Elder Dance
A downloadable waltz
Oh no! The Wise Elders of the Grassland Gang and the Badland Bunch, along with their entourage, are having a chance encounter at the border between their territories while trying to sneakily attack the other! Both groups wish to get past the other, or at least show their might to the opposing Wise Elder. This calls for a ritual dance battle!
This is a 2-player abstract boardgame about trying to surprise the opposing group's Elder or trying to get past them. The gameplay is fairly simple and revolves around both players having to maintain a very strict formation while maneuvering through the board. The PDF explains the rules and provides illustrations for how to play and setup the game. The original version of the game was heavily stalemateable, so version 1.2 heavily revised the rules.
Download
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Development log
- Version 1.2cJul 19, 2024
- Elder Dance is back!Jul 06, 2024
- Version 1.1Sep 01, 2023
Comments
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Out of sheer curiosity, what board & pieces did you use to prototype this? I have a suspicion…
I'm pretty sure this one wasn't prototyped on boards/pieces from existing games but rather using a crude handmade board & some random pieces I had bought from spielematerial.de or elsewhere. It came to existence around the same time as Kurote and I think I used the same components for both? Hard to be sure though, it's been over a year.
Fair enough! I was so sure it had to be an Onitama situation haha, given that that game is also 5×5 and has a master and four students per player.
"When a unit moves to a space that has opposing units on one or more of the 8 spaces.surrounding it, those opposing units are pushed away from the moved unit,provided there's an empty space in the direction the opposing unit would move to."
If a unit move several steps through a line,will all space the unit passed on the line needs to judge the push?
I mean ,if I move one units two steps,may I pushed opposing units two times in two space I moved.
Oh yeah, great point! The push happens only around the space the unit stops at, not on every space it moves through. I'll clarify the text.
YEEEEEEEESSSSS
"If a unit moves to a position where the opponent's Wise Elder is orthogonally adjacent to the moved unit, the controller of that unit wins the game."
Does that mean who is winner only depends on the potional relation between the last moved unit and the opponent's WE, none of the other units'business?
I love the rules for the crowd movement. Really creative!
"If a player has 2 non-exhausted units, only one of which has a valid move to make, that player must spend their turn moving that unit, and then on their next turn rest, as described above."
Pretty sure this doesn't say what you want it to say. What if making that one move frees up the other piece to move? Do they still have to not move it and then rest the following turn? Instead, what if moving the free one doesn't unblock the other, but then the opponent's turn frees up the stuck piece? Is resting still forced? I don't expect anyone would think those reasonable or intended, but that's what the rule is saying.
Also, I'd add in a statement saying it's explicitly okay for a player with only one non-exhausted piece that can move at the start of their turn to move just that one piece and not be saddled with having to rest the following turn. (After all, the first player's third turn pretty much has to do this.)
Those are fair points! The first thing was meant to concern cases where a unit is in the middle of the player's formation so that they can't move anywhere no matter how the opponent changes their formation. I'll add a clarification.
There should already be a statement towards the end of the rules stating that the player may move only one unit on their turn if they have only one non-exhausted unit left; I guess I could add an extra point about it earlier in the rules to make it clearer.