Variance, and shifting rows

Variance is an uncredited 1985 game published by Dash Inc.

BGG description:

The object of the game is to be the first to move all nine of your pawns from your own "home intersections" to those of your opponent. The playing board is made up of 17 thin strips, which can be slid left or right to transport pieces laterally. Pieces may move to adjacent intersections, jump adjacent pieces, and make "long jumps" covering a greater distance.

The main game uses a die to determine how many moves a player may make on his or her turn. A variation, included in the game directions, removes the die by adding a schedule of moves per turn.

A review by Jake Davenport:

Variance plays like Chinese checkers for two players, with the addition of a board that shifts some pieces laterally and the ability to make long jumps across the board. The game board consists of 17 strips that make up a diagonally oriented grid, and each player has a set of pawns that he or she must move to the other player's starting location. A player may do one of three things in a  "move": advance a pawn, jump a pawn over any other pawn, or shift one of the board's strips either left or right. A pawn may jump another pawn which is several spaces away, landing that many spaces beyond it. If you jump a pawn that is in the exact center of the board, you can go from your start to your destination in one move. You can also make a series of jumps in one move, leapfrogging quickly to the other side of the board. Setting up for such jumps is an integral part of the game's strategy.

Variance looks sharp. The board is well designed and aesthetically pleasing. The rules are simple, but players quickly realize that there is much to learn in planning out moves. After the first game, we decided to play with the move schedule to keep luck from affecting the game. Each game we played found us learning new tricks. We found more efficient movement, at first jumping pawns to a point near the goal and then marching them in, then in later games jumping pawns directly into the goals. As we get better, I expect to find ways to move across the board faster, while simultaneously thwarting the opponent from doing the same. It's a rare joy to encounter a game with simple rules that has an interesting forward thinking strategy. Variance is a game which can be learned quickly and yet has depth of play which becomes evident with each successive game.

games review US GAMES #102

This ludeme of shifting rows is not common. Games that use this mechanism include Shuttles,

A Sid Sackson's review for GAMES #47

1988's Shift Tic Tac Toe,

where each player either drops a friendly stone, like Connect 4, or slides one row, eventually moving pieces out of the board.

And also 1976's Perplexus,

Babuschka

 Babuschka is a 1982 board game by Al Newman, published by Ravensburger.

 

BGG description:

Uses an 8x8 board with the 12 corner squares taken out. The pieces are nesting Russian dolls (8 each of small, medium and large, for 24 pieces per player). Reminiscent of Halma, the pieces attempt to cross the board and re-form on the opposite side. You only move the topmost of any Russian doll stack and you must land on an empty space or on top of a smaller piece. Checkers-like jumping is also possible. The clever part is that pieces underneath others are out of reach, thus you immobilize enemy pieces by covering them ... until you move away.

 

Rules also at BGG.

The game has an interesting and original property: it has perfect information, but requires the use of memory, since some pieces will become hidden during the match. Usually games of hidden information work on the opposite direction, less and less information stays hidden as the match advances.

Hexagons

Hexagons is a 1923 uncredited puzzle and game, published at Clement Toy Co.

The board is hexagonal holding 18 half-hexagonal pieces,

There is a puzzle named Nine-Hex which is a variation of the 15-puzzle. The player position the board in a given puzzle position. The goal is to keep sliding half-hexes until the initial position above is reached (no rotations are allowed). The text provides a notation that describes many initial positions to solve.

The game is named Hexagons and also starts with an initial puzzle position (where the piece 5 is removed). The game can be won by stalemating the adversary or pairing half hexes, but the ruleset seems unspecified or ambiguous.

The 1 Game

The 1 Game is a 1994 uncredited game, published at The 1 Game.

It is played on a triangular board with three types of pieces,

BGG rules description:

Players take turns removing any number of consecutive balls along a single horizontal line, as long is there is no gap or red ball between them. The removed balls are discarded into the large hole and underneath the slider, which stops them going astray and gets them ready for the next game. The red ball can only be taken on its own. Any row containing red can only be taken up to the red. A blue ball allows players to take up to, or part of, three entire rows radiating from that blue. Other blues in the path are treated as regular silver balls. The player with the last ball loses.

I was able to find the ruleset from the original website (via Wayback Machine, from 5 Dec 1998).

Siesta

Siesta is a 1999 game by Guido Hoffmann, published at Goldsieber Spiele.

The rules by Paul Lucas:

An excerpt from Stven Carlberg review:

Siesta is an excellent game by Guido Hoffman (who is, by the way, the son of game designer Rudi Hoffman) that has turned out in my group to be one of the biggest favorites of the year. Not only do the bits look good -- as no reviewer seems able to resist mentioning -- but the particular geometric swirl produced as the game plays out is rather fascinating. So as well as being fun to play, it's aesthetically very pleasing to watch each game develop.

Siesta falls into the category of games with no hidden information and no dice, but it is very much an original. There are three types of pieces in the game: the suns and the shadows, which everyone uses equally, and the roofs of a different color for each player.

 

Tac-Tic-Turn

Tac-Tic-Turn is a 1987 game by Ned Strongin, published at IRWIN Games.

This is a variant of Tic-Tac-Toe played with nine 2x2 pieces that can be picked and rotated back.

Rules:

• On his turn the player either:
• drops a friendly piece on an empty square
• rotates a 2x2 grid by 90º degrees
  
• Wins the player that make a 4, or longer, in-a-row

The game had a review on GAMES #99,

§

Yasuhiro Jisai mentions that a variant of this game is marketed in Japan as Pitagoras, and includes a custodian capture for pair of pieces (like in Pente).

I went searching (ピタゴラスゲーム) and found this page where it is said: 相手の駒２個を自分の駒で挟むと取ることができます（１個を挟んでも取れません）[You can capture your opponent's pieces by sandwiching two of them between your own pieces. (You cannot capture by sandwiching just one piece.)]

This game comes with more pieces (which makes sense, given that captures are allowed),

Otherwise, having just six pieces, the captured pieces should be returned to the respective player's reserve.

Some comments from the mentioned page:

You know, I think this is quite a brilliant game. If you focus too much on lining up pieces, you'll get captured. But if you only think about capturing or blocking your opponent, you might overlook the rotation mechanic. And predicting how the board will change after a rotation is really tricky!"

Yuki-Onna highly praised the game, saying that constantly considering the effects of "sandwiching," "lining up," and "rotating" makes it excellent for training flexible thinking and multi-angle strategy planning.

Pusher, Leverage, and Physics

Pusher is a 1993 game by Werner Falkhof, and published by ASS Altenburger Spielkarten.

The game works for two or three people, and has a dexterity element to it.

The rules,

Since there is Physics involved (players push balls in non-deterministic ways) this is a game that looks abstract, but isn't. Something between a mini-pool and Subbuteo, which is very hard to design well.

Indeed, the last part of a review by Ben Baldanza:

Pusher is another great-looking game that disappoints in play. I give Theta credit for trying to integrate a dexterity mechanic into a placement and seemingly strategic context, but the result is more chaos than strategy.

 

 

A game that better approaches the problem of mixing Abstract Strategy and Physics is Leverage:

 

 

No, I didn't forget Jenga: not obscure enough :-)

Ascent

Ascent is a 1998 game by Gregory K. Van Patten.

Ascent is played with numbered tiles initially arranged in a diamond pattern (see starting configuration). There are four rows slanting down to the left, and four rows slanting down to the right. Also, there are seven levels (ie, the level with the "1" tile, the level with the "2" tiles, etc.).

On his turn, a player must switch two tiles from different levels, under the condition that the tile initially in the higher level has a larger number than the tile in the lower level.

• The goal of the first player is to arrange tiles in one of the four rows slanting down to the left so that the numbers form a strictly increasing sequence from the top of that row to the bottom.
• The goal of the second player is to arrange tiles in one of the four rows slanting down to the right so that the numbers form a strictly increasing sequence from the top of that row to the bottom.

Extra considerations: Passing is not allowed, so you could possibly have to make a move which achieves your opponent's object, so that you lose. If a move simultaneously achieves strictly increasing sequences from top to bottom, in both directions, then the game ends in a tie.

Here is a sample game by the author (gray pieces mean switches).

First player has just moved, and threatens to win
by switching the 2 and 3 on the lower right side. 

.Second player defends by switching the indicated 3 and 6, and can now win by switching 4 and 5. Note that if second player had tried defending
by switching 1 and 7, first player would have won immediately. 

First player switches 3 and 4, and can now win by switching 2 and 5. 

Second player switches 3 and 7, and can now win by switching 6 and 7.


First player switches 2 and 5, and can now win by switching 4 and 6. 

Second player defends by switching 5 and 7,
and can now win by switching 2 and 3. 

First player switches 2 and 3, and can now win by switching 4 and 5.

Note the [3 3 5 6] row slanting down to the right does is not a
win for second player, because it does not form a strictly
increasing sequence (it contains more than one "3" tile). 

However, the first player neglected to consider this 1,3 switch,
which results in a second player win.

Kensington

Kensington was designed by Peter Forbes and Brian Taylor in 1979, and published by Arxon, among others.

The game is similar to Nine-Men-Morris in a Tessellation of squares, triangles and hexagons,

Pieces are placed on line intersections. Players take turns placing their fifteen pieces on empty intersections. Then pieces are moved one at a time from one intersection to another (a player passes if he does not have a valid move). 

• If a player has pieces on all corners of a triangle, he can reposition one enemy piece. 
• If a player has pieces on all corners of a square, he can reposition two enemy pieces.
• The object of the game is to control the corners of a hexagon.

The game has a design weakness that can be patched with the following rule: 

• It is not permitted for a player to rebuild a triangle or a square until two turns have passed.

 

 

The game had above than average visibility back then, and was quite probably backed by a nice marketing budget. It appeared more than once, at least, on the american Games, the french Jeux et Strategie and the italian Per Gioco magazines. However, it became somewhat obscure after the 1980s. It can be played at Ludii.

 

The board can be (better) used to play Christian Freeling's Lotus, a Go-like game.

Chase

Chase was designed by Tom Kruszewski in 1985 and published by TSR.

Clark D. Rodeffer and me (João Neto) wrote an article about it in Abstract Games Magazine #9 (2002). It is a remarkable game that, sadly, is almost forgotten. I recommend reading the article and try yourself the game.

Some words from Steffan O'Sullivan in 1997:

Bumps and exchanges are other key elements to watch out for in the game.You can carefully set up a fork, thinking you've got a good capture going next turn, when suddenly he makes a bump move which protects both pieces at once and threatens a move to the Chamber!

One thing chess players have a hard time adjusting to is the concept of exchanges in this game. It seems like a good exchange, trading a "1" die to capture a "6" die, but after the exchange, you both have the same number of dice totalling 25! Very puzzling - you have to learn to think differently than in chess.

As your dice pool dwindles, you become less flexible. Yes, you still have 25 movement points total, but if those are concentrated on five dice as opposed to spread out over nine dice, you'll find it's harder to make all kinds of moves. Most dice will have high numbers, and you can't creep up on the enemy. Even worse, you can't afford another loss at that point, and the game gets very tense. Most of the strategy centers around the Chamber: he who has the most dice at any given moment is ahead, unless his position is really lousy.

Position is something that takes time to learn: there are key rows which radiate out from the Chamber that are very important. It's also important to keep at least some of your dice together. Not only does this allow for Exchange moves, it also makes for some good bumping. But this is something you'll learn best from playing the game, so I won't go into detail.

Here's another review from Sid Sackson in GAMES #68,

Tripples

Trippples is a 1972 William T. Powers' race game, where the board is constructed with a set of pieces marked with their possible moves.

According to BGG:

Trippples is played on a 8×8 board as opponents race from one corner to the other. On the board are placed, in a pre-movement round, tiles with three arrows which point to three of the eight surrounding spaces. Each player plays these tiles alternatively until they have all been played. Movement is made by following the arrows, and avoiding the neutral zone in the middle. The game ends when one player reaches his goal or when both players cannot make legal moves.

The key game mechanism is that your move options are determined not by the three arrows on the tile under your (transparent) game piece, but by those under your opponent's piece. Thus, each move is chosen to try and limit your opponent's next as well as to try and guarantee yourself a good selection of choices. This adds an element of bluff and second-guessing to the game.

The rulesheet:

The game does not have the property of converging to the endgame, it seems possible to walk on circles, never be able to reach your final corner. That's why the rules have two extra winning conditions for these types of situation. To slightly reduce this problem, it's better to consider that empty tiles allow for unrestricted moves.

There's a version using hidden information, where all tiles start upside down, and are only revealed when a piece stops there. It's also possible to add an element of luck, by shuffling the tiles and placing them on the board at random.

The review at Games & Puzzles #42:

This game has patent US3820791. When searching this game I came by the blog The Dreams of Gerontius, which has a post about Tripples, and mentions an much older 1894 patent (US519326) for a game with some board design similarities, 

This is a game for two or four players, with capture and scoring themes.

[addendum] There's also another similar game I wish to mention, Schada from c.1936 [1][2]. 

Here each player occupy their first two rows with sixteen pieces. The game is a variant of Halma, where captures are possible. The moves are decided by the available markings at the square the piece is standing.

[1] Fred Horn - Schada, AGPC Quarterly 18 [2] (2016)
[2] Fred Horn, Kerry Handscomb - Schada, Abstract Games Magazine 20