Bug
Bug Rulebook
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Components
Bug is played with white and black stones on any hexagonal tiling. The designer strongly recommends starting on a small board (a "hexhex3" board of 3 tiles per side, sized for full-size Go stones) and moving to larger boards only after gaining experience. Games can be played quickly on small boards or deeply on large boards.
Definitions
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A bug is a group of connected, same-color stones on the board. A single stone is also a bug.
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The size of a bug is the number of stones it contains.
Play
The board starts empty. White begins the game by placing one white stone on any empty space. Then, starting with Black, the players take turns. Each turn has 3 steps, taken in order: 1) Place, 2) Eat, 3) Grow.
1) Place
You must place one stone of your color on an empty space such that the resulting bug isn't larger than the largest bug on the board (regardless of color) prior to placement.
Example: It's Black's turn. Placing a stone to create a size-4 bug is illegal if the largest bug on the board prior to placement was only size-3.
2) Eat
All your bugs which are adjacent to one or more enemy bugs of the same shape (but not necessarily the same orientation) must eat (capture) those enemy bugs. Return eaten bugs to your opponent.
Example: It's Black's turn. Black's bug is adjacent to an identically shaped white bug. Therefore, the black bug eats the white bug.
Mirror-image bugs count as the same shape — a black bug eats an adjacent white bug that is its mirror image, exactly as if the shapes matched directly.
3) Grow
Increase the size of each of your bugs that ate, by exactly 1, by placing a stone of your color on any empty space adjacent to each such bug.
Example: A black bug eats an adjacent white bug, and then grows by 1 stone.
If eating would unavoidably force a bug to grow by more than 1 through a merger with another bug of the same color, no eating occurs.
Example: It's Black's turn. Normally, a size-1 black bug would eat an adjacent size-1 white bug. However, there's no way for the black bug to grow without merging with another black bug after eating. Therefore, the black bug doesn't eat.
If, after growing, a bug is adjacent to an identically-shaped enemy bug, it must eat the enemy bug (and grow again) if possible, and so on.
Example: A size-1 black bug eats a size-1 white bug, then grows to size-2, then eats a size-2 white bug, then grows to size-3, all in one turn.
End of the Game
The first player who cannot place a stone in the Place step wins. That is: you win if you've filled the ecosystem with your bugs so much that you can no longer expand.
Tips
- Don't eat opponent critters when unnecessary. It's almost always better to delay eating to the last moment. When you eat your opponent's critter, you also give your opponent more flexibility.
- While it can be fun to capture multiple opponent bugs at once, it's dangerous, because it gives your opponent a lot of flexibility to counterattack.
- Try to minimize the number of moves you have left to play and maximize your opponent's. In the late stage, if there is no tactical advantage to be gained, fill the cells that only you can fill before the ones that both you and your opponent can fill.
- Ultimately, you want to make captures that don't lead to opponent counter-captures. At first this is impossible. So early, you need to build your position, so that when it becomes possible to prevent counter-captures, you can do so better than your opponent. It's all positioning, and it takes a while to learn this skill.
- The difficulty of building shapes, and therefore the difficulty of defending and attacking shapes, is governed by a hierarchy. Over time and experience, it's possible to understand this hierarchy. Doing so will better help you decide which shapes to build, and which shapes to keep your opponent from building.
- On smaller boards, controlling a large amount of the second-most outer ring may be key to victory — it ensures you won't have to fill the outer ring, while your opponent will.