd have to think more about though - e.g. when a tile is almost at the threshold but at a deadlock (both colors are evenly surrounding it)
1) Somehow I can actually play and enjoy it. I'm usually really bad at these sorts of games (Go, Viking Chess, etc.). But I find I win a good portion of medium games while not getting frustrated.
2) All animations need to be decoupled from the gameplay entirely. Don't remove them, but they have no place in the order of move execution. I can't actually play how fast I want to play because I still have to wait _a while_ for a previous animation to "finish".
3) If I quickly move my mouse cursor around and happen to move off the board (moving my mouse while thinking), it will actually select a random piece near the border without any click event ever happening.
All in all nice, but seeing how fast paced this game is (for me at least), it needs some major work to make it play snappy and predictable.
The animations are a bit sluggish. I kept missing clicks on tiles that were finishing animations from a previous turn. Maybe I was playing faster than I should have been but it made things somewhat confusing.
Yep, same here. The animations are way too slow. For whatever reason it seems to wait like a second after you move to pulse influence. There's no reason it should wait.
Thanks for the feedback. What device are you on - mobile, tablet, desktop? I am wondering if the animation is taking longer on devices with less processing power.
I could also add an option in the settings to disable animations, for those who like to play fast.
See also the game of Hex. I was introduced to it by Martin Gardner's 1957 column in Scientific American[1]. As far as I know, these columns are not available free online from Scientific American. However, there is an excellent description of the game and its properties by Thomas Maarup available[2], his Thesis on it is at [3]. Like the cited game Influence, the rules of Hex are very simple and although it is easily proven that in Hex the first player has a winning strategy available, this strategy is unknown.
The game was first invented by Piet Hein in 1942 and was independently reinvented in 1949 by John Nash while a graduate student at Princeton University.
There is a recent book on Hex by Ryan B. Hayward and Bjarne Toft, published by CRC Press [4].
Before someone asks, I didn't read Martin Gardner's column in 1957, but I was old enough to read it in 1963 as a child. I became fascinated with Mathematical Recreations monthly columns that year, and at the library I eventually read every one of the Mathematical Recreations columns he wrote for the magazine (over 300).
[1] Martin Gardner. Mathematical Games—Concerning the game of Hex, which may be played on the tiles of the bathroom floor. Scientific American, 197:145–150, 1957
Fun game! It wasn't always immediately obvious where exactly I could play, but I imagine the more you play the more it clicks too.
I also agree with your decision to not use numerical indicators. It would definitely make things too complex and the graphical representation you have is pretty elegant as-is. Optional if at all.
Thanks! Yea I was trying to make the game's visuals as simple as possible. Especially for mobile players, where screen real estate is quite small.
But looks like there's demand for more indicators for the game's state. Will need to think more about how to have indicators without cluttering the visuals.
I did win the first game but noticed you mentioned difficulties, clicked hoping it wasn't on Easy. It was! ha
For people in this thread, if you're into abstract game design in the hex/table space, Nick Bentley creates some games I find very interesting, though haven't played. Bought some generic tiles once, hoping to eventually try out Circle of Life:
Wild, I made something extremely similar a couple years ago (also inspired by Go) called Quagen (https://quagen.io). I like your use of hex and the UX better than mine. Nice job!
Wow our ideas were really similar. I read your blog post - even how we came up with the idea was similar! I too played a lot of Hearthstone, and thought of adding a new digital element to a board game. Seems like Go was a natural fit :)
Neat. While it would draw away from the visual elegance, the game would be bit more playable if it had numeric indicators, both for current level of influence and the change for next turn.
i agree that there is a "legibility" issue. the game doesn't communicate the state of unlocked hexes or the rules of how the threshold to lock hexes. It wouldn't necessarily need to be numeric indicator. it could be a visual indicator on a hex to communicate that a hex will lock to a particular colour next turn. For even more usability, the game UI could update these indicators for all hexes when the player hovers over a hex (if you place here, then this is the immediate result you will get..)
Thanks! I did think about numeric indicators but didn't want to introduce too much complexity. Would also take away from the fun if players had to check the numbers for many cells each turn.
Still trying to figure out the best way to show that information.
Super fun, and it's quite challenging at first to beat the blue hard AI. I've found my personal "joseki" that wins every time by a large margin: one of the two center points, then press blue's response on the other center point by playing one of the two points that attaches to both of your stones. When blue pincers this latest stone, pincer his original stone. Blue will pincer your latest stone again, and you then respond by pincering blue's second stone. From this position it seems like you can do almost anything and win--probably because blue is over-eager on pincering. I usually win with 30+ points this way.
Seems like blue is at a big disadvantage even with green's first stone being weak. I've only found one path to victory: play adjacent-towards-the-edge to green's first stone in the middle, and green will do what seems to be a bad move (a diagonal pincer even further into the edge). From there just capture green's first stone and things start to be more do-able.
Addictive, fun, quick, yet interesting and subtle if you're into strategy games. I think you have a potential winner on your hands. Some polish and tweak may be needed based on feedback here, but a mobile app could make a killing
Whether a group will be captured or not often depends on whose turn a given space becomes playable or not, and if there are enough moves in the game left for the group to weaken sufficiently. Both of these are very hard to predict, which gives the game a somewhat random feel.
I like this game because it is a bit mysterious, but I seemed to quickly hit on a strategy - start towards the centre, make 3x3x3 triangles, ignore blue - which wins more or less every time. Blue could counter that but doesn't.
[+] [-] ianthehenry|4 years ago|reply
1. It's difficult for me to tell which spaces are open for play and which aren't -- the border is hard to parse. (Is that this cell's border, or the adjacent cell?) This isn't really an issue during placement, but it is an issue for signalling that a cell has been "captured," which is hard for me to tell.
2. Hexagon grid is absolutely the right call. :)
3. The influence mechanic is very opaque: it's very hard for me to predict what will happen next, which makes me feel like I'm playing a little "intuitively," instead of planning out my moves with intention. Some way to see "this is the current state and this will be the next state" would help with that, but I think as long as influence is a continuous quantity it's going to be difficult to visualize and predict.
4. Making the board itself hexagonal (ala Hexxagon) will give you an odd number of cells, preventing ties. Might also be nice to smooth out cell-strength discontinuities around the top and bottom edges.
5. Balancing the first-player advantage by making the first move a "weak stone" was very confusing to me, because an adjacent move by player two will "capture" my initial stone with a single stone of theirs. I didn't understand this until I saw your comment about it here. I think the pie rule would work well in this game, but it's hard for me to reason about since edge moves are offensively weaker but defensively stronger... I'm not sure how well it would shake out, if you haven't tried it already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_rule
[+] [-] jawslouis|4 years ago|reply
1. I can try experimenting with the border thickness. Selectable tiles would have a light gray border, instead of the dark green/blue border.
3. I'm planning to add a way to view the 'next state' in the next version of the game. But still trying to figure out a good way to visualize the 'influence' of each tile, besides the color.
4. Yes, also will try out the hexagonal board shape. And give players more options for the board size too. I think it's the right size for smaller screens like a mobile phone, but desktop users might want to play with more tiles.
5. Thanks for suggesting the pie rule. I looked into it, but think it'll be too confusing, especially for 1st time players. The 'weak stone' would be easier to understand for new players - perhaps except for those with a Go background :)
[+] [-] underdeserver|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qsort|4 years ago|reply
First, I understand you were trying to make an approachable presentation, but the rules as you presented them are incomplete (how does influence work? what is a "threshold"?), and I think for a board game that's a big mistake. What makes games like those cool is that rules work deterministically, even for games that involve randomness. Having to guess the rules is something I actively dislike.
Second, have you considered a square board instead of an hexagonal one? Using Go terminology, it feels like the groups have too many liberties.
Other than that, the game is pretty good. I feel it captures the attack/defense territory-based gameplay of Go perfectly.
Have you tried to measure the first move advantage?
edit: Wow this thing is a drug. Hard AI is deceptively good, I managed to tie a game 25-25 after several attempts, but you definitely can't afford to be sloppy if you want to stay afloat!
[+] [-] jawslouis|4 years ago|reply
1. My original thinking was to keep the game simple for casual players. But now I see that there are many who want to get into more depth :) Will work on it to make the rules of the game clearer and give an option for more visual indicators.
For now, here are some explanations (which might beg more questions):
influence - at the end of each turn, the average color of a tile's neighbors is calculated, and the tile gets 30% of that color (retaining 70% of its original color)
threshold - once a tile gets 50% of the way to max-blue or max-green, it gets a dark border and is not selectable. 0% is white.
2. I originally thought about square tiles, but then it would be more complicated to figure out the 'influence' on diagonally adjacent tiles. Hex tiles eliminates that issue.
3. There is a strong 1st mover advantage in this game. To compensate, the 1st green tile is actually at 55% color. I tried to balance the game so that hard AIs on both colors would roughly capture equal number of tiles.
Glad you're enjoying the game!
[+] [-] joegahona|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jawslouis|4 years ago|reply
The rules are simple but it takes awhile to master. What is your best score against the Hard AI? I got 27 (me on green) – 23 (AI).
Would you want to see some sort of match-making to play against others online?
See demo gameplay or view the source code at https://github.com/jawslouis/Influence-Game
[+] [-] SimonDorfman|4 years ago|reply
Side note: I’m working on a game that has some similarities that might interest you: https://simondorfman.com/volcanoes1
[+] [-] ALittleLight|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moconnor|4 years ago|reply
Fun and interesting game - this has a lot of potential! Great mechanic, I would pay for an iOS app in the future.
[+] [-] neogodless|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bookofsand|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrooched_moose|4 years ago|reply
It seems to require some fairly fast movement, but I did accidentally trigger it a few times when I was trying to play for real.
I've tested on Firefox 89 and Chrome 91.
[+] [-] jawslouis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jawslouis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kortex|4 years ago|reply
Echoing/jumping off of a few comments:
- I love the hex grid. Hexagons are bestagons and I bemoan the fact we went decimal and dozenal.
- I actually don't mind the intuitive play style that much. It's kinda fun and mitigates overthinking
- however, more obvious visual indication when a cell is locked would be nice
- It might be interesting to see a more quantitative indicator of the influence of a cell. The shade alone is hard to parse. However I disagree with numbers (or maybe make it a setting toggle). I'd personally prefer a purely visual/geometric.
- One way to possibly indicate would be coloring sub-shapes inside the hexagon. Not sure if that would look too busy.
- This game is super addicting. Nice work all around!
[+] [-] jawslouis|4 years ago|reply
I also recognize the need to better see the 'influence' level of a cell, especially for players who want to get better at the game. Maybe scaling the size of the colored hexagon in each tile would work. So the colored hex would grow with 'influence', and once it reaches the border it would become locked
[+] [-] jawslouis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CGamesPlay|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jawslouis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minxomat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minxomat|4 years ago|reply
1) Somehow I can actually play and enjoy it. I'm usually really bad at these sorts of games (Go, Viking Chess, etc.). But I find I win a good portion of medium games while not getting frustrated.
2) All animations need to be decoupled from the gameplay entirely. Don't remove them, but they have no place in the order of move execution. I can't actually play how fast I want to play because I still have to wait _a while_ for a previous animation to "finish".
3) If I quickly move my mouse cursor around and happen to move off the board (moving my mouse while thinking), it will actually select a random piece near the border without any click event ever happening.
All in all nice, but seeing how fast paced this game is (for me at least), it needs some major work to make it play snappy and predictable.
[+] [-] cdubzzz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cowvin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jawslouis|4 years ago|reply
I could also add an option in the settings to disable animations, for those who like to play fast.
[+] [-] todd8|4 years ago|reply
The game was first invented by Piet Hein in 1942 and was independently reinvented in 1949 by John Nash while a graduate student at Princeton University.
There is a recent book on Hex by Ryan B. Hayward and Bjarne Toft, published by CRC Press [4].
Before someone asks, I didn't read Martin Gardner's column in 1957, but I was old enough to read it in 1963 as a child. I became fascinated with Mathematical Recreations monthly columns that year, and at the library I eventually read every one of the Mathematical Recreations columns he wrote for the magazine (over 300).
[1] Martin Gardner. Mathematical Games—Concerning the game of Hex, which may be played on the tiles of the bathroom floor. Scientific American, 197:145–150, 1957
[2] https://maarup.net/thomas/hex/
[3] Thomas Maarup (2005 Thesis) https://maarup.net/thomas/hex/hex3.pdf
[4] https://www.routledge.com/Hex-The-Full-Story/Hayward-Toft/p/...
[+] [-] chewmieser|4 years ago|reply
I also agree with your decision to not use numerical indicators. It would definitely make things too complex and the graphical representation you have is pretty elegant as-is. Optional if at all.
[+] [-] jawslouis|4 years ago|reply
But looks like there's demand for more indicators for the game's state. Will need to think more about how to have indicators without cluttering the visuals.
[+] [-] grimgrin|4 years ago|reply
For people in this thread, if you're into abstract game design in the hex/table space, Nick Bentley creates some games I find very interesting, though haven't played. Bought some generic tiles once, hoping to eventually try out Circle of Life:
https://www.nickbentley.games/circle-of-life-an-ecosystem-si...
His "best" list:
https://www.nickbentley.games/category/my-best-games/
[+] [-] sundaypancakes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jawslouis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zokier|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shoo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jawslouis|4 years ago|reply
Still trying to figure out the best way to show that information.
[+] [-] lainga|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dddw|4 years ago|reply
very nice game, will pass it around to fellow-go players
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] SebastianKG|4 years ago|reply
Seems like blue is at a big disadvantage even with green's first stone being weak. I've only found one path to victory: play adjacent-towards-the-edge to green's first stone in the middle, and green will do what seems to be a bad move (a diagonal pincer even further into the edge). From there just capture green's first stone and things start to be more do-able.
[+] [-] donmatito|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] who23|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jawslouis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] im3w1l|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beardyw|4 years ago|reply