Gamehelphipposcrocodiles

Goal

Hippos & Crocodiles is an abstract strategy game for 2 players designed by Néstor Romeral Andrés. The goal is to place animal pieces onto the board. If you cannot place a piece on your turn, you lose immediately; the last player to place a piece wins!

Setup

• One player controls the Hippos (brown) and has 8 hippo pieces in reserve.
• The other player controls the Crocodiles (olive green) and has 8 crocodile pieces in reserve.
• The game is played on one of four maps (table option Map; choose Random to have one of the four picked at random when the game starts):
  • Square: 14×14 grid (196 squares), the default.
  • Rectangle: 20×10 grid (200 squares).
  • Lagoon: a meandering lagoon, 19 rows of 11 squares each, drifting right, centre, left, centre and right again from top to bottom (209 squares).
  • Pool: the round pool board, 16×16 grid with the corners cut off (208 squares).
• Animals can only cover squares of the map: nothing may stick out over its edge.

Animal distribution

Table option Animal distribution:

• Random (default): who plays the Hippos and who plays the Crocodiles is decided at random.
• First player plays Hippos / First player plays Crocodiles: the player who starts gets that animal. When you start a rematch from the end of a game, BGA rotates the starting player, so the animals swap automatically (with Random the animals are drawn again).

Difficulty

Table option Difficulty:

• Easy (default): the cells where the centre of the animal can go are highlighted on the board for its current direction.
• Hard: no highlights and no counts. Place the animal where you think it fits; a spot that does not fit is shown in red and cannot be confirmed. If you cannot find a place for your animal, press Surrender (red button, with a confirmation): you lose the game immediately. In Easy mode there is no Surrender button: the game ends by itself when you have no legal move.

Trunks (optional)

Trunks are brown rectangles of 3×1 squares that act as obstacles: no animal can be placed on top of them. They can be placed horizontally or vertically, must fit completely inside the map and cannot overlap another trunk. The more trunks, the shorter the game. Table option Trunks:

• Off: no trunks (default).
• On - players place 2 each: before the first animal, the players take turns placing trunks, the first player starting, until each has placed 2. Tap a square, press the grey ↻ Rotate button in the Action Bar (or R) to switch between horizontal and vertical, then Confirm.
• On - randomly placed: 4 trunks are placed at random before the game, never touching each other, so that both players can still move.

Animals

Each animal occupies exactly 10 squares on the board:

• Hippo: A 3×3 square body with a single protruding snout cell.
• Crocodile: A central spine of 6 squares with two pairs of legs extending out to width 3.

Your turn

#	Action	Description
1	Pick placement	Tap one of the highlighted squares on the board to preview your animal there. Animals can be placed in any of the 4 cardinal orientations (0°, 90°, 180°, 270°). The marked circle is the pivot: it stays on the same square when you rotate.
2	Rotate	Press the grey ↻ Rotate button in the Action Bar (it also works before you pick a square: the highlighted squares follow the new orientation), or tap the previewed animal itself, to turn it a quarter turn clockwise. Orientations that do not fit are skipped in Easy mode. For a trunk, the same button switches between horizontal and vertical.
3	Confirm	Click Confirm to lock in your move, or Cancel to pick again. Animals cannot overlap each other or a trunk, or extend beyond the map.

Controls

• Tap / click a highlighted square to preview your animal there.
• ↻ Rotate (grey button in the Action Bar, before Confirm) or a tap on the previewed animal: turn it a quarter turn clockwise.
• R rotates clockwise, Shift+R rotates back (keyboard).
• W, A, S, D point the animal's head up, left, down or right.
• Confirm locks in the move, Cancel takes the preview back.
• With a mouse, move the pointer over a highlighted square to see a transparent preview of your animal with its pivot on that square.

Game end

• When an active player cannot place any of their remaining animals legally onto the board, that player loses immediately.
• The other player is declared the winner!