About Online Acquire
This site is an online version of Sid Sackson's Acquire board game. You can create an account (or log in as a guest) and play with other people online.
Gameplay
Gameplay is based on this version of the official rules, with the following exceptions:
- No special rules are applied to 2-player games.
- Tiles that become "dead" (would merge safe chains), while in a player's hand are not replaced. If a player draws a dead tile, it is replaced in the manner described in the above rules.
Quitting
A common complaint with multiplayer computer Acquire is quitters. In Acquire there is no resigning, if one
player leaves the game abruptly, it ruins the game for the other players, as there is no obvious way to distribute
the quitting player's tiles and shares without messing up other players' plans and strategies.
Solution: On this site, games can be timed. If a user's time runs out before they make a play, a (dumb)
computer player will play for them. This way, if you leave in the middle of a game, the dumb computer will continue to play for you,
so you will likely lose, but the other players can continue their game uninterupted.
Rankings
The player rankings displayed on the leaderboards and in Game Stats are computed using the TrueSkill algorithm. Your
Ranking is a probabilistic estimate of your skill that is updated after each game. TrueSkill factors in the strength of your
opponents (for example if you beat someone with a high skill estimate, your rating will increase more). As you play more games TrueSkill
becomes more "confident" in your skill rating (if you look in Game Stats you will see that the players with more games have a smaller ± rating range, meaning we can be more confident that their actual skill is close to their rating).
The leaderboards display the "conservative" or lower end of players' rating range.
Note: Your record and rankings are only updated based on games with 2 or more signed in players. If you only play against guests your ranking will not be updated.
See here for more information on TrueSkill.
Acknowledgements
- Thank you to my father, for teaching me to play this obscure board game at 5 years old.
- Parts of the site's design and user interface are inspired by Tim Styer's Acquire, which can be played on his website. Thank you, Tim, for keeping Acquire alive on the web for many years.