Setting up the board

With two of you placing the tiles, you’ll be ready and playing in a couple of minutes (unless you’re busy making pretty patterns!)

There are 3 distinctly different ways of setting up the game:

Randomised

The quickest way to get started – randomly fill in 5 of each colour in each half of the board, then fill the last 4 spaces with random tiles.

Patterned

Create a patterned board to battle on. What will you come up with?!

It’s not just for looks either, patterned boards create very interesting games!

The board below for example will create strong clustered play, with pieces defending or transferring between zones. At the start, White has no moves onto purple whilst Black has no moves onto red; both players will have to carefully choose their opening moves to create opportunities on these colours and prevent themselves from having forced or missed moves. 

Competitive

For advanced play, players will build the board from scratch between them, trying to place colours in a way that will complement their playing style.

Taking from a shared supply of visible tiles, players alternately play a piece anywhere into the board: they must play either into a corner space, or edge to edge with an existing piece. 

As you are able to play tiles anywhere, you must balance developing your own structure with interrupting that of your opponent.

Different size boards

The game has a modular frame with pieces varying in length from 1 to 4 tiles, allowing you to create different sized game boards. This allows you to create smaller boards for quirky piece combinations and more puzzle-like quick play, or to combine pieces from Colour Chess and Lure together on one board. You can also combine multiple sets to create sprawling battlefields for Swarm play or 4 player Colour Chess.

I think the randomized board is very fair and can be used competitively. The "competitive" setup sounds unnecessary to me and I feel like I would just place down a lot of them without understanding where they are best placed. Almost placing them randomly since I don't care. Analyzing the randomized board from the start makes more sense to me, rather than during the creation of the board.

Regarding the last 4 random tiles placed when using random, is it completely random? On the app I have noticed that sometimes 2 of them are of the same color. Can 3 or 4 of the last 4 tiles also be of the same color? I think it would make more sense if the last 4 placed would have different colors.

I haven't really tried the patterned boards. The randomized boards are just too much fun.

If anyone is interested in programming here is code I used to generate a colored board:

https://pastebin.com/K4v9Pr8Y

There are no color that appears more than one time more than another color there.

For the last 4 tiles, it gives a slightly different flavour to the game depending on what the four random colours are.

- If they are all different, then each player has two colours that they are stronger on than the opponent, so leads to more pushing against the other player's weak colours

- If some of them are the same then those one or two colours will be slightly more prevalent on the board, so focus for forcing will shift to the other colours (if I remember right the app is set to completely random for the last 4 tiles, so you could have 4 the same colour)

That being said, it depends a lot on which tiles are covered by pieces at the start and the layout of each colour as to how the colour forcing plays out, so I don't think it matters too much whether the random 4 are different colours to each other or not. 

The competitive setup we find to be fun, but as you say you need to be fairly experienced with the game and it adds another 3-5 minutes to the game at the start. 

Generally making sure you've got a good spread of colours in your half of the board is important, but you can instead focus on swamping your opponent's side with one colour (making sure you have a couple of well-placed tiles of that colour so you're not forced on it).