I’m still working on my first game, but in the meantime I made a quick mockup of a board game idea so I could toy around with the rules and see what works. This thing was made in two days and is very rough, but I still consider it a success (enough so that I’m willing to post it here) because it actually turned out to be pretty compelling to play. It’s presented completely without explanation, so I’ll try to summarize the rules here.

• Players take turns placing pieces on a 4×4 board.
• The aim is to get four pieces in a row (horizontally, vertically, or diagonally). The first player to get four in a row wins.
• You push your pieces onto the board from the sides (use the boring white buttons).
• You can push your piece into another piece, causing it to slide into the next space. You can even push pieces off of the board.
• No Counter-Pushing: If your opponent pushes right on the bottom row, for instance, you cannot push left on the bottom row on your next turn.
• No Re-Pushing: If you push down on the leftmost column, you cannot push down on the leftmost column again on your next turn.
• (The game keeps track of counter-pushes and re-pushes and disables the appropriate buttons, but it’s not very clear about it, so it may pay to keep track mentally.)
• The game can end in a draw, as it is possible for both players to get four in a row on the same turn. It’s also possible for a player to get two sets of four in a row on the same turn. If both players somehow get simultaneous wins, but one player has multiple sets of four in a row, that player wins. This doesn’t seem likely to happen, but the situation could certainly be contrived.

I think that covers pretty much everything. I may one day come back to this and try to make it more presentable, but for now I have another (board) game I need to be working on. You can play the game in your browser here.

(EDIT: It looks like I didn’t waste much time in making it more presentable! The game still resembles what is described in this post, but only slightly. I considered leaving a copy of the old version of the game online so that this post would make more sense, but it’s embarrassing enough even in its final form.)