Polypods 2022

Polypods are creatures of the snub-square grid. They are composed of connected pieces of 2 types: core and feet.

Feet are the extremities; that is they are either: 1. Those pieces with only one friendly neighbor, or 2. Those with exactly 2 friendly neighbors that together fill the points of a small triangle of the grid.

Core are the other pieces that connect all the feet together. Cores are always toxic to the feet of adjacent polypods.

The game of Polypods is about growing and protecting polypods of your color so that you have the most polypod cores when the game ends.

Life and Death: A polypod lives when it has at least as many feet as cores. It dies when it does not.

When a piece is added to a polypod, any adjacent feet that are no longer at the extremities, immediately convert to core.

In like manner, when a polypod loses one or more feet though contact with the core of another polypod, any cores that thus become exposed as extremeties, immediately revert to being feet.

Play: The Green player starts by placing a piece onto the empty board. Play alternates. On your turn you

1. Place a new piece on any empty space on the board, where it will not cause any of your own pieces to be removed. 2. Update your polypods. 3. If any new cores in your polypod are next to the feet of any other polypods, those feet replaced with 'remains' markers that restrict future play at those locations. 4. Every opponent's polypod that lost any feet is updated. 5. If the updated polypods are no longer alive, they are entirely removed from the board.

Play proceeds until both players pass consecutively. Then the game is scored by counting the number of cores of each color.

Ties are broken by counting the number of empty locations that are only adjacent to one's own color to see who has more.

An additional rule is only relevant for play with more than 2 players: New polypods must not be started next to the feet of more than one color of polypod.