FOUR

Summary: In this Death Match, place your pieces carefully to lock out your opponent from playing anything at all. (Original design by Stephen Tavener)

Designer(s): Non-original Game

Featured in: The Genius: Code Red

Match Type: DM (for 2 players)

Rules:

DMA - FOUR

📖 -- Rules -- 📖

Summary

Play your pieces in the correct order to block the opponent’s moves and to outlast them!

Gameplay

The game is played on a 9x9 board, with 16 pieces for each player, shown below.

Players are not locked into this grid; you may place pieces that poke out, but all placed pieces as a whole must fit the grid. The host may move all placed pieces as a whole to fit the board (🔍)

🔢 Before the game starts, Amey, as the player with higher priority will select the starting player.

✏️ The starting player begins the game by placing down one of their pieces covering E5

⚠️ From now on, players alternate placing down one of their pieces, following these restrictions:

Newly placed piece has to share an edge with one of the existing pieces.
Newly placed piece cannot have the same color OR the same shape as the last piece played by the opponent.
Newly placed piece cannot be adjacent to pieces of the same color OR the same shape.
The Bounding Box of all the pieces cannot be bigger than 9x9.

A Bounding Box is a smallest rectangle that contains all of the pieces that have been played.

This allows players to build in any direction from the starting piece, but the end game state will fit on a 9x9 grid

Game End

<:Token:1004484049580085393> Players alternate placing down one of their pieces on a square grid until one of the players can’t make a move. That player loses and is eliminated.

<:Garnet:1005736161978888262> The player that wins the DM gets 3 garnets.

Submissions

⌛ Players have 1 minute per turn and no reserve time.

If you run out of time, the opponent will have 1 minute to make your turn, and then 1 more minute to make theirs.

If the opponent doesn’t make a turn for you, we pretend that nothing happened and you are passed back the turn.

✏️ To submit, use any submission form that’s understandable. I recommend using the color of the piece and number of cells it occupies, e.g. y1 or g3. To submit where you place, list the coordinates the piece is covering.

For example, g3 E4-E5-D5 would be a valid first move.

You can use 0, 10, Z and J to submit outside the grid.

Examples

🔍 Here is an example of a game in progress. It is Jatloe’s turn, and the last piece played is a y4.

Jatloe submits b4 B3-B4-C3-C4. This move is invalid for many reasons, namely:

A 2x2 piece is the last one played, so it can’t be used.
A 2x2 piece is next to another 2x2, placing it there is invalid.
A blue piece is next to another blue piece, placing it there is invalid.

One of the many valid moves in this situation would be r1 F5.

🔍 Here is an example of a game in progress. It is Jatloe’s turn, and the last piece placed is an r2.

Y3 B9-C9-C10 is a valid move, even though C10 is not a space on the grid.

As a reminder, players are not strictly bound by the box, but the pieces as a whole must fit.

After the turn, the board will look like this:

Now a submission like g1 C10 is invalid, as that would make the pieces take up 10 columns, which is not allowed.

🔍 Here is an example of an end game. It is Jatloe's turn and the last piece played was B1. He is unable to make any more moves, he therefore loses the game and is eliminated.

FOUR

Rules:

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