BattlePaths

Here is a simple, short and fun game for 2 players. It takes just a few minutes per match so best played "Winner out of.." 3, 5, 10 or whatever amount of games you agree upon. You take turns by passing the mouse. If you ever played Battle Ships then you'll be at home with Battle Paths. The idea of the game is very similar and so is the game name - not by coincidence.

Battle Paths has 2 boards: red and blue and you decide who takes which color. There are 2 stages to the game: stage 1 - setting up the boards and stage 2 - the battle. The red player always starts first in both - the setup and the battle. Switch colors if you want to take turns at who starts first.

Stage 1 - the setup.
The red player clicks 'start' and sets up his board first without the blue player looking. Then the blue player sets up his board without the red player looking. You set a path of any shape and amount of tiles (40 in total) starting at the orange tile and finishing with a green tile. The fun part comes as you add extra dead end paths to totally mislead your opponent. You can use less than all 40 tiles. By clicking 'finish' again you change the location of the green tile to the last tile set. You can undo your moves by clicking set tiles. You can even start from scratch by clicking 'reset'. Once the red player is happy with his setup he clicks 'switch' and the blue player sets up his board. Once he too is happy with his setup he clicks 'play' for the battle to begin. The fun of the game is to see how much of a devious setup you came up with to have totally misguided your opponent and how well you guess at his setup to hit his green tile.

Stage 2 - the battle.
The red player starts first and you take turns. If you score a hit you continue until a miss. With each miss the highlight of the boards is switched to indicate whose turn it is and which board is being played. The red player takes shots on the blue board and the blue player takes shots on the red board.

There is only 1 rule to keep: when setting up don't leave abandoned island-type structures on the board. The paths must be built so that tiles are adjacent to each other.

You can watch a demo of the game below.



You can download it here.


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What a great idea for a game!

I watched on the video to see it in action and I was quite enthralled by it. The immediate changeovers after a miss were quite exciting! It's got a great competitive element too, especially with the opportunity to make your own devious paths to try and trick your opponent.

I imagine there could be a single player version with randomly generated paths, although I guess that would make it too much like a standard minefield game.

I guesse it's the human factor which gives that competitve adrenalin, especially with simple games like this one. 

The 1 player version which I have played so many times testing the game is all about setting up the 2 boards and then immediately forgetting what the setups were!

Making the game work was not too hard. So I decided to make things more difficult for myself and incorporate into the game a move validating mechanism. Now I have made myself a challenge and maybe someone can help me with figuring out how to go about it. 

Checking if a tile is placed properly works fine. It's when removing a tile I don't know how to check if the remaining structure is intact or not. 

Example

 

In the above example, after removing 2 tiles, it became impossible to hit the green tile since shots are limited to paths uncovered till now - starting with the yellow start tile - and you can't take wild shots all over the place (the game would become ridiculous trying to hit that 1 tile somewhere - you wouldn't then need paths).

I managed to write a simple routine to check for a single lone tile. It kicks in when clicking the "switch" or "play" buttons. 

I don't know how to go about secluded clusters of tiles detached from paths.

Any thoughts on this?


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