Final Project Preliminary Concept – Togyzkumalak

CONCEPT

For our final project, I want to create a version of the Kazakh traditional board game, Togyzkumalak (transl. “nine pebbles”). The game is played on a board consisting of two rows of nine pits each, with 2 larger pits (storehouses) between the two rows. The objective of the game is to capture more pebbles than the opponent (-> high score). This is a two-player game.

game setup for reference

Each player will be using three buttons connected through Arduino to p5 to control their movements in the game (left, right, enter). On p5 will be the visualization of the board. Players will use buttons to choose which pit to take the pebbles from.

The rules of the game are (with consideration of Arduino):

1) The game begins with 9 pebbles in each pit. Each player will be given 1 minute to make a move.

2) The first player chooses one of the 9 pits on their side using the “left”, “right”, and “enter” buttons on their Arduino.

3) All of the pebbles from the chosen pit are distributed evenly over the pits in an anti-clockwise direction.

        • If there is more than 1 pebble in the pit, the first pebble is put back into the pit it was taken from.
        • If there is only 1 pebble in the pit, the first pebble is moved to the next pit in the anti-clockwise direction.
anti-clockwise movement of the pebbles

4) If the last pebble to be moved is put into one of the opponent’s pits and the total of the pebbles in that pit is an even number, they get moved to the player’s storehouse and add to their total score.

moving pebbles from the opponent’s pit if the total in the said pit is an even number

5) opponent’s pit can be “conquered”, meaning that all the pebbles that ever fall on that pit will move to the player’s storehouse. However, there are some more conditions that need to be followed to do that (it will be checked by p5 automatically):

        • the total of the pebbles in the last pit you’ve visited must be 3;
        • the pit shouldn’t be the rightmost pit of the player (pit #9);
        • you must not already have a “conquered” pit;
        • if your opponent already has “conquered” a pit on your side, you can’t “conquer” a pit that is opposite to it;

6) If one of the players doesn’t have any more pebbles in any of their 9 pits, the opponent’s pits are emptied into their storehouse.

7) The one with the biggest score wins.

CREATIVITY

To add something new to the game, chance games will be played between the turns:

        • after every 3rd turn, a player will be given a chance to roll a die in the game. The die will have both negative ((-3) to (-1)) and positive numbers (1 to 3). The number shown will be added to the score of the player.
        • after every 7th turn, a player will be given a choice between three cards shown backward. One of the cards will be empty, one will have a challenge, and the last one will have a bonus. Drawing an empty card will safely return you to the game. Drawing a challenge card will make decrease your turn time to 30s for the next two turns. Drawing a bonus card will add 1 more minute to your turn time for the next two turns.

POSSIBLE CHALLENGES

I think I will have a difficult time implementing the game logic. Another thing I usually have issues with is checking the time (setting up a timer). I also need to think of the way the transitions between different states of the game to make it look animated and not mechanical.

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