Bug

🟢 ⚔️ Death Match (Green Meadow): Bug ⚔️ 🟢

Grow your bugs so they rule the ecosystem.

On a hexagonal board, grow your bug and eat identically-shaped opponent bugs. When you can no longer expand on the board, you win.

This game is based on a 2017 abstract strategy board game of the same name, invented by Nick Bentley. It was also used in Genius Game 3, with significant differences from the original version. It was also used in Community-Hosted Genius Game 2, this time with pretty much the exact same rules as the original version. This version is much closer to the one in CHGG2.

RULES

🀄 The game is played on an irregular hexagonal board, as follows. The rows are numbered 1-6, and the slanted diagonals going top-left to bottom-right are labeled A-G. The black cells are not part of the board. The cell coordinates will not be present in the actual board; only the row/column labels outside the board are present.

🀄 The board is initially empty. Throughout the game, players will place pieces of their player color on the board. Each piece occupies one hex, and no piece can occupy the same hex as another piece. Players do not run out of pieces; they have an unlimited supply of them. The default colors are red and blue, but you may choose your color subject to the umpire's approval.

A bug is a connected group of pieces of the same color. The size of a bug is simply the number of pieces it contains. Two bugs are adjacent if at least one piece from a bug is adjacent to at least one piece of the bug. Two bugs are congruent if they have the same shape, allowing rotation and/or reflection.

🧬 Here, the group is taken to be "maximal"; that is, as large as possible. A connected group of 3 pieces forms a bug of size 3, but not anything smaller. It follows that two bugs can only be adjacent if they are of different colors; otherwise the two groups of pieces would have merged into a single larger bug.

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

🧠 The first turn of each player is used to set up the board. First, the starting player chooses one empty hex to be blackened; then their opponent does the same. Blackened hexes are no longer part of the board, as if they weren't on the board at all to begin with, similar to the six blackened hexes on the board.

🧠 Afterwards, turns follow this structure:

1. Grow
2. Eat

📌 1. Grow

🧠 During the grow step of your turn, you must either spawn a new bug, or enlarge an existing bug. Either of these options causes you to have an active bug that is relevant for the eat step. If you cannot do either, the game end condition has been reached; see below.

• Spawn: Place your piece on any empty hex that is not adjacent to any of your existing bugs. This creates a new bug of size 1. This new bug becomes your active bug.

• Enlarge: Place your piece on any empty hex that is adjacent to exactly one of your existing bugs. This causes the bug to increase in size. This new bug becomes your active bug. ⚠️ There is one condition: if you enlarge a bug, its new size cannot become larger than the largest bug among the remaining bugs on the board (of any color).

⚠️ Note that it is never allowed to place a piece that is adjacent to two or more of your existing bugs. This would merge them into a single bug, and have you seen two creatures in the real world merge into one?

📌 2. Eat

During the eat step of your turn, your active bug might eat the opponent's bugs to grow larger.

A capture happens when your active bug is adjacent to an opponent's bug that is congruent to the active bug. In this case, the opponent's bug is removed, and your active bug enlarges as a bonus.

🧠 While there is no choice on whether to remove the opponent's bug or not, there is a choice on how your active bug enlarges. As with the "enlarge" option in the grow step, you place your piece on an empty hex adjacent to your active bug and no other bug, to make your active bug larger in size. This might be a hex emptied after removing the opponent's bug.

⚠️ Unlike in the grow step option, you may enlarge a bug to become larger than the largest bug on the board. However, you still may not merge bugs together.

🧬 It may happen that your bug is adjacent to multiple congruent opponent's bugs. In this case, you remove them all, but you still only enlarge your active bug by one.

🧬 It may happen that, if you perform a capture, there is no legal choice for the enlarge portion. In this case, the capture is not performed. The opponent's bug remains on the board.

🧬 Due to the above rule, it's possible that two congruent non-active bugs are adjacent on the board. They don't capture each other, as only the active bug makes captures.

Captures are mandatory, and as long as it's possible to capture, you will keep capturing. The eat step ends once you can no longer capture.

👑 The game ends when one player cannot perform the grow step of their turn. That player wins, for having filled the ecosystem with so many of their bugs.

ADMINISTRATION

📌 ⏰ Timing

You have a turn timer of 1 minute and a time bank of 5 minutes.

What this means is, on your turn, you are normally given 1 minute to make your move. You may take longer than that by using your time bank; the time in excess of 1 minute is taken from your time bank, with a limit of 5 minutes. Your turn timer is refreshed every turn; you get a full 1 minute 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).

On the first turn, your submission consists of the location of the hex you wish to blacken.

For the rest of the game, your submission consists of:

• For the grow step, the location of your new piece.
• For the eat step, the locations of your pieces for the enlarge portion of captures, in order of captures.

Your submission must be a complete legal move; that is, each part of your submission must be legal, and you must make the correct number of captures, neither more nor less. If your submission is illegal for any reason, you will be informed of your first mistake (e.g. your enlarge causes your bug to merge with another, or you can still capture after the last capture), and you will need to fix that.

You may use any available tools for note-taking. However, you may not talk to other people or use any automated programs.

📌 📡 Information

Everything in this game is public information; there is nothing hidden.

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 public, but feel free to clarify.

🔺 Publicly announced, at the end of move

• What the board looks like.
• Which bugs were captured by the previous move.
• Whose turn it is.
• Whether the game ends.

CLARIFICATION

📌 Example game

Other than the initial board setup (the strange board and the initial blackening step), this is identical to how Bug is played normally.