IrMhae

   Alright, old "new" twist on Perfect Sense: you don't use safety goggles to protect your vision, but rather a blindfold. I had that originally, till I realized that there are other ways of protecting your eyes and switched to safety goggles. Goggles still don't protect your eyes from laser pointers and stuff, so I knew there was a reason I had blindfolds originally. Protecting a sense takes that sense away from you, here now, as with the clothespin and earplugs from earlier.

   But anyway, what this post is really about. The board for Perfect Sense kind of resembled that of a different game I've been working on (because grammatically "on which I've been working" means that I have been actually working on top of it), and apparently I'm not the only one to notice. It's called IrMhae, and it's a game somewhat popular in the 'verse of the Artefact, which is my primary television sci-fi setting. It's kind of like chess, or better yet chaturanga, as there are four players, two to each side. Each piece is comprised of eight towers, and although the pieces start off squarely on the spaces they may move sideways so that they sit partially on more than one space. Maybe that would make more sense if you saw the actual board:


Alright, maybe this looks more like a target. It should be checkered. That'd get the point across easier. (But do alien cultures checker their boards? Maybe this is just the un-anglicized (terracized?) board, but all the ones we see on the show do have checkers.)

   Each of the towers, the sub-units of the basic piece, is on the red-lined mini spaces, and the main larger piece uses the larger black-lined spaces. The pieces don't have to stay perfectly on the larger spaces, and can avoid some attacks by moving partially off of them. That's how the pieces move horizontally, i.e. sideways along their own rings. I'm not sure how the pieces could move vertically between the smaller inner and larger outer spaces, though. The pieces would obviously have to be smaller on the inner spaces, since the inner spaces are smaller than the outer ones. Maybe it's magnets that can expand and contract the pieces but still keep them together. Maybe the pieces can't even move vertically. I'm not a fan of that option, because it does take away some of the strategy, even if the rules would allow for the use of ranged vertical attacks. Nesting the towers sounds like it might work, with smaller pieces inside the larger ones that can be sent inward. It would add a layer of strategy, since moving inward pieces outwardly would instantly move the other larger pieces from where they were parked to meet them so that the smaller piece would fit on the outer row, and you wouldn't be able to move outward or inward if that size of the piece had already been captured. It's a possibility, at least.

   Anyway, it's not like you see the game in motion that much in the show, so the rules don't matter that much. It's just more of a set piece than anything else. It's important that these universes feel real and lived in. Though I suppose coming up with these kinds of rules helps with that. Ah, well. Even if the audience never sees all the hard work we put into these, they can allegedly sense it, and at least it's still fun for us.