Bug

About this board game

Bug is a two-player combinatorial game with approximately 30 minutes of play time, in which players build shapes on a hexagonal board and make them eat one another.

Each connected group of same-color stones is a bug, including a single stone. As bugs survive and capture matching enemy shapes, they grow into larger forms. The game is played with black and white stones on any hexagonal tiling, although the author recommends beginning on a “hexhex3” board before moving to larger boards.

Black starts by placing one stone. After that, players alternate turns, with White going first. Every turn follows three stages:

• Grow: Place one stone to start a new bug or enlarge one of your existing bugs, without merging bugs or exceeding the largest bug size currently on the board.
• Eat: Bugs adjacent to enemy bugs of the same shape must capture them, allowing for rotation and reflection.
• Bonus Grow: Each bug that ate grows by exactly one stone, placed on an adjacent empty space.

Captures can trigger further growth and additional eating. However, if a capture would unavoidably merge a bug with another same-color bug and force growth beyond one stone, the eating does not occur.

The unusual objective gives Bug its distinctive tension: the first player who cannot place a stone during the placement step wins. Awarded the 2017 Best Combinatorial Game prize, Bug originated in the author’s exploration of “perceptual binding”—the idea that carefully structured shapes may make combinatorial games easier for the human mind to understand.