Slyde

About

Slyde is an abstract strategy game for two players. It’s a bloodless fight where the goal is to bring together as many tiles as possible. Each player controls a set of tiles, Black or White. The tiles can appear in two states: fixed or mobile. At the beginning, the entire board (8x8 or 10x10) is covered in mobile tiles, which alternate in color to create a checker pattern. White starts the game, then players move alternately. During a move, a player swaps one of his mobile tiles with an adjacent mobile tile of his opponent. The player’s tile then becomes fixed, by placing a disk on it, but the opponent’s tile remains free. Symmetric play can be quite a nuisance, so there’s a special rule to discourage it. If a board is in a symmetric position, the next player to move can change the state (mobile/fixed) of any tile regardless of color instead of doing a standard swap. This does not apply to the first move. The game ends when there are no more legal moves. The player who controls the biggest group (defined by orthogonal connectivity of like-colored tiles) is the winner. If the two biggest groups are equal in size, the second-biggest groups are compared, and so on. Slyde is the first specimen of a new family of games. In fact, a few designers have already proposed their own interpretations of the same concepts of swapping, fixing and coalescing – much like there are many variants of Draughts or Chess. —description from the publisher

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