3 Quarters
Every player in 3 Quarters has eight quarter circles, and almost any move you make can hand points to somebody else.
I made the game in August 2022 to warm up a class before a writing or design studio gets to its brief. My reasoning was that people pay attention when there is something to lose, so the game makes that risk visible to every player.
You place your pieces on a printed board of 24 squares. Each turn you add, turn or remove one piece, and a four-sided die decides how far it turns. Three pieces with the same pattern, facing one shared corner, make a three-quarter circle. The pieces can belong to anyone, and whoever completes the circle takes the points printed on them, from 1 for crosshatched to 4 for solid black. A yellow square doubles the score.
The first player to 25 points wins, and whoever empties the board loses 10. A phone times each move at 20 seconds.
I gave it to students in a game design course at IIT Gandhinagar and asked them to change it until it was as far from the original as they could take it.
The 2022 rules did not answer six questions, such as whether the three pieces must match, and I answered them in October. The clarified rules sit next to the old ones, which stay as I wrote them.
The board, the pieces and both sets of rules are on GitHub under CC BY 4.0, and boardgameBuilder can open the game for you to change.
I still have not answered one question I wrote down in 2022, whether 25 points is too easy a target.
https://github.com/prayasabhinav/games/tree/main/3-quarters
https://boardgame.syntax.prayasabhinav.net/#games/3-quarters