Abstract: the abstract game

Recently Greater Than Games had a contest on their site for a ______: the ______ game contest. It was a cool exercise, and while I'm fairly certain if I had won I would have heard about it by now I'm not going to discuss any of my submissions in this post on the off chance that I'm one of the finalist. I submitted 4 games and when I'm certain I'm out of the running I'll likely discuss them at length. The contest was for a game they would be kick starting for April fools so I'm not 100% sure if it would be appropriate to discuss the games I submitted publicly before then.

Instead I'm going to talk about a game idea I came up with to late for the contest. Because I think it would have been a good fit for the contest it's working title is Abstract: the Abstract Game.

Component wise the game consists of 50 bridge cards. 36 of those cards are board cards which are randomly placed into a 6x6 grid. The remaining cards are the player pieces. These have one of 7 icons and are double sided with one player controlling each side.

As shown above, the board cards have 6 icons and 4 movement grids printed along their edges. The icons represent player pieces and the grids indicate how a movement pattern. The two taken together tell the players how their piece will move if it is on that card. And perspective matters. Each movement pattern is associated with the icon "above" it from the players perspective. And if the piece has an icon that doesn't have a pattern indicated then it may move one space forward (ie towards your opponent).

You win if either all the pieces left in the board are yours or if you opponent can't move on their turn (ie all off their pieces are on your back row AND their icons don't have a movement pattern on the card they are on). In the above example, the red piece would move by leaping orthogonally and Flipping pieces that it leapt over. The blue piece however moves like a rook in chess.

Anyone interested in testing this idea out?