New game: Trig

Over twenty years old, but never before made public in playable form, Trig is the root game of a suite of three, collectively entitled The Summer-House Floor.

It's a centrifugal connection game played on the Colour A and Colour B pathways of a hexhex7 board coloured non-contiguously in Colour A, Colour B and Colour C (Colour C at the corners), with a single, differently-coloured cell - known as the Pillar - at its centre. The board is empty at start of play.

Two players, Black and White, alternate in occupying with pieces of those colours exactly one vacant cell per turn which is adjacent to the Pillar and/or to at least one occupied cell. If a placement completes an equilateral triangle of any size whose other two vertices are friendly pieces already in place AND whose centre is occupied by an enemy piece, the latter is flipped to the adverse colour. (Where a placement enables multiple captures just one of these must be chosen, and 'cascade' capture is never allowed.) Victory is achieved by completing a continuous string of one's own pieces which, however circuitously, links the Pillar to the edge of the board or forms a loop enclosing the Pillar somewhere within it.

Although strongly believed not to be undrawable, Trig has never produced a draw in actual play.  It is now available to be played via the AiAi page of mrraow.com, and I should be most interested in the opinion of anyone who cares to try it out.

Trun:- played on aTruncated icosahedron (football of 20 hexagons + 12 pentagons)

delta flip as trig

fill pentagon if fully surrounded

score all hexagons + pentagons

Hey Burglar!

Does Trun actually exist, or was it just a satirical way to accuse Trig of impenetrability? :)  I strongly suspected the latter, but couldn't be 100% sure.

Either way, though, it's the case that people often imagine Trig will prove to be an agonising brain-burner, but that's really not so.  It's actually fast and furious, and kids in particular seem to take to it very quickly.

Assuming you can afford the time, I wish you'd give it a few goes and let me know what you think.

Best,

R

@Richard, can the game be actually played on that linked web page?

Or do I have to download something?

Hi hypercube.

Download is involved.  Procedure as follows:

Go to http://mrraow.com/index.php/aiai-home/

T hen (I'm taking the liberty of adapting Nick Bentley's instructions for Bloom):

"To run it, you’ll need Java and you may need to change your security preferences. You’ll get a bunch of zipped files in the download. The file to run is “ai ai.jar”. Once opened, load Trig by going to: File –> Choose Game, then select Trig.mgl. You can change the AI settings from the AI menu."

R

Aaargh!  What happened there?! Anybody able to help?

I combined trig with the fact it has to run in java

Java can work in 3d, so added another dimension

Also prefer games that go the full distance