The Fractured Flat

The world has shattered! Our two-dimensional universe has splintered into dozens of shards, and heroes like us need to knit it back together! As dimension-hopping wizards in a flat world, you will struggle to reunite your mutiverse and score some points along the way, in The Fratured Flat.

The Fractured Flat is a simple area-control board game, in development at Crab Fragment Labs. You will need 16 small tokens for each player, and the Fractured Flat game board, below.

Players take turns placing or moving their tokens on the board. You score points by occupying regions with dots (“cities”), and you also score points if neighboring regions are owned by your opponent. Each game takes 10 to 15 minutes.

• Rules: How to play The Fractured Flat (Version 1.5, 12/22/24)

• Fractured Flat Board (Version 1.4, 8/18/24)

• Play The Fractured Flat online at Greg Whitehead’s Down the Rathole

• Video: How to Make Game Boards

Notes on the newest version: We have tightened up some of the older language around scoring, and added a new rule based on some dead-end situations discovered by Greg Whitehead in his simulator. (Now when a rank of spaces is completely full the next rank opens up for everyone.)

We are still tinkering with the fundamentals of this game, but we hope you will give it a try. The goal is to pretty it up steampunk-fashion and sell it as a printed silk, along with a nice set of stones, in summer 2025.

Do you like abstract games, and want to see more? Have a question or a comment? Let us know!

For other abstract games in a similar vein, you can check out Mapple, Prudh, and Linos, along with many others at The Pub.