Game rules

This is a game for four players, identified with numbers from 0 to 3. Each player has control over a clan of dwarves helped by some wizards. The goal of the game is to dominate the ancient kingdom of Moria.

This game also includes some units of Sauron: orcs, trolls, and one Balrog. Sauron units correspond to player -1.

The game lasts 200 rounds, numbered from 1 to 200. Each unit of every player, Sauron units included, can move at most once per round.

The board has dimensions $60 \times 60$. Units cannot move outside it. The 2 upper rows, the 2 lower rows, the 2 leftmost columns and the 2 rightmost columns are cells outside Moria, and therefore are the only cells of type Outside.

The rest of cells, of type Cave, Abyss, Granite and Rock, belong to Moria. Cave cells are passable by any unit. Abysses are cells only passable by orcs and the Balrog. Granite and rock cells are only passable by the Balrog. However, rock cells are soft enough to be excavated and converted to cave cells by dwarves.

Initially, most Moria cells are of the rock and cave types. By default, 80 cave cells have a treasure. Dwarves will have to excavate to reach those treasures. There are also some granite cells. Abysses only appear, with small probability, after rock cells are excavated by dwarves.

Each cell can have at most one unit on it. When a unit tries to move onto a cell already occupied by another unit, this in fact means an attack. A unit that attacks does not move during that round, even if the attacked unit gets killed. This includes “attacking” a rock cell (see below).

Dwarves and wizards cannot attack units of the same clan. (This would be an illegal move.) Orcs and trolls will never attack other Sauron units. The Balrog does not attack: it just kills everything surrounding it.

Dwarves are the main characters of this game. At the beginning, each clan has 20 of them. They are born with 100 points of health. When they attack, the adjacent enemy unit loses between 20 and 40 points of health. Dwarves can move horizontally, vertically and diagonally on outside and cave cells.

A dwarf can excavate a rock cell by “attacking” it. A rock cell excavated 5 times (by one or more dwarves) becomes an abyss with probability $4\%$, and a cave cell otherwise.

An abyss is a bottomless hole that is impassable by dwarves, wizards and trolls. Any dwarf or wizard that moves onto an abyss (with no orc in it) falls into the abyss and dies immediately. Trolls will never try to move onto an abyss. Orcs enter Moria only through abysses, and can afterwards pass over them. The Balrog does not care about the abysses of this game.