Gale

Deconstructed by Eli Allen.

Gale is a variation on the classic theme of 'touch the other side before your opponent does'. The game is played on a grid of staggered dots that alternates between rows of four and five across. There are five rows of four and four rows of five. Players agree on who will play on the rows of five and who will play on the rows of four, though they are functionally identical. The game is played in alternating turns, during which the active player may connect two of his or her dots either vertically or horizontally with a line. No two lines may intersect. Victory is achieved by the first player to form a continuous line between two dots on opposing sides of the field. It is impossible to end Gale with a draw as in order to completely prevent an opponent from achieving victory by blockading every possible path would require a player to form a complete chain across the grid and thus win.

Unfortunately, Gale plays quite awkwardly. The recipient of the first turn essentially dictates the pace of the entire game and, barring a flagrant misplay, is almost certain to win simply for the fact that they had a head start in the race. In testing, the first player won 11 out of 13 games played without special conditions imposed which give them an 85% win percentage. This figure may even be too low, as the two games won by the second player were won against novice opponents. In games with special conditions imposed the numbers varied but, most interestingly, in games where all moves were determined randomly by assigning numbers to dots and rolling dice to pick moves, the first player managed to retain a win percentage of just better than 71%. These numbers are clearly statistically significant and denote a critical imbalance.

Gale can be scaled infinitely to board sizes of [n X( n+1)] for any whole, nonzero value of n, however there is no significant statistical change in win percentages on larger grids. Nearly every game ends with the first player achieving what I have come to call a 'fork' which is any state in which the first player has two divergent paths toward their goal stemming from the same line, usually in a 'T' or figure-four shape. This state is so absurdly easy to achieve that the second player can only hope that their opponent is unaware of the strategy to win. The only defense that even prolongs the game significantly is an inverse 'T' built to mirror the first player by the second. This tactic is only really valuable on significantly larger board sizes, as they give the second player more time to build in traps which could theoretically confuse an opponent into misplaying, however remote the chance.

Overall, Gale is an entertaining diversion but becomes tiresome quickly as players begin to understand the lack of depth involved.