Sam Gentle.com

Robochess

Robochess sketch

Yesterday's gaming dalliance reminded me of an old idea I've had kicking around for a while. It's a turn-based strategy game similar to chess in that it's on a grid and you have various pieces that move, but that's pretty much the whole similarity. It's more similar to programming battle games like Core War, but I really like the name Robochess.

Each piece on the board is actually a robot, only able to make moves according to its programming. That programming is done in a fairly simple visual programming language built into the game. Each instruction costs a certain amount of Instruction, which is a limited resource in the game. Robots can move, add Instruction to themselves or adjacent robots, as well as mine Instruction from themselves or adjacent robots. There's no attacking, rather you beat the other robots by either mining all their instructions out, or turning them evil by changing their programming.

And actually everything in the game is a robot. The junk tiles are just robots with no useful instructions, the walls are wallbots that just do nothing, and your main robot is just a robot with a special "do what the player wants" instruction. If that instruction is mined out, you lose. Alternate victory conditions could include being the first to mine a particular victory instruction out of one of the junk piles, or capture all the instructions available on the map.

I'm sure there'd still be some complexities to solve, but I think the core mechanic of a strategy game with programmable pieces would be pretty fun.