🧠 Strata

Strata is a hidden-objective structural strategy game played on a 6×6 grid.

Each player secretly selects (or receives) a scoring metric and attempts to shape the board to maximize their own objective — while also benefiting from the opponent’s metric at double value.

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🎯 Core Concept

At the end of the game:

Your Score =
    Your pieces under your metric
  + 2× (Your pieces under opponent’s metric)

You must:

• Build toward your goal
• Infer your opponent’s goal
• Shape the board to exploit the 2× multiplier

Strata rewards:

• Structure
• Deception
• Spatial intuition
• Pattern recognition

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🕹️ How to Play

• Board size: 6×6
• Players: X (human) vs O (bot)
• Turns: 10 each
• On your turn:
  • Place a piece on any empty square
  • OR remove any piece from the board
• When both players complete 10 turns → scoring is revealed

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📊 Metrics

Each player uses one hidden metric.

🔗 Joint

Count orthogonal (up/down/left/right) connections between your pieces. Each touching edge between two of your pieces counts as 1.

🧍 Disjoint

Count pieces that have no orthogonal same-piece neighbors. (Diagonal does not matter.)

🧱 Edge

Count your pieces on the outer border of the board.

🎯 Center

Count your pieces in the central 2×2 zone.

🏰 Enclosure

Your pieces act as walls. Any region (empty or opponent pieces) that cannot reach the board edge without crossing your pieces is considered enclosed.

Enclosure Score =
    (# enclosed cells)
  + (# unique fence pieces touching that region)

Example: a 3×3 ring enclosing 1 cell uses 8 fence pieces → 1 + 8 = 9 points.

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🤖 The Bot

The bot:

• Optimizes its own metric
• Uses heuristic evaluation
• Includes slight randomness to avoid deterministic play
• Does not know your metric

Strata is intentionally designed so that reading the bot’s structural tendencies becomes part of the strategy.

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🧩 Design Philosophy

Strata explores:

• Hidden-objective tension
• Emergent spatial structures
• Cross-metric exploitation
• Minimal rules → deep outcomes

The game is intentionally:

• Simple to learn
• Transparent in scoring
• Structurally deep

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🛠️ Tech Stack

• Astro
• Vanilla JavaScript
• Static deployment
• GitHub Pages hosting

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🚀 Development

Run locally:

npm install
npm run dev

Build for production:

npm run build

Deploy (manual gh-pages flow):

npm run deploy

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🔮 Future Ideas

• Metric inference difficulty modes
• Personality-based bots
• Multiplayer mode
• Adjustable board sizes
• Visualization overlays
• Tournament scoring variants

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📜 License

MIT

Astro Starter Kit: Basics

npm create astro@latest -- --template basics

🧑‍🚀 Seasoned astronaut? Delete this file. Have fun!

🚀 Project Structure

Inside of your Astro project, you'll see the following folders and files:

/
├── public/
│   └── favicon.svg
├── src
│   ├── assets
│   │   └── astro.svg
│   ├── components
│   │   └── Welcome.astro
│   ├── layouts
│   │   └── Layout.astro
│   └── pages
│       └── index.astro
└── package.json

To learn more about the folder structure of an Astro project, refer to our guide on project structure.

🧞 Commands

All commands are run from the root of the project, from a terminal:

Command	Action
npm install	Installs dependencies
npm run dev	Starts local dev server at localhost:4321
npm run build	Build your production site to ./dist/
npm run preview	Preview your build locally, before deploying
npm run astro ...	Run CLI commands like astro add, astro check
npm run astro -- --help	Get help using the Astro CLI

👀 Want to learn more?

Feel free to check our documentation or jump into our Discord server.