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Yeah, I definitely overestimated how many people would recognize it. I'll need to do a much better job onboarding new players in future... the original was also renowned for having phenomenal personality, and I'm disappointed that I didn't have time to live up to that. Thanks.

Thanks. Yeah, enemies use exactly the same functions as the player to act. They even have limited vision like the player and create their own objectives to increase vision if there aren't enough viable targets.

Enemies can do partial angles rather than limited to multiples of 10... but I offset that with a bit of randomness. A skilled player should always win. By the end it was pretty clear that I needed to embrace the chaos a bit, to give more room for physics and dynamic terrain to shine :)

Not taking a turn is way too strong. Guaranteed win as soon as there's 3 pieces on the board. Instead, changing board state should be something more interesting...

Maybe instead of moving a piece, you slide a whole row/column for your turn? ie top row XOX -> XXO. Now you can get surprise wins, and moving your opponent's pieces is a double-edged sword because you could slide THEM into or out of an advantageous position. Slides must consider attack and defense.

Or get weirder. Maybe something like 2048 where you slide every piece on the board in one direction but they block each other, such that they pile up on the edges compressing empty space. This one could easily be themed as tilting/flipping the table.

There's a lot of room to be creative within a seemingly simple premise.

I guess I don't really get the point? Why would you ever want to slide into an EMPTY SPACE instead of simply placing a new piece? It still takes your turn, and now you've lost a piece...

Clever, well executed with the addition of controlling future turns.

I found a trick online for using the shader to tile arbitrarily by scalar constants, so the map turns itself into a 3x3 copy. From there you can teleport the camera when it gets too close to the middle image's edge (to the other side of middle image), and every object (including collision & cursor collision) needs 9 sprites offset into a grid with known spacing so you can see them "wrap" around. You'll also need to set up a Lua module with shared functions for converting between object coords and map coords. In short, the middle 3x3 is where everything (including physics) actually happens and the player is constrained to it. Near edges and corners, you're seeing shallow copies precisely where the real objects would be.

It's all an illusion, but I think it came together shockingly well.

Thanks. Added a how-to-play description.