caethboards

This repository contains various artisanal, hand-crafted Caeth, Noc, and Noeth boards of many sizes and styles for your board game playing enjoyment. (Or adult coloring, thanks to the hypnotic repeating patterns.)

These boards are released into the public domain and are best played with colored pencils, preferably four in two sets of related shades. Give each player one of the sets, and have them use one color for the undergame voting cells and the other for the won overgame cells when successfully claimed.

Alternately, using the flood fill or paint bucket tool in most paint programs will work as a way to play with these boards on the computer, whether via PBeM or Google Drive or what have you.

Pre-rendered American letter-sized versions are in the pdf/ directory. The Inkscape source SVGs are in src/. Contributed variations are in the contrib/ directory.

The metarules

All of the metarules used by these boards are voting or majority "mutators" that you can use to modify a number of different board games (hereafter the overgames); they work best with connection games, and in particular ones where pieces are placed on the board and never moved or removed afterwards, although they can be modified to handle piece removal.

Caeth

With the Caeth metarule, every pair of adjacent cells has an edge (or node) between them as part of the Caeth undergame. Players take turns claiming one of those nodes per turn; use the pie rule for the first move. An overgame cell is immediately claimed by a player when that player controls half or more of the Caeth nodes into that cell; a single node may trigger more than one overgame cell claim at the same time.

A player wins a Caeth metarule game only by winning the overgame by its standard win condition (connecting both sides, all three sides, etc.), counting only the overgame cells. The undergame nodes are not considered part of any overgame connection.

Noc

The Noc metarule is similar to the Caeth metarule, except the undergame involves nodes that lie at the adjoining or "meeting points" of the cells of the grid. In a hexagonal tiling, that means most Noc nodes are votes for three cells rather than just two. It is named in honor of ConHex, which uses a custom board but a closely-related version of this mechanism.

Noeth

Noeth is a combination of both Noc and Caeth, with the undergame nodes for both on the same grid. It uses a modified 1-2-2-2... move protocol; the first player fills in any undergame node, and from then on each player fills in two undergame nodes if and only if they are one Noc node and one Caeth node and those two choices do not share any overgame cells. If they cannot meet those criteria, or for some reason wish not to do so (possible in a game like Havannah), they instead claim any single undergame node.

Near-Noeth

Near-Noeth is identical to Noeth, except that the criteria for dual claiming is as follows: you fill in two undergame node if and only if they are one Noc node and one Caeth node and those two choices share precisely one overgame cell. As in standard Noeth, an inability to do so (or a choice not to) results in claiming a single undergame node.

The boards themselves

The boards are named based on which metarule they're meant for (caeth-, noc-, or noeth-), and then come in various sizes and variants:

• -hex-: Boards meant for Hex and any variants played on the same board.
• -hexhex-: Boards meant for any game that uses a regular hex-hex board.
• -square-: Boards meant for games on a square grid.
  • -4square-: A Caeth-specific version with explicit orthogonal votes.
  • -8square-: As 4square, but with added diagonal votes.
• -starweb-: Boards meant for Starweb.
• -y-: Boards meant for the Game of Y.

The caeth_loz- boards are a variant art-style for Caeth boards that makes the overgame cells much more prominent, much like the Noc and Noeth designs.

Sizes and numbers

For a given overgame, there are usually several boards of different sizes. In addition, the PDFs are rendered two different ways for each board: one with light grey numbers representing the number of undergame nodes needed to claim a given cell, and one without those numbers; the latter have a -no-counts suffix.

Some boards are small enough that multiple copies are present on the same page in the printable PDFs.

Using these elsewhere

If you want to use these as a base for further works, you'll want to use the -unscaled versions as your base. They're still grid-aligned, which makes editing them much easier than the formatted-for-printing files. (I'd also appreciate a heads-up as to what you're using them for, but that's obviously not required. Just, y'know, appreciated. My email address is phil PERIOD bordelon SWIRLY-A gmail FULLSTOP com, with the appropriate substitutions.)

Also feel free to contact me if you're interested in a PBeM (or equivalent) game with one of these boards. Or if you color them in a particularly pretty fashion.