The Genius: Championship Edition 2

In this Main Match, players must traverse a maze collecting pellets while ghosts attempt to cross their opponent's paths.

Designer(s): RedsToad	Match Type: MM (for 4 players)
Featured in: The Genius: Code Red

Guests and communication:

Each player brought a guest to assist them in the final match.

Each guest is provided with a confessionals channel, which acts both as a thoughts and submissions channel; a pair chat with their player and a pair chat with each other guest.

This means that a player cannot talk with a guest that they didn’t invite, except for #player-lounge.

F4: The Genius: Championship Edition 2.

This game is heavily inspired by Pac-Man Championship Edition 2.

(yes we're having a 2 before a 1)

This is the final Main Match. Players will be ranked by points at the end of this match. The player with the highest score will advance to finals. The 2 players with the lowest score will fight in the first death match; the winner of that will fight the 2nd place in the second death match.

Summary:

Players attempt to collect as many points as possible by optimizing the gameplay boards that are presented to them every round while managing the limited amount of actions they can take throughout the entire game.

Rounds:

⌛ This game is divided into a 24 hour pregame and a number of rounds 24h each.

Every round, each player will be presented with a board to optimize, which will require players to spend some Time. All players start with 10 minutes of Time. When a player runs out of Time, they and their guest can no longer submit.

When all players run out of Time, the game ends.

Board Explanation:

Every round, players will be presented with a board like this one:

The bottom part of the screen is game information, relaying info about your current state in the game and relation of that to other players.

The leftmost number in the rectangle is the Target score for the current maze.

The horizontal segmented bar next to it is the Overflow bar, and the number right next to it is the Overflow.

The bar is a visual reflection of the Overflow; it will start out empty at 0 Overflow and will be completely filled at 250 Overflow. Each of the 10 segments of the bar will light up as your Overflow increases by 25.

The bottom-right part shows your current standing in the game.

The lower of the two numbers is your current Score, the higher number is your current Time.

Next to those numbers you can see your ranking for both Time and Score.

Maze Elements:

The majority of the image will be taken up by the current maze. The maze is a grid of squares that can be occupied by one of the elements of the maze, or be empty.

There are 4 parts to a maze that will always be present: Walls, Pac-Man, Fruit and Pellets.

In rounds 5, 9, 12, 14 and every following round, Power Pellets will also be present.

Players will be controlling Pac-Man using a series of ULDR moves. The goal is to move the Pac-Man to the Fruit, while avoiding walls and collecting enough pellets on the way.

🔍 One of the solutions to the above maze is RDRDDLLLULLDLLUUULLL, tracing the following path:

Every ULDR move will take 1 second. The path drawn above will take the player 20 seconds.

⚠️ There is 1 exception to this rule. Substrings LR, RL, UD and DU will only take 1 second total for 2 moves.

🔍 For example, adding LR to the beginning of the player's submission could eat a big pellet while only costing 1 additional second.

Guests will be controlling the ghosts using the series of UDLR moves. Their goal is to move from the fruit back to the fruit, while intersecting as many players as possible.

If a guest’s submission is shorter than a player’s submission, the guest's submission will repeat.

Unlike players, guests are not allowed to have LR, RL, UD and DU substrings in their submission at all, even when looped.

🔍 *For the above board, one of the possible submissions in RRRUULLULLLDDRDR. It is shorter than the player’s submission, thus it will loop and intersect the player on move 18.

A submission like RRRUUURRDDDDDDLLUUULLL is invalid, as it will contain an LR when looped.*

Pellets, Target and Player Scoring:

Some spaces on the board will be occupied by Pellets. There are 2 different pellet sizes.

Small dot is worth 1 pellet, the medium diamond is worth 5 pellets. When those pellets are collected, they subtract their value from the Target. When Target reaches 0, pellets add to the Overflow instead.

If collecting a medium pellet had caused the Target to reach 0 without using all 5 points from the pellet, that remainder will be added to the Overflow.

Each pellet gives you points equal to the pellet value times Overflow, capped at 250 (aka the white meter).

Thus, with an overflow of 550, a small dot will give you 250 points, and a medium one will give 1250 points.

Pellets collected will be added to Overflow before awarding points

🔍 *For example, the path above collects 19 big dots which equals 95 pellets. 67 of those clear the Target, remaining 28 add to Overflow.

First 13 big dots don’t add to overflow, so the points each dot gives is 5 (big dot value) * 82 (Current Overflow)

14th big dot finishes the target and gives 3 to Overflow, bringing it up to 85 and thus giving 5 * 85 points 15th dot adds 5 more to Overflow, giving 5 * 90 points. 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th dot all give score using a similar process.

Going through all dots and adding up the score, the above path gives 8,255 points and increases overflow by 28.*

Power Pellets

In mazes 5, 9, 12, 14 and every following one there will be one Power Pellet.

Collecting it will allow the player to eat ghost guests by intersecting with them.

Each ghost eaten will award the player points equal to current Overflow (uncapped) times number of pellets eaten on this board.

Note that these mazes will never have big pellets and will have way fewer pellets in general.

Ghost - Player interactions

For each player a ghost passes in a round, they score 1 point.

⚠️ At the end of the game the guest who scored the least loses and their player cannot win even if they have the most points.

If a player passes through all ghosts still participating in the match without eating a power pellet, they incur a penalty.

The player’s overflow is reduced by 25 and their submission is cut short.

Game End

After a player runs out of time, it is announced which player ran out of time and they and their guest will not participate in the rest of the MM.

⚠️ After all 4 players run out of time, a special round is held, during which no submissions are required and players are prompted to visit the Finals Shop for the final time.

After the special round ends, the match ends.

All player and guest scores are revealed.

All players are ranked from highest score to lowest. In case of a tie, priority is used.

The player with the highest score wins, unless their guest has scored the least, in which case the player with the 2nd highest score wins.

📌 Amendment: Garnet usage

After pregame, players may spend Garnets or Ghost points to see a future maze.

Seeing a maze N rounds in advance costs N garnets or ceil(log2(N)) ghost points (aka "how many times can you divide by 2 before number becomes less than or equal 1")

⚠️ I expect the game to last around 2 weeks. Peeking too far in the future might not be beneficial.

📌 Rule Change:

Looking at the next maze costs 1 ghost point now instead of 0.

📌 Clarifications:

Players' and Guests' paths can go through the fruit freely, they just have to end on the fruit.

Edited the explanation for ceil(log2(N) because it was wrong, whoops

@Player

📌 Addendum: A missing player submission will result in a 1 minute penalty and skipping of the maze.

A missing guest submission will result in that ghost not appearing on the board, which implies that no player will be able to lose by running into all ghosts

The Genius: Championship Edition 2

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