Xero-G
| Xero-G | ||
|---|---|---|
| Designed by Kat Costa | ||
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| A quick, accessible game of spaceships and strategy | ||
| Players: | 2 | |
| Length: | Fast | |
| Complexity: | Medium | |
| Trios per color: | 4 | |
| Number of colors: | 1 | |
| - - - - - - Other equipment - - - - - - | ||
| 6x6 grid | ||
| Setup time: | 1 minute | |
| Playing time: | 3 minutes - 10 minutes | |
| Strategy depth: | Medium | |
| Random chance: | None | |
| Game mechanics: | Perfect information | |
| Theme: | Space | |
| BGG Link: | Xero-G | |
| Status: Complete (v1.0), Year released: 2019 | ||
Xero-G[edit | edit source]
Xero-G is a perfect-information strategy game with a sci-fi theme. Players take on the role of spaceship pilots who use fancy maneuvering to reach the opponent's base. Looney pyramids represent ships, and a 6×6 board represents the space between two warring planets. Released July 2019.
What You will Need[edit | edit source]
12 Looney Pyramids in any color or mix of colors.
Any 6×6 grid or four Martian Coasters |
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Goal[edit | edit source]
Maneuver a spaceship onto your opponent’s alien base.
Premise[edit | edit source]
You and an alien race have been at war for ages, so long that each of your planets began manufacturing fighter ships with artificial intelligence to do the fighting for them. But cosmic rays gradually caused bit-flips in all the fighter ships’ software, turning them into mindless drones hurtling through space. You are the last trained pilot your planet has in this war, and it’s your job to take whatever spaceship you can come by and fly it into the fray. You will often jump from your current ship into others, reprogramming their coordinates to help your strategic position. Plan things right, and you will finally be able to enter the enemy base and put an end to the war.
Setup[edit | edit source]
| Give each player 2 larges, 2 mediums, and 2 smalls. Each player arranges these pyramids on the row closest to them, in whatever configuration seems good. Players may use any two objects to represent their planetary bases, or players may simply agree to remember that the bases are one step off the end of the board. The six pyramids initially provided to each player are not "owned" by those players, they're just the ships that happen to be available to fly during the first few turns. All of the pyramids on the board may end up being flown by either player as the game progresses. |  |
Start[edit | edit source]
The player who has most recently read a work of science fiction goes first. Turns alternate thereafter. On your turn, find the row closest to you that contains one or more pyramids. This is your home row. (At the beginning of the game, this will be the back row.) Choose a pyramid from this row as the ship you’d like to fly.
How Ships Move[edit | edit source]
- 1) A ship must move exactly the number of spaces as it has pips. Ships move orthogonally only, but are allowed to change direction with each space.
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- 2) Spaces that a ship passes through must be empty, but the space the ship lands on at the end of its movement can be occupied. Landing your ship in an empty space ends your turn.
- 3) If your ship lands on another piece, you get a choice between two actions:
- Rocket Boost — Count the pips of the piece that your ship landed on. Your ship then gets a boost of exactly that many extra spaces. As with regular movement, any spaces the ship passes through while being boosted must be empty, and spaces the ship lands on may be occupied. Rocket Boosts can be chained and/or can end with a Reprogram Coordinates action.
- Reprogram Coordinates — Leave your ship in the space where it landed and pick up the piece it landed on. Place that piece in any empty space on the board—except beyond your opponent’s home row. This ends your turn.
Rocket Boost Reprogram Coordinates 
This ship gets four successive boosts before ending in an empty space 
This ship has landed on a medium pyramid. Instead of taking a boost of two movement, the player has chosen to leave his original ship there and relocate the medium pyramid to an empty square of his choice. The only prohibited square would be beyond the opponent's home row.
- 4) Your ship can pass through the same square more than once in a single turn, but it is not allowed to double directly back on itself or retrace its path. To understand this, it helps to visualize the four sides of any given square as being made of four separate gates, each of which can be crossed only once. All the gates start out black (open) at the beginning of each turn. But as a ship passes from one square to another, the dividing line between the two turns red (closed). Look at this example. For simplicity, assume the ship has picked up sufficient boost power from pieces not shown in these diagrams.
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You now know everything there is to know about movement.
Game End[edit | edit source]
When one player has flown a ship into his opponent’s alien base, landing there with no leftover moves, the game ends immediately and that player is the winner.
Rules Clarifications[edit | edit source]
- Moving off the 6×6 grid to land on the enemy base counts as exactly one space of movement, no matter which square in the end-row the ship departs from.
- If you find that it’s not legal to move any of the pieces in your home row, then select a pyramid from the row next-closest to you.
- The board must have changed at the end of your turn.
Credits[edit | edit source]
- Xero-G is based on the excellent 1985 abstract game Gyges by Claude Leroy. One important difference: in Xero-G, victories are sudden and final. No renouncing victory because your opponent made a mistake. This is space-war! We use all situations to our advantage. This cuts playing time down to under 10 minutes.
- Theme and rules write by Kat Costa