el-ixir(6)

🎀 NAME 🎀

el-ixir — a two-player board game 💖

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

Okay bestie, so El-Ixir is a board game and it has a lil element of randomness baked in, which is honestly part of the charm. Two players play it at the same terminal — like, sitting together, one screen, chaos ensues 🫶. That said, it is possible to use a shared tmux if you wanna do remote play. Long-distance game night, we love to see it.

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. And if your terminal doesn't meet that requirement?? Honestly it should be long extinct 💀. No cap.

👑 RULES 👑

The object of the game — the whole vibe, the main character energy — is to connect as many blocks in your colour to the corners. The players take turns, and every turn you're handed four random tiles. Four! Fresh tiles, every single turn. Slay.

The game is controlled by pressing any key (just not Shift or Ctrl...). And q quits. That's it. That's the whole control scheme. Periodt.

🌸 Moving 🌸

To make a move: first choose one of the four tiles that were rolled for you. Then choose a direction — up, left, right, down — and a length from 1-4.

And here's the tea: if a block of that length won't fit, it gets silently cut to the longest length there's actually space for. No warning, no drama, it just... shrinks. 🙈

Hint: it's almost always beneficial to choose length 4. Like, almost always. Just saying.

🌈 Anchoring 🌈

If the block you just placed causes some blocks to be connected to one of the corners, you get credited a point for every tile covered by a block in your color</color> that's connected to a corner by an unbroken line.

And bestie, that line has to go via cardinal directions only — diagonals are not enough. Sorry. Diagonal shortcuts do not count, the line has to be legit 💅.

🦋 Embracing 🦋

There are two types of embraces, and they are lowkey iconic:

• complete embrace — when your blocks either completely enclose a part of the board, or wall it in into a border.
• anchored embrace — this one trades the requirement of enclosing only parts of the board that contain no free tiles for allowing braces that are connected only diagonally.

Also, heads up: it is possible that a move makes both players eligible for an embrace — and in that case, your opponent has priority. Yep. Your opponent. Not you. It's giving unfair but okay we move 😭.

Whichever player gets the most points, wins. That's the whole game, bestie. Go connect those corners 💜.

And that's a wrap! This lil slice of the Games Manual is el-ixir(6) — section 6, games, you know the drill. Thanks for reading, mwah, take care of your terminal 🎀✨