Board Game Arena

Two new strategy games from Mark Steere are now in alpha: Churn and Blast Radius. Take a look!



Churn is a very simple but very unique game -- you must place a marble, forming the smallest group of your own marbles possible. Once you are forced to make a larger group (e.g. there is only one space to play), you immediately remove all of your own smaller groups.

This results in a small board game with a surprisingly high move count. Be aware if you play on larger board sizes than the default, it may take 200+ moves to finish.

You can see a summary of the rules here: https://en.doc.boardgamearena.com/Gamehelpchurn





Blast Radius is a sort of war game -- you must place a piece, forming the smallest stack of your own pieces possible.

Each tower of piece(s) is surrounded by an exclusion zone equal to the tower's height. As the game proceeds, larger and larger zones are excluded, until only one player remains.

You can see a summary of the rules here: https://en.doc.boardgamearena.com/Gamehelpblastradius


NOTE: As usual with games I develop, there are a lot of preferences, so be sure to check them out.

Churn is based on a very interesting mechanism. The churn rate is so high that on a size 3 board (19 cells), it takes about 75 turns to complete a game. A size 5 (61 cells) takes about 8,500 turns to complete. So naturally, size 3 is the default. Of course Churn is finite.

Effective strategy has eluded me so far, but that's pretty normal for me.

Blast Radius has been very well received. It's related to Oust inasmuch as it's a simple placement game that begins with an empty board and ends with only one color. And you have items growing and killing smaller items. But in Blast Radius, the items are stacks - not flat groups. And there's action at a distance - killing all stacks, enemy and friendly alike, within the blast radius.

The design started out as my attempt at a war game, but it ended up being infused with abstract DNA.