The comet circumflex board game.

William Overington

Copyright 2002 William Overington

Saturday 2 November 2002

This board game is a research platform for the comet circumflex system, in order to test whether the comet circumflex system can be used so that people around the world may play the board game using comet circumflex sentences and discuss the board game using comet circumflex sentences.

The game is played on a board of nine squares by nine squares.

There are nine pieces. Each piece is of a particular colour and carries a number and is either a round, a triangle, a square piece or a pyramid.

The pieces are as follows.

number colour type
1 brown triangle
2 red square piece
3 orange round
4 yellow triangle
5 green square piece
6 blue round
7 magenta pyramid
8 grey square piece
9 white pyramid

Players play grand moves alternately. The game is not competitive. The purpose of the game is to enjoy the intellectual satisfaction of achieving a goal. The goal of a particular game is decided by the players at the start of the particular game. A goal could be something such as that the two pyramids are next to each other orthogonally. Another example of a goal is that all three square pieces are next to each other in an orthogonal line.

Pieces are not moved individually by players.

Each player may make a grand move, a grand move consisting of attempting to move a collection of pieces in numerical order, starting with the lower or lowest numbered piece of the collection. Thus a grand move consists of a set of moves. A piece moves to an empty square. If movement would take the piece onto an occupied square or off the board, then the move cannot take place.

Movement not taking place due to an already occupied square is part of the play of the game, movement not taking place due to avoiding going off the board is considered poor play. The reason for movement not taking place due to avoiding going off the board being considered poor play is that variants of the game could have a larger board, and thus game plays devised with the present board would not move up to be useful on a larger board.

Each grand move moves a number of pieces, in numerical order from lowest to highest, one square in the chosen direction of north, south, east or west: in the event of the piece needing to move off the board or onto an already occupied square, then the piece stays in the same square as before the move. If the destination square is not empty at the time that the piece tries to move then that move does not take place, even if the destination square later becomes empty as part of the same grand move.

All of the moves within a grand move must be attempted in increasing numerical order. The result may be that none, some or all of the individual moves within the grand move may take place.

The move types are as follows. Each type of move may be in a north, south, east or west direction. That is, orthogonal moves of one square for each affected piece which may move, all of the moves in the same direction.

Move all rounds. This affects pieces 3, 6.

Move all triangles. This affects pieces 1, 4.

Move all square pieces. This affects pieces 2, 5, 8.

Move all pyramids. This affects pieces 7, 9.

Move all even-numbered pieces. This affects pieces 2, 4, 6, 8.

Move all odd-numbered pieces. This affects pieces 1, 3, 5, 7, 9.

Move all prime-numbered pieces. This affects pieces 1, 2, 3, 5, 7.

Move all square-numbered pieces. This affects pieces 1, 4, 9.

Move all cube-numbered pieces. This affects pieces 1, 8.

There are thus thirty-six possible moves.

The starting position of the game is as shown in the diagram. North is upwards on the screen, south is downwards on the screen, east is rightwards on the screen and west is leftwards on the screen.

 
 
 
North
 

West









East

 
South
 
 
 

Individual squares on the board may be referred to as a letter from a to i going from left to right and a number from 1 to 9 going from bottom to top. Thus, for example, the top left square in the diagram is designated as square a9.

Here is a collection of all of the gif files needed so as to be able to set all possible positions in the board game into web page format.

               

               

 

 

The comet_circumflex system.

Copyright 2002 William Overington

This file is accessible as follows.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/c_c00500.htm