Avid go player with some basic familiarity with other classic abstract strategy games here.
There are some interesting ideas here but it feels like it's lacking a driving force pushing the game forward. It seems like the players can just keep rearranging their pieces in their own area refusing to engage and risk capture. Retreat seems to often be a sensible strategy.
Perhaps this is most similar to chess but in chess if your opponent just moves back and forth you can easily line up an unstoppable attack while they are messing around. It's unclear here how to avoid the situation where the opponents just dance around each other making sure they never get captured.
Could also compare to Stratego where there just isn't anywhere to retreat to, forcing players to engage.
Other abstracts like go and Othello are always adding pieces to the board so there's no way to stall or slow play the game.
Thank you for the feedback! I was thinking about the force forward mechanic and as it exists in mentioned game. In Pressure stepping back is defensive until reaching the edge of the board. The biggest problem with the current design I have with endgame when it's balanced to 1 token left on each side. This could be a draw, because it's in most of the cases is not possible to lead to surrounding the leftover token. With 2 to 1 left still (depending on a board setup) it's possible to dance around to avoid capture.
Do you have some proposal that would work in this game?
Avid go player with some basic familiarity with other classic abstract strategy games here.
There are some interesting ideas here but it feels like it's lacking a driving force pushing the game forward. It seems like the players can just keep rearranging their pieces in their own area refusing to engage and risk capture. Retreat seems to often be a sensible strategy.
Perhaps this is most similar to chess but in chess if your opponent just moves back and forth you can easily line up an unstoppable attack while they are messing around. It's unclear here how to avoid the situation where the opponents just dance around each other making sure they never get captured.
Could also compare to Stratego where there just isn't anywhere to retreat to, forcing players to engage.
Other abstracts like go and Othello are always adding pieces to the board so there's no way to stall or slow play the game.
Thank you for the feedback! I was thinking about the force forward mechanic and as it exists in mentioned game. In Pressure stepping back is defensive until reaching the edge of the board. The biggest problem with the current design I have with endgame when it's balanced to 1 token left on each side. This could be a draw, because it's in most of the cases is not possible to lead to surrounding the leftover token. With 2 to 1 left still (depending on a board setup) it's possible to dance around to avoid capture. Do you have some proposal that would work in this game?