Ziege
Outsmart the horde in a battle of wits.
Play as a team of scientists tasked with getting the cure to safety after an outbreak has taken over the lab. Outsmart the infected as you navigate the board, making strategic moves to ensure the cure's survival in this strategy-driven board game.
Will you escape with the cure?
Overview and Objectives
Ziege is played on a 7x7 grid of squares.
Accompanying the board are 12 Infected and 8 Scientists, plus an additional Head Scientist that holds the Cure.
Ziege is a game of unequal sides and different objectives.
The Scientists aim to escort the Head Scientist to an edge square on the board
The Infected aim to capture the Head Scientist before he escapes to an edge with the Cure.
How to Play
All pieces move like the rook in chess; in a straight line for as many empty squares as the player chooses.
Pieces cannot hop over other pieces and cannot move diagonally.
A piece is captured when trapped between two opposing pieces.
A captured piece is immediately removed from the board.
It is possible to capture multiple pieces at once.
Lastly, a piece can safely move to a square between two of the opponents pieces without being captured.
Credits
Ziege was written and designed by Ross McCormick.
The music was composed by Ross McCormick.
The game is written entirely in Pico-8.
I like it a lot, thank you.
I'll like it even better if you could add randomness in AI moves.
Because when you have found a winning combination you can apply it to each game and that's really sad.
For example you can win the "normal" difficulty with a 6 moves combinaison like :
You could also add obstacles on the board or different pawn placement to create different starting combinations.
once again thank you.
Thank you so much @EBArtSoft! I'm really glad you enjoyed the game, and I really appreciate your thoughtful feedback.
I'm looking into adding some randomness to the AI's moves by implementing an Opening Book. This will help to address the issue by enabling the AI to vary its moves during the opening phase of the game, making each game feel less predictable and (hopefully) more challenging!
Liked it a lot. I somehow got my 1st win at max difficulty after losing three times on normal. Now I want to play as the zombies... Except an AI could stalemate and wait for you to let it win, witch would not be fun at all.
Oh, I made myself a laminated cardboard version and added it to the board game travel folder.
Thanks @RealShadowCaster! Congrats on taking down the hard bot on your first try, that’s no small feat! I intended to make playing as the zombies a possibility, but unfortunately the AI didn’t play all that well with the scientist pieces so it would have required a lot of tweaks to make it fun!
Amazing to hear you’ve made a laminated cardboard version of the game! What an ace idea! I’ve still got the paper-prototype I made out of cardboard and stones when I was playtesting the game - your version sounds much more sophisticated!
@rmcco, it's super easy and cheap to make board games with a printer and a laminator : desing your pdf with the board and the figurines, print on white cardboard, laminate, cut the board, rules, game content list and pieces with scissors, and you're done.
Big advantage is it doesn't takes much room. I have a travel game folder with 50+ games.
A drawback is that wind can move the pieces, so your stone version would be much better for outdoors play.
Small advantage is games are mostly water proof.
Drawback depending on the game : it's easy to slide pieces on the board, but hard to pick them up and put them back someplace else : the static electricity tends to make the pieces stick. When that happens, picking up a piece tends to make you pick the entire board and make non sticked pieces fall. Early knight moves with the chess board are problematic for example. Checkers work OK, but you have to get used to slide around pieces you capture rather than over. Getting captured pieces out of the board is not hard for checkers : you slide to the border using the unoccupied diagonals.
Thankfully, this problem is non existant for ziege as there are no diagonal moves and no jumping, so every move is a slide with no risk of bumping another piece, just perfect for the media. If a captured piece is surrounded and hard to remove, you can rotate it sideways to indicate it's dead and remove it later. You can alternatively use the colored little men from Carcassone, if playing at home.
Got around playing this absolute gem and not gonna lie I enjoyed it just as much I thought I would. Played chess a lot as a kid and a lot of chess-like asymmetrical games nowadays never really got around Tafl, but glad I experienced it here first!
As a first time player the CPU levels feel just right, not sure how it would challenge experienced players, but from my perspective they are nailed down really nicely!
Sound and graphical presentation is clean and well done!
I really love the game so far, but the 4-5 times I’ve been 1 move away from winning the AI freezes and won’t take their last move to then allow me to take my final winning move. It just hangs on “The Infected Are Moving”. Is that a known bug or am I doing something wrong. Downloaded it this morning, so think I’m on the latest released version.
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