Bullies

Bullies is a turn based board game with a simple set of rules. Players start with queens and drones capable of moving around the board and shoving other pieces (friend or foe). Any piece that falls out of the board's boundaries are lost. Players are eliminated when they lose all their queens, and the goal is to be the last player remaining. Controls are as follows:

• Mouse → Select piece
• Arrows → Move selected piece
• Enter → End turn

Shoves are performed by moving into another piece. This consumes any remaining movement and moves the shoved piece a fixed distance or until it collides with something else. If a piece is immediately shoved into a neighbor then they're both moved a single space.

Despite the game's simple rules shoving can lead to some very interesting and complicated collective tactics. For instance the player can make chains of pieces that shove each other to reach places none of them could reach on their own.

This game was designed for an AI course as the subject of a heuristic search to try generating swarm tactics.