Fourfold

The Laws of Fourfold

The game is played on a square court of twenty-five positions. Four teams compete, each playing from one side of the court. A team’s objective is to move as many players as possible from the starting side to the far side. Each player reaching the destination scores a goal. Players who score a goal are immediately evaporated and play no further part in proceedings. Players may wear a smock or tabard in the team colours. Suitable head gear must be worn at all times for reasons of safety and decorum.

To start the game, a team is chosen at random to deploy a player to the court. The player makes their first move immediately, after which a second team is chosen at random and so on until the maximum number of players is reached. There may be up to sixteen players on the field at any one time.

Players move forward towards their goal, one position at a time, moving either straight ahead or diagonally left or right. Each player must move on a turn, unless there are no available positions to occupy, in which case a player must pass and remain on their current position. Turns are taken by order of appearance on the field, starting with the earliest player to step on to the court and ending with the most recent.

If a turn is completed without a player being able to move, a stalemate is declared and the player who has been on the field the longest is evaporated. Whenever a player is evaporated, a team is then chosen at random to deploy a replacement, providing there is a place available on their starting file. If there is no place available, the team must pass and the turn resumes with the movement of the next player. The winning team is the first to attain four goals.

Background

This project started life as an experiment in animating a crowd. Although I had a functioning and chaotic crowd, I struggled to ensure that the participants avoided or bumped into each other, instead of just passing freely through other bodies. One of the approaches I tried was to reconstruct the movement of the crowd as operating on an invisible grid, where a person couldn't enter another node which was already occupied by a body. It wasn't too successful but while I was working on it, I had the idea of this little game, which ended up being much more fun.