Dominate

Dominate is a two-player paper-and-pencil game of area domination. Maximize your influence to win the game.

Components

9 x 9 square torus board with 3 x 3 sub-regions. The torus property means that the left and right and top and bottom edges are to be considered connected and wrap-around moves are allowed. For game purposes, the board is broken down into 27 overlapping regions each containing nine squares. There are nine rows, nine columns, and nine 3x3 regions. Alternate regions also work and add variety. See Figures 1 and 2. If playing on the provided printout, use the small squares to the right and bottom to keep track of which player dominates which region.
Two different colored pens or pencils. Actually, one pen or pencil with do, if players use different marks like 'X' and 'O', but colors look better.

Game Play

Players take turns placing one, two or three marks as an orthogonally connected group on empty squares. Note that groups may wrap-around the edges of the board. See Figure 3. This effectively removes any center advantage that the first player may have. Players may not pass a turn.

Winning the Game

A player dominates a region by occupying any 5 or more squares in the region. The game is won by dominating 14 or more regions on the board.

Print and Play

Click on the following link, Dominate PnP.pdf, and print a copy of the standard game board to give the game a try.

Designer Comments

Dominate was designed rather quickly for a Board Game Geek (BGG) contest, Shubumi-Challenge-2-Tic-Tac-Nine, sponsor by Dave Dyer of BoardSpace.net. A requirement of the contest was to use the 9 x 9 board with 3 x 3 sub-regions.

The design of Dominate started out using a Sudoku board and claiming groups of one to three numbers that added up to nine or a multiple of nine, with the goal being to capture a majority of regions. The number idea was soon scrapped because it lead to analysis paralysis and some end game problems. Scattered number selection was replaced by orthogonal placement. Lo and behold, the game started to work nicely and was added to the contest listing ASAP.

But sometimes haste makes for some unsettling results. Dave Dyer almost immediately informed me of a close similarity between Dominate and a game called Majorities by Bill Taylor. Up to that time, I had never heard of Majorities. Luckily, the games only share the region majority rule. The boards, stone placement, and goals are all different in some way. The moral here is, if you design a game in a vacuum and it comes together quickly, there is a good chance that it might be close to, if not the same as, a game that already exists. My apologies to Bill Taylor for any similarities between our games. The similarities are purely coincidental. I trust that most people will agree that the two games are "different".

Figure 1. Standard game board. The smaller boxes can be used to keep track of which player dominates each region.

Figure 2. An alternate game board

Figure 3. Wrap-Around Placements: If the groups of dots in the center were placed as indicated by the arrows the groups would wrap-around as indicated by the lighter colored groups of dots

Figure 4. A completed game: Blue wins 14 to 13. The color of the edge boxes indicate which player won the rows, columns and 3 x 3 regions.