Crater
Two to four squads of four on a hillside, and every shot leaves a hole. A turn is thirty seconds: walk, jump, pick a weapon, aim, hold fire for power and let go. What the shot does is stored as it happened, and the ground never grows back.
The rules
- Each seat has a squad of four characters with a hundred health each. The seats take turns, and within a seat the characters take turns, so you never play the same one twice in a row while you have another.
- A turn is thirty seconds of walking and one shot. Walk left and right; a slope up to three cells steep can be walked, a taller wall cannot, and a jump clears a little of both. The turn ends when you fire, or when the timer runs out with no shot.
- Five weapons: the bazooka, a shell on an arc the wind bends; the grenade, which bounces for three seconds and then goes off; the shotgun, a straight ray and a small bite; the cluster shell, which becomes five at the top of its arc; and dynamite, dropped at your feet. Clusters and dynamite are counted: three clusters and two dynamites a squad for the game.
- An explosion takes a disc out of the ground, hurts everything in reach, less with distance, and throws it. A character thrown a long way lands hard and is hurt again by the fall. A character at zero health is out, and its going out is a small explosion of its own.
- The ground never grows back, and a piece cut free floats where it is. A character that leaves the field, off the side or through the bottom, is lost.
- The wind changes every turn and is shown before you aim. A turn is not a matter of chance: the same keys with the same wind do the same thing every time.
How a game ends
- The last squad with a character standing wins. If the last two squads fall in the same turn, the game is a draw.
- A missed move deadline is a skipped turn, not a forfeit: the deadline is set when the game is made, a squad that lets it pass is skipped, three missed turns in a row retire the squad, and its characters stay on the field as scenery. Above two seats a resignation retires the squad the same way and the others play on; at two seats it is the other player's win.
Worth knowing before you start
- Power is the whole game with the bazooka: the same angle at full power flies across the field, at half power lands at your feet. The dotted arc while you hold fire is where the shell will go with no wind.
- A grenade rolls downhill after it lands, and it will roll back to you on a slope. Throw it short and high onto ground that slopes away from you.
- Dynamite hurts whoever drops it. It is for a character standing next to yours, and even then the drop costs most of your own health.
- With scripting off the page shows the ground's surface and where everyone stands; caves under the surface do not show there, and a turn needs the script.
The seed decides the hillside, where each squad stands and the wind each turn; it is published when the game ends. A turn is the keys you pressed, replayed by the server, so the whole game can be checked from the log.
Crater terms
- A squad
- The four characters a seat plays; last squad standing wins.
- A crater
- The hole an explosion leaves. It never fills in.
- Retired
- A squad taken out of the turn order by three missed turns or a resignation; its characters stay on the field.