MINOA

MINOA

               When I went to go find out some info on Minoa I found some interesting things. Typing Minoa into google brings you to information on the ancient civilization in Greece, which is cool, but unfortunately has nothing to do with the game we’re talking about here. Along with stuff about ancient Greece there were a lot of sports games and other places called Minoa and really just nothing about the game. Anyways moving on to the game I’m supposed to be talking to you all about…

Minoa is a partizan game, which means the same moves aren’t available to each player. Unlike the games we’ve been playing where the winning player is the last to play, in Minoa there is a number of points given to each player and when there are no more moves left, each player counts their points and whoever has the most wins. This is a very similar game to dots and boxes, but has a few differences. The biggest notable difference you’ll see between Minoa and dots and boxes is that in dots and boxes you are trying to get the most boxes where in Minoa you are trying to get the most triangles in the end. The rest of the differences you’ll be able to see in the playing the game portion.

Playing the Game

               This game can be played with 2-4 people. If two people are playing, each player will get twelve sticks, player one will get twelve red and player two will get twelve blue. In a three-person game each player gets eight sticks, player one with red, player two with blue and player three with yellow. In the four-person game the players get six sticks, player one with red, player two with blue, player three with yellow and player four with green. These sticks can only be used by the player assigned that color, but there are also black sticks that can be used by any of the players.

 The board, as seen below, starts out empty with only the vertices present. The sticks that are red, blue, yellow or green can only be used on the edges, while the black sticks can only be used on the inside.

When you go to place a piece on the board you have one of two options, place a colored piece on the edge or place a black piece in the middle.

Once a player places their last colored stick on the edge, any colored sticks the other player has left are placed on the remaining edges. This has the possibility of ending the game, but doesn’t necessarily end it. The game ends when all the colored edges are assigned their own triangles. As you can see in the image below, the red colored triangles show that the player with the red sticks gets those triangles to themselves.

                

               At the end of the game in order to find out who won, only one person’s triangles need to be counted. Since there are 96 triangles within the board, if the player has 49 or more triangles this player has won, and if this player has 47 or less they have lost. If the player counting their triangles has 48, then it is a draw and neither player wins.

This is the first game we’ve seen where at the end of the game there is a possibility that there is a draw and no clear winner is found. The easiest way to get a draw is for the second player to copy all the moves of the first player. There is no way to not get a draw from this strategy, unless of course the second player doesn’t copy one or more moves.

Trying to win

               Not gonna lie I had a bit of an issue trying to find things that helped me understand the math behind this game. So I started small and hoped it would work its way up from there. Apparently you’re supposed to wait until closer to the end to use your colored sticks, so I tried playing a small version of the game with this in mind. I ended up using a sixth of the board and started playing against myself. I found something that’s pretty obvious, but probably worth noting. If there is a larger area with two edge spaces that haven't been filled in with colored sticks yet, you want to be the first one that puts their color down. That way you force the other player to either make the section you placed your colored stick in smaller, or to place their colored stick in the other open edge. If they place their colored stick in the other open edge you have a chance to make their section smaller and if they try to make your section smaller, then you can just place another colored stick and claim the whole large space. With this thought you can apply this to large blocks that have more than two edge pieces connected to them.

Stealing dots and boxes ideas

               In the dots and boxes game there is a parity to the number of long chains each player wants in order to win. Looking at the way dots and boxes works this makes a lot of sense and is a good thought process behind winning. I figured trying to copy dots and boxes was a good way to go seeing as the games are pretty similar. I’m not sure about the parity you’d want, but trying to get the most of the largest blocks of triangles seems like a good way to go. So let's say there are three larger chains on the board and it's your turn. If the longer chain has more than one edge to it you want to put your color down first as stated above. If it only has one edge you can put a colored stick on, you need to size up the options. This sort of relates to part of the dots and boxes play where one gives up a big chain in the start to get more boxes, or in our case triangles, in the end. There may be some cases where it makes sense to give up long chains of triangles in order to get more in the end, just be sure to think it through or else you'll end up on the bad end of the deal and lose.

COL

              I thought I'd leave you with this game I found in the book Natasha listed as suggested sources. It's called COL and is a map-coloring game. In this game there's, you guessed it, a map that is colored (wow!) by two players. One player can use black, while the other player gets to use white to color in different portions of the map. The thing is that no two spaces that are connected can be colored the same color and spaces can only be colored once. So basically, once you color a space black, all the surrounding spaces can only be colored white, but once you color one of those spaces white, its surrounding spaces can only be colored black, so you keep going until there are no more spaces that can be colored. Once you have a piece that is touching both a black and a white space, this can be ignored and since it can now be colored neither black nor white. In COL we can tell what values each space has unlike in Minoa since there can be the same colored triangles next to each other.

Conclusion

            Well that's about all I've got for you now. Any insight or thoughts are appreciated!!

Works Cited

WEST, JULIAN. "Championship-Level Play of Dots-and-Boxes." 1996. Accessed February 13, 2017. http://myslu.stlawu.edu/~nkomarov/450/westboxes.pdf.

"MINOA." BoardGameGeek. Accessed February 13, 2017. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/135090/minoa

Conway, J. H. On Numbers and Games. n.p.: Academic Press Inc., 1976.