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 the green frame.

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, and the status bar tells how many spots are possible in each direction (where the animal's head points) for all four rotations.
• 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, use Horizontal/Vertical (keys W/S and A/D) to switch between horizontal and vertical, then Confirm trunk.
• 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	On a touch screen: tap an unoccupied board cell where your animal can fit. 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	Use the ↑ Up, ← Left, ↓ Down and → Right buttons to choose the direction your animal looks (its head points that way).
3	Confirm	(Touch screens.) Click Confirm placement to lock in your move. Animals cannot overlap each other or a trunk, or extend beyond the map.

With a mouse: move the pointer over a square to see a transparent preview of your animal with its pivot on that square, and click to place it at once (no Confirm step). Press W (look up), A (look left), S (look down) or D (look right) to turn the preview; the four direction buttons work too.

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!