The GEMJI tiles come alive and transform into 2 powerful armies in an epic battle strategy game. Use your soldiers' powers in the best possible way, block your opponent and leave them with no moves. Don’t forget to keep your army strong and connected - you may lose your lead in the blink of an eye.
The players arrange their tiles into two “armies” on the playing field, as shown in the illustration below. The blank "Joker" tiles are kept separately at the start.
Both players use their blank joker tiles to build a “bridge” between the two armies. To do so, they take turns placing them connected to their armies, while still separate from the opponent. Then, after both have placed all three blank joker tiles, the two armies are pushed together so that they join at the “bridges”.
The player who uses white tiles goes first. Using this bridge, the players start attacking each other by moving their tiles across to their opponent’s field. Once placed, the bridges cannot be moved. The rest of the tiles can move across the fields if they are connected to at least one other tile. Tiles or clusters that get disconnected are discarded.
Each player has two moves (actions) per turn. A single move can be either rotation of a tile or a move in a direction. The direction in which tiles move is determined by the direction of their strokes.
The goal is to step on your opponent’s tiles, thus blocking them. Blocked tiles are inactive until freed up. Once a tile blocks another tile, it cannot be conquered itself - that is, the maximum number of stacked tiles on the field is 2 (or 3 if they are on a bridge). You cannot step on your own tiles.
During the first move of your turn, your tiles can occupy positions that are otherwise prohibited. For example, you are allowed to briefly step on already conquered tiles, as long as your second move is to step away from them. You can also disconnect a single tile from the army without discarding it, as long as it returns on the second move.
The first player to reduce their opponent to only 10 active tiles wins the game. Active tiles are those that are not currently blocked/conquered. Discarded tiles are not counted.
Just a quick question, how do you 'take" the opponents pieces off the board. Or is it just about blocking them by being on top of them. If it is just about blocking them, how does a piece or group of pieces become detached from the main force of the army?
Sorry if this is a silly question, its just not very clear from reading the rules a few times.
Hey Andrew,
Glad you’ve tried the GEMJI Battle!
It’s a long one and it needs a lot of thinking, so I’m really happy somebody is interested in it
Yes, “taking” is done by “blocking”.
Once you move your tile away, though - the opponent could once again operate with the tile that is “free” now. Another way to “block” the other player is to “cut an island” and virtually remove his or her pieces out of the battle. The “island detaching” is done like this:
Imagine you have 10 tiles ( 8 of the opponent and 2 yours) together, but the only “bridge” to the other tiles in the game is a piece of yours… so you may want to move this piece away
thus leaving a “gap” and sacrificing your 2 tiles, in order to eliminate 8 of the opponent.
As long as some tiles are not connected to the main tiles - they are dropped from the game.
Why would someone want to do that?
So we could conclude that “being connected” is an integral part of the game’s strategy and could be used by both parties in order to keep some of the tiles temporarily as a “hostage” in certain periods of the game.
Does this help?
Once we finish with all the crowdfunding ( I hope that we will have time to record videos for each game). But it will take a long time. So please be patient :))
Awesome thanks Mark for the explanation it’s make more sense now. I think it’ll become clearer as well as we play a few games, I just wanted to have a basic knowledge of it as I am sure my 9 yr old daughter will be asking ALL the questions when we start playing this one haha.
Hope everything is going well for you and the team, I’m so excited to be a part of all this and can’t wait to see what the future holds for Gemji. It is one of most interesting and innovative games I’ve seen, and I’m nearly 40
. I’ll definitely be buying more sets when they become available.
Thank you for your kind words Andrew
And also - that’s exactly the purpose of this forum - to ask anything you have in mind!
Once we scale-up the production - we will start publishing even more games, so keep prepared!