Triluminary
| Triluminary | ||
|---|---|---|
| Jeremiah Wittevrongel | ||
| In Triluminary, players battle for influence over the Grey Council. | ||
| Players: | ||
| Length: | unknown | |
| Complexity: | Medium | |
| Trios per color: | 5 | |
| Number of colors: | 3 | |
| - - - - - - Other equipment - - - - - - | ||
| Hexagonal board | ||
| Setup time: | 3 minutes | |
| Strategy depth: | Medium | |
| Random chance: | None | |
| Theme: | Babylon 5 | |
| Status: Initial design (v1.0), Year released: 2005 | ||
Triluminary is an abstract strategy game for two players. You and your opponent are both influential Minbari museum curators in the year 2358. In honor of the 100th anniversary of the opening of Babylon 5 station, you are both putting together exhibits that honor the memory of Babylon 5. Each of you would like to have one of the Triluminaries as part of the exhibit, but the Grey Council will only permit one of them to be on display.
Your goal is to win the influence of 2 of the 3 castes, and thereby convince the Grey Council to allow your museum to include a Triluminary in your exhibit.
Status
Under development
This game is currently under development, in the Initial Design stage. Feedback is strongly encouraged! Feel free to give comments on game design or structure on the talk page.
What you need
- 3 Icehouse Stashes.
- A Hexagonal board, with 37 spaces. The board from Gipf is the correct shape and is large enough.
- 2 players
Setup
Each player takes a stash, and places it in front of himself, off of the board. Each of the pyramids in the third stash represents a unit of influence with one of the 3 castes, according to its size. These influence pyramids are stacked up and placed next to the board, in reach of both players.
Initially, place 6 of the influence pyramids (2 of each size) upright at the vertices of the board, so that the pyramids of the same size are directly opposite each other. Influence pyramids are always placed upright on the board, while all other pyramids are always lying down.
Figure 1: Initial Setup for Triluminary, on a Gipf board.
In Figure 1, the yellow pyramids are the influence pyramids, while the Blue and Red pyramids belong to the players.
Play
Use any mutually agreeable method to determine a starting player. When Jeremiah plays the game, he prefers a method that deals with Babylon 5 in some way, but it's entirely up to you.
On each turn, players push one of their own pieces onto the board. Pieces always enter from the edge of the board, and travel in a single direction. Small pieces can move one space, medium pieces can move up to two spaces, and large pieces can move up to three. The piece being pushed onto the board is always lying down, oriented in one of the six possible directions. It can be oriented in any of the 6 directions when it is pushed onto the board, and need not point in the same direction it is being pushed.
When a piece is pushed onto the board, it can push other pieces in the direction it is moving. Any number of pieces can be pushed in this fashion. Non-influence pyramids can be pushed completely off the board. If this happens, they go back to their owner, and can be pushed back onto the board in a later turn. Influence pyramids may never be pushed off the board, which might prematurely end a push.
After pushing a new piece onto the board, you may optionally reorient any one piece of your own color which was pushed by the newly added piece.
The two photos below give an example of pushing a piece onto the board.
Figure 2: About to push a large blue piece onto the board
In Figure 2, blue is about to push a large piece onto the board. As it is a large piece, blue can push up to three spaces, which he does in this example. The green arrow shows the direction of the push.
Figure 3: After pushing a large blue piece onto the board
Figure 3 shows the board after the large blue piece has been pushed onto the board. The large yellow influence pyramid was pushed three spaces, while the small red was pushed one space.
Winning Influence
In order to win an influence pyramid, you must set up a chain of 4 or more of your own pieces on the board that point at the influence pyramid. Piece 1 points at piece 2, which points at piece 3, which points at piece 4, which points at the influence pyramid. The pieces can point any distance, so long as there are no intervening pyramids of any color to break the chain.
Figure 4: A chain of blue pieces
In Figure 4, the blue pieces form a chain of 4, pointing at the medium piece in the middle. The red pieces do not form a chain of 4, since there are blue and yellow pieces in between them.
When such a chain of 4 pieces is created, the influence pyramid they point at is captured. The capturing player takes the influence pyramid, then removes all pieces involved in the chain (even if more than 4) from the board. The opposing player then places a new influence pyramid of the same size as the one just captured on the board, in any vacant space. Once both of these actions are completed, in this order, the capture is considered resolved.
If there are no more influence pyramids of the same size as the one just captured, then no new influence pyramid is placed, and the capture is resolved immediately after the pieces in the chain are removed.
Once a capture is resolved, the board is again evaluated, and any other captures present (even if they were not present before resolution of the last capture) are resolved.
The player whose turn it currently is chooses the order of resolution in case more than one capture is present simultaneously. Captures are always resolved sequentially, and it is quite possible for the resolution of one capture to create one or more new captures, or to cause captures that were present to no longer be valid captures.
Winning the Game
If a player captures a total of at least 3 influence pyramids (a majority) of a single size, he wins the influence of one of the 3 castes. When a player wins the influence of 2 of the 3 castes, the Grey Council allows him to display the Triluminary in his exhibit, and he thus wins the game.
In other words, the goal of the game is to capture any of the following 3 combinations of influence pyramids:
- 3 small influence pyramids and 3 medium influence pyramids
- 3 medium influence pyramids and 3 large influence pyramids
- 3 small influence pyramids and 3 large influence pyramids
Credits and Copyright
 This game is licensed under a Creative_Commons License and is copyrighted © 2005 by me, Jeremiah Wittevrongel |