Hat Game by marcmagus
An aperiodic abstract tile-laying game for one to six players.
Print and Play: Download the PDF, print the board and tiles, cut and punch the tiles, and play: either solo or with up to five friends!
I was inspired by the new "hat" aperiodic monotile, and particularly a variant with pipe/path decorations (see below) to make a game about delivering goods using these unusually shaped tiles to lay out a path. Initially players were attempting to connect two points or connect the start point to goals to represent delivery, but as I developed the game I found that the paths really liked to curve back on themselves in interesting ways and really didn't like to make long routes, so I decided to lean into what the shapes were doing and encourage players to attempt to better tile the plane (or interfere with other player attempts to do so). I think this made for a better game, but a consequence is that the "delivery" theme has become extremely abstract. So it goes: themes are inspiration.
In my mind the different symbols are hats the players are delivering, but clear colorblind-friendly presentation won out over whimsy there.
Tools used: * Inkscape * Libre Office * A printer, scissors, and a weird heart-shaped hole punch
Free Fonts used: * Chunk * Liberation Serif
Acknowledgements: * “Hat” aperiodic monotile paper by David Smith, Joseph Samuel Meyers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss, see https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/hat/ * “Hat” with pipe decorations originally created by Carlos Luna-Mota, see https://mathstodon.xyz/@carlos_lunamota/110171345407668765 – my tile is adapted from their printable tile available at https://www.printables.com/model/448090-aperiodic-monotile-pipes/files (CC-BY-4.0) * Triangle graph paper from https://incompetech.com/graphpaper/triangle/ * Symbol colors selected from the “Tol” colorblind-friendly palette, found at https://davidmathlogic.com/colorblind/
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/hat-game |
Ratings
| Given | 0🗳️ | 0🗨️ |
I made a quick web version of the game to play for those of us with limited access to a printer (with permission from marcmagus). It doesn't track score, valid placement, or anything like that. It's just placing, flipping, and rotating the pieces on the board. You'll still have to read and follow the rules.
https://thebooksnail.itch.io/hat-game
I would still recommend printing it out on card stock for those who can since it can be more enjoyable as a physical game, especially for multiplayer.
If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1814621596?t=3h13m15s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin
In my play, I rarely did knots and the ones I did do were simple small circles. Counting up the points was surprisingly difficult due to losing track of what I counted.
For solo play it would be nice if there was a score range in the rules to compare of how well you did. Example: diff score of 1-10 novice, 11-15 advanced, 16-20 expert, 20+ master (just guessing at numbers)
I had to read the rules a couple of times to get it (which is normal for board games with me), I want to say the scoring example was well done and very helpful.
Alternative gameplay idea, place all tiles without gaps. Why is this so hard?! Interesting to see how few flipped pieces used to get it to work, trying to add more always resulted in gaps.
Really cool to play with this tile though, made for very interesting spatial stuff when trying to figure out where a good placement would be =).