Flipping Symmetry – A Godot Wild Jam 47 Entry

Flipping Symmetry is an experimental digital implementation of a board game concept. The game has two main phases.

Phase One – Tile Placement

Each player gets 18 tiles with a red face and a blue face. Each tile has a variety of arrows and actions on each face, mirrored on the X axis. The players take turns placing tiles in a way that they think will be most advantageous to themselves.

Phase Two – Area Control

Once the tiles have been placed, the game moves into the area control phase. Players get 3 action points per turn and can flip a tile for 1AP (action point), rotate a tile for 2AP or place a pawn. If a tile is flipped or rotated, all adjacent tiles that have arrows pointing to them will be flipped, rotated or swap places with that tile.

The goal of this phase is at the end of your turn, you want to have flipped as many orthogonally adjacent tiles as possible to your colour (player 1 is blue, player 2 is red).

Pawns

Players get 5 pawns that they can place on the board. They get 3 Holders, which prevent tiles being moved, 1 Bruiser which knocks another pawn off a space and 1 Diplomat that prevents tiles being moved only as a result of another tile being moved (so it can still be flipped as a main action).

Holder – 1AP

Bruiser – 2AP

Diplomat – 2AP

Scoring

Tiles that aren’t touching another of the same colour are not scored. If at least 2 adjacent tiles (except diagonally) have the same colour, each tile is scored, 2 for 2 tiles, 3 for 3 tiles, etc. Both players score on each turn.

Red player scores 25, blue player scores 8 and has 2 tiles not scored.
Example Scoring – Red controls most of the board for 25 points, blue scores just 8 and misses 2 points due to single tile islands.

The game ends after 20 turns (10 turns per player) or when one player gets at least 250 points.

Controls

Left Click – Flip Tile

Right Click – Rotate Tile

Space – Switch flipping (X/Y) and rotating (clockwise/anti-clockwise) direction

Future Developments

The game is very much in an early prototype stage. I was originally designed to rapidly prototype the concept for a physical board game. I do worry that this might turn out to be a digital-only game but I would like to experiment with it in the real world.

  • I would like to give the game a theme, if possible, I have some ideas.
  • Allow players to choose the order of daisy chained tile movements (currently these happen simultaneously)
  • Add mobile-friendly controls
  • Balancing of the action point costs.
  • Improve the tutorial.
  • Improve the AI player.
  • Fix implementation of some of the pawns.
  • Perhaps swap the costs and number of Diplomats and Holders.
  • Perhaps remove the turn limit.
  • General polish.

Please give the game a go and see if you have any suggestions or if you think the game should continue development.

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