HOuRGLASS (miserytourism)

HOURGLASS is a two-player time-sensitive abstract strategy game where all the pieces inhabit one of two GENDERS.  Players can flip their own pieces to make them into a different gender.  Pieces also have a STATUS: Alpha, Beta, or Liminal.  This status is tied to the piece's hourglass timer (unique to each piece), which is a measure of its masculinity or femininity.  This status dwindles as the sand in their top timer bulb (their active gender) runs into the bottom one (their target gender).  So a piece that starts as an Alpha Male will gradually become a Beta Male, then a Liminal Male.  When a piece has no more sand in its top timer, it becomes an Alpha of the opposite gender and is considered GENDERLOCKED, which means that the player who owns it can't flip it anymore. 

Both sides have 5 types of pieces.  Each piece has a different purpose and way of moving.  You can see all the details of the pieces' movement and abilities on the left hand side when you click a piece.      

The goal of the game is to have the most pieces on the dominant color (light gray spaces are male, dark gray spaces are female) when one of the following conditions is met:

• All individual piece timers have stopped moving (when a piece's timer stops, it is genderlocked).
• One side has no starting pieces remaining.
• 20 turns have passed

On your turn, you have as much time as you want to analyze the state of the board, but once you click "EXECUTE", you've got  6 seconds of action time (there is no hard limit to how much you can move or flip during this time; you're constrained only by what you can do in 6 seconds).  Captures become restricted when the timer hits 1 second, so you can't capture at the last moment.  You should be able to see the other player moving on their turn, and you can also review your pieces and their timers during this time. 

CONTROLS:

LEFT CLICK to select a piece.  Click to move to green spaces, capture on red ones.

MIDDLE/MOUSE WHEEL CLICK to flip a piece.  

RIGHT CLICK to cancel out of special move targeting (Libido or Manipulation).

HOST:  Press ~ (or `) key to restart the game for you and the other player.

SPACE BAR:  Pull up technical info (outgoing/incoming bandwidth).

Host is the first person to join.  When both players are at the board screen, the Host can press the Start button to begin play.

FULL MANUAL, featuring piece descriptions + strategy (5 pages)

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CREDITS

The game TAMSK by Kris Burm was a major inspiration for HOURGLASS.

Icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com

Public domain images taken from https://pixabay.com/ All other artwork and design by @lynchpoet