My June One Game a Month project is called Interdiction. It’s a two player board game based on Tic-Tac-Toe, but with a twist. The goal of the game is to get a higher score than your opponent. Placing five of your tiles in a row grants you ten bonus points and usually, but not always, results in a win. However, it’s technically possible for a player to get enough points to win the match even if they aren’t the ones to finish the game with five in a row.
As you play, you place various tiles on the board. You always have a randomly generated queue of three tiles to choose from. The tiles you may encounter are:
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Supply - +1 point
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Supply x2 - +2 points
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Force Dispersal - +1 point, place two tiles
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Siege - +2 points, OR steal an enemy tile (except Fortress) and get +1 point
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Fortress - +0 points, can never be stolen
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Shuffle - +0 points, shuffle your queue with three new tiles
Nick Vecellio of Beardsounds was awesome enough to do the sound design for the game.
For next month’s One Game a Month project I want to do an enhanced version of this game by adding single player AI. When I decided this I had no idea where to start. Now I have a very vague idea. Some of the reading material thus far has been on the minimax algorithm: http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com/programming/minimax/
Right now I’d be happy to just have a system where the AI places any of its tiles anywhere at random and then hands the turn back over to the player. I don’t even care if it calculates move values yet. Wish me luck.
