What dfan said. Playing randomly in RPS will completely nullify any cunning strategy your opponent might want to use, which makes it a pretty compelling technique!

In Fluxx, trying to win can be worse than playing randomly. Also, since I can be very bad at figuring out what people are going to play, any game in which the whole game is guessing that I often do better by playing randomly. But that's not true of everyone.

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on The Player of Games by Iain Banks. When I read it (ages ago) the grand game he comes up with (vaguely like Go) felt very compelling to me.

How about a game with a rare but devastating penalty? Players that know the rules will play conservatively to avoid it, while those who don't know the rules will make wild plays that score much better but have unknown-to-them risks. I know nothing about Tarachin, but imagine this rule: distance is good for your score but a player whose ball reaches the outer edge of the court immediately loses a finger. Lightsong will generally win but be unpleasantly surprised one of these days.

Uh... unclear on why that link didn't work, anyway it's http://icehousegames.org/wiki/index.php?title=Outgrow

Alright, done!

Roshambo (Rock Paper Scissors) leaps to mind.

Sure, feel free. When I was designing the game, I half thought about saving it or the next IGDC, but I decided I'd rather go ahead and blog about it.

Hey, do you mind if I throw the rules to Outgrow up on icehousegames.org? I'd give you full credit of course. Feel free to do it yourself/maintain it once I do instead if you'd like!

Actually, AH, it looks like hidden levels are revealed as you complete the Heroic levels. So #20 should be there somewhere; you just need to complete every Heroic level in the second tier.

For those checking the comments feed who already saw this, note that this game is available for both Windows and Mac.

Thanks. I started by deciding to do a jagged line, which then suggested lightning to me. And once I'd decided on lightning as a theme, it was of course natural to have it go from the top to the bottom.

I think your game is just fine for a few minutes' work. The one thing my game has that yours doesn't is an element of decision-making. With two dice, you are sometimes presented with a choice of going farther or sending your opponent back. Maybe give them a choice of what to do on a 6?

Anyway, we both certainly fulfilled the goal of the exercise, which was to make a game. Congrats to us!

Ha! I created a similar post on my blog, but you put more thought into it and your game is WAY cooler :) I like the concept and find it interesting that I naturally started from the bottom of the page while you started at the top.

Not sure, AH. I don't see it anywhere. If I remember correctly, the level IDs were something that wasn't there when the game was first on Armor Games, so I think it was a later update. Maybe there were some levels they decided to take out at some point? I don't think you're missing any hidden levels, though.

I see in the beginning of the game, Level 4 is actually a ways above the other levels, and I dont know why it showed up there, or how.

BUT my question is what happened to level 20? IT looks like there is space for it, but I've done all the amulets and finished all the battles of the levels around it, but still no level 20?

The lack of save in Kongregate was deliberate; they didn't want people getting the badges by just sharing save codes.