Trippples
Introduction
Tripples (BGG) is a board game from the 1970s.
It is played on an 8x8 grid, and each tile on that grid (except the corner starting tiles, and four blank tiles) contain three arrows. The three arrows each point in one of eight directions (up, down, left, right; and diagonally between those). There are therefore 56 tiles, and 56 unique combinations of arrows - so each tile is unique when placed in the correct orientation.
Tiles are placed on the board, and depending on the variant of the rules being played this can either happen before the game starts (face up, either randomly or players take turns to draw and place tiles as they choose), before the game starts (face down, randomly), or over the course of the game as an alternative player action, instead of moving their playing piece.
Players start in adjacent corners and attempt to cross the board to the diagonally-opposite corner before their opponents can do so.
Players take turns, and may move their playing piece one square per turn. The interesting thing about this game is that the direction they can move is limited to the directions indicated by the arrows underneath their opponent's playing piece.
The rules are ambivalent regarding how the blank pieces are treated - either you can't go there at all, you get a second move if you can go there, or (house rule) your opponent can choose to move in any direction if you land there.
The Question
I thought it might be interesting to puzzle out optimum tactics for this game, and was hoping to get some further thoughts here (hopefully this type of more open question is allowed?). If we need something more specific, perhaps we can be aiming towards an optimum board layout such that the number of moves for one player is minimised while the moves for the other player is maximised?
My initial thoughts are:
- If playing a variant where the player has control of the tiles, place tiles around your opponents endpoint such that they point into your own
- If playing a variant where the player has control of the tiles, place tiles around your endpoint such that they point away from your opponents
