Masked Army

⚪ ⚔️ Death Match (White Meadow): Masked Army ⚔️ ⚪

Remember to tell apart your friends from foes, as you don't want infiltrators in your great army.

Place pieces that have both your and your opponent's colors on the grid. Your goal is to make the largest group on the board. However, the board is hidden; you have to memorize all the colors of tiles already placed.

RULES

Each player has a player color. The default colors are red and blue, although players may choose any reasonable color.

🀄 The game is played on a 9×9 square board. The rows are labeled 1-9, and the columns are labeled A-I.

🀄 There is only one kind of piece used in this game: a 1×2 domino where one cell has the color of a player and the other cell has the color of the other player. The following example uses the default red and blue.

An army is a group of cells connected side by side, all with the same color. Your army is an army of your color.

The player with the DM Advantage chooses the starting player. Then players alternate turns until the game end condition is reached.

🧠 On your turn, you must place one piece on the board. The piece must be aligned with the grid, and it may not overlap another piece or extend beyond the board. Other than that, there is no restriction where you put your piece.

📡 However, the colors are hidden. Only the latest-placed piece has their colors visible; all other pieces are grayed out with no border to distinguish piece boundaries. In addition, all previous board updates and your moves will be deleted. In short, you have to remember the board.

🎭 In the following example, suppose the rest of the board is empty. The last piece placed is on F4-G4. The left board shows what you would see, and the right board shows all the pieces if they weren't hidden.

👑 📡 The game ends when a player can no longer place any piece. The board is revealed at this time, and the sizes of all armies are counted. Note that empty squares remaining are not included in any army.

👑 Compare the sizes of the largest armies by both players. The player whose largest army is larger wins the game. If tied, compare the second-largest armies. If still tied, compare the third-largest armies, and so on. If all army sizes are exactly identical, the player that places the last piece wins.

🎭 In the example above, Red has armies of size 4 and 1; Blue has armies of size 3, 1, 1. Red wins as Red's largest army, 4, is larger than Blue's, 3.

ADMINISTRATION

📌 ⏰ Timing

You have a turn timer of 2 minutes and a time bank of 5 minutes.

What this means is, on your turn, you are normally given 2 minutes to make your move. You may take longer than that by using your time bank; the time in excess of 2 minutes is taken from your time bank, with a limit of 5 minutes. Your turn timer is refreshed every turn; you get a full 2 minutes every turn, regardless of how much or little you used it before. However, your time bank lasts for the entire game; once you use up an amount of time from the time bank, it is permanently lost. If you run out of both turn timer and time bank, you lose the game.

The umpire is allowed freedom in measuring time usage; check with the umpire. A common method is to round up time bank usage to the next 5-second interval.

📌 🧠 Submissions and allowed tools

Your submissions are done in the public game room. We will take the first legal submission you make, unless you promptly fix the submission (e.g. in case of making a typo or sending a move too early).

Your submission consists of the location and orientation of your piece. A simple method to state your submission is by saying which cell will have your color and which cell will have your opponent's color.

THIS IS A MEMORY GAME. No notes of any kind are allowed. No other aids are allowed, either.

📌 📡 Information

As this is a memory game, almost all information ends up not known to anyone, requiring you to remember everything.

More specifically, this game has the following pieces of information, along with how and when they are revealed to the players, if at all. If a piece of information is not in this list, it is likely not known to anyone, but feel free to clarify.

🔺 Publicly announced, at the end of every round

• Where and in what orientation is the last-played piece. (This information is deleted at the end of the next round.)
• Which cells are occupied by a piece.
• Whose turn it is.
• Whether the game ends.

🔻 Explicitly not known to anyone, before the end of the DM

• What color each occupied cell is, other than the last-played piece.

🔺 Publicly announced, at the end of the DM

• What color each occupied cell is.
• How large the armies of each player are.