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        Arimaa >> General Discussion >> Question for Omar or someone in the know.
        
(Message started by: DorianGaray on Dec 21^st, 2006, 5:02am)

Title: Question for Omar or someone in the know.
Post by DorianGaray on Dec 21^st, 2006, 5:02am

How did you decide that 4 steps by move was the way to go and not 3 or 5?

Title: Re: Question for Omar or someone in the know.
Post by IdahoEv on Dec 21^st, 2006, 5:50am

I'll guess that the answer is probably "playtesting"; in game designs where I've had similar decisions to make, I've found the balance through trial and error.

Though 4 steps in Arimaa has a lot of nice symmetries and implications built into it - just enough to move halfway across the board, just enough to flip an enemy piece from one side to the other or execute a hostage, etc.

Title: Re: Question for Omar or someone in the know.
Post by omar on Dec 23^rd, 2006, 11:59pm

It just felt right. The reason for having multiple steps per turn was of course to increase the number of possible moves from a given position. So I wanted to have the number of steps be as high as possible, but still managable for humans. I experimented with 3, 4 and 5 steps per turn and 4 felt just right.

Also as Evan mentioned it seems to have some nice properties on a 8x8 board with pushing and pulling taking two steps.