FuKyu Beta Is Open
What FuKyu is, how it came about, and how to get in
The Fu Kyu Project is now in official beta testing mode and invite-only registrations are open, for both Prod and Dev. For Prod this means that aside from me, no invites can be sent yet - there are no other users in the system who could do that. Dev is a different story. There is already a handful of real-life testers there, and if you happen to know one of them, they can invite you.
But that is just the hook that lets me write this blog post, in which I want to explain what FuKyu actually is and how I arrived at the idea.
Growing Up With Games
I could make a grand sweeping argument about the social significance of humanity's instinct to play, and so on. Nah. I come from a family where my generation spans a wide range, with lots of cousins, and board games, card games and parlour games were always part of how we socialised, part of growing up. Vicious tongues claim I got my Abitur (German High School Diploma) in Doppelkopf, because in the upper years of school, looking at the free periods across a given week, we played more hours of DoKo than we attended AP classes.
Open or Closed
A question: setting aside the fact that one is played by two players and the other by more; Do you prefer chess or backgammon? What I am getting at is the difference between open and closed games. I used to prefer dice and card games, but during the pandemic I switched to closed games like chess, the game of kings. In social settings you laugh off bad luck and it does not matter, because it was always about being together, but alone in front of a computer during the pandemic, bad luck felt deeply frustrating. I lose at chess more often than not too, but I can live with that. It was me, who blundered the queen, and not the third double sixes in a row by some stranger or by a machine.
Solved or Unsolved
So I wanted to invent a closed game, one where the players' strategy decides the outcome rather than luck. Sure, it is up to the player's strategy in Tic-Tac-Toe whether they win, but honestly is it an interesting game that fascinates people, the way Go or chess do? Hardly. Because it is so obviously solved. If both sides play optimal moves, the game always ends in a draw. The same goes for "Checkers", "Nine Men's Morris" and "Connect Four". The first two end in a draw with perfect play from both sides, while the last one has the so-called first-mover advantage and the player who goes first wins.
Chess, on the other hand, in its starting position with all 32 pieces on their squares, is complex enough to be considered unsolved. Parts of the chess endgame are solved though: so-called tablebases have been used to compute results for positions with seven or fewer pieces on the board, determining which side wins with perfect play or whether the game is forced to end in a draw. There are even endgames that end in checkmate on move 549. Props to you if you called that next game!
How FuKyu Came About
Early this year I invented a new online game more or less out of boredom, riding my AI productivity wave. Let me introduce you to: FuKyu. This game was meant to be closed and as unsolved as possible. The first part I can say is given. The second? Who knows. I am sure an AI could figure it out, but it would be so much cooler if we figured it out ourselves. The name, by the way, says it all - and not what the English-minded reader might think. Fu Kyu or 普及 translates roughly as popularisation, spreading, or "occupying space". The game concept, inspired by "Cathedral", is to conquer more space than your opponent. More on that in the README and on the website - I will not repeat here what you can look up yourself if you are interested.
The Game Narrative
A good game naturally also needs a good story. Sure, at the end of the day it is about placing pieces, scoring points and preventing your opponent from spreading. But in FuKyu it is about the elemental and existential struggle of organic against inorganic matter. We have a pulsing Core that supplies the energy for growth. Crystalline and organic matter grows outward from this core into empty space, the Void. It must maintain contact with the Core to supply its tissue with energy. This requires roads (branches and veins), from which leaves/prisms and fruits/clusters hang, each with different point values. The largest elements, fruits and clusters, also carry restrictions and special properties (poison and radioactivity). As you can see, far more than just placing pieces on a board.
What You Can Try Right Now
So, the beta tester invite-only registration is now live. What you can see and try without registering are the Game Replays (on the Dev server), where you can watch actual test games, and the Solitaire version, where you play one faction and try to place as many pieces as possible.
Before you click: The site is designed exclusively for desktop with mouse and keyboard. Do not even try on mobile.
Solitaire: fukyu.net/games/solitaire/
Game Replay (Dev): dev.fukyu.net/replay.php
Beta Access
If you are interested in beta test access, send me a message.
