I recently discovered the Banana Ball exhibition baseball games, and their custom ruleset, featuring limitations, crowd participation mechanics and special roles among other things.

This reminded me of (and it’s an derivative game rather than an alternate ruleset) Three-Sided Football, which, among other things, is a Situationist, philosophical and sociological rabbit-hole.

I also recall dark chess, a chess variant with line-of-sight mechanics, to emulate the fog of war. There are thousands of chess variants stretching back a thousand years, this is just one of the first I learned of which really interested me.

  • makeshiftreaper@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    Since most people are unbeatable at tic-tac-toe I have a variant I like to play that has nested boards. Sometimes I call it tic-tic-tac-toe-toe or nested tic-tac-toe. Here’s some shitty MS Paint to explain (red numbers indicate the board, the blue the squares on the board as they correlate to bigger board):

    Rules:

    • You have a tic-tac-toe board where each square is itself another tic-tac-toe board
    • The outer board is numbered 1-9 going from top left to bottom right
    • Each sub-board is also numbered the same way, 1-9, left to right
    • When you play on board, the square you play in determines the board that your opponent must play in next
      • For example: if you play the middle left square (4), on the bottom right board (Red 9), then your opponent must play on the middle left board next (Red 4)
    • Winning a sub-game wins that square on the overall board
      • You may tie a sub-game by filling a board, those squares are dead and nobody gets them
    • Getting tic-tac-toe on the overall board gets you a win
    • You cannot play on a finished board
    • If a play would force a player to play on a finished board then that player may play anywhere instead

    It sounds confusing on paper but once you draw the board and play like 2 turns people immediately get what’s going on. It’s really funny to observers because they watch people make “obviously” bad plays on these disjointed boards and they have no idea what’s going on

    I also once nerd sniped an intro programming class because I thought making this in the command line would be a fun project for one of my intro assignments. It turns out updating and printing nested python lists can get very confusing very quickly