NAME

       el-ixir - a two-player board game

DESCRIPTION

       El-Ixir is a board game with an element of randomness.  It is played by two players at the same terminal,
       although it is possible to use a shared tmux for remote play.

       The  game  should  be  playable on any vt100ish terminal whose character set includes a certain subset of
       glyphs of IBM ROM BIOS, encoded as Unicode.  Terminals  not  meeting  this  requirement  should  be  long
       extinct.

RULES

       The  object  of  the  game  is to connect as many blocks in your colour to the corners.  The players take
       turns, being presented with four random tiles each turn.

       The game is controlled by pressing any key (not Shift or Ctrl...); q quits.

       Moving:
              To make a move, choose one of the four tiles that were rolled for you.  Next, choose  a  direction
              (up,  left, right, down) and length (1-4).  If a block of that length won't fit, it's silently cut
              to the longest length there's space for.  (Hint: it's almost always beneficial  to  choose  length
              4).

       Anchoring:
              If  the  block  you  placed  causes some blocks to be connected to one of the corners, you will be
              credited a point for every tile covered by a block in your color that's connected to a  corner  by
              an unbroken line (via cardinal directions only — diagonals are not enough).

       Embracing:
              There are two types of embraces:

       •      complete  embrace,  when  your  blocks either completely enclose a part of the board or wall it in
              into a border

       •      anchored embrace, which trades the requirement of enclosing only parts of the board  that  contain
              no  free tiles for allowing braces that are connected only diagonally.  It is possible that a move
              makes both players eligible for an embrace — your opponent has priority.

       Whichever player gets the most points, wins.

                                                                                                      el-ixir(6)