Octiles

 A Dale Walton's game from 1984 published by Kadon.

Each player starts with five counters on the initial positions. There are also 18 tiles,

 

all eighteen tiles

Each player must move their counters to the circles on the other side of the board.

At the beginning the board is empty, and there are no paths to travel. The tiles are shuffled and stacked.

On his turn, 

1. a player takes the top tile from the stack and places it on the board (adjacent to one of her pieces). The tile may replace an existing tile, which goes to the bottom of the stack.
   
2. then the player moves one of his pieces over that tile, and eventually others, travelling thru a connected path. The path must end in an empty middle circle. Pieces cannot stop at the adversary final circles (i.e., their initial positions for a two player game).
   

When all tiles are used, all remaining moves will imply a tile replacement (the removed tile is then used by the next player).

Notice that when paths cross, that means bridges not road blocks. Paths can also follow the paths printed onboard.

When a piece reaches one of its final circles, it can no longer move. 

A player can pass, but it is illegal to have two passes in a row.

@ boardgamegeek

An old abstract game

The French historian Thierry Depaulis presented, in his BGS 2013 talk, three board games from the 1600s. One was a dice game, another a race game (both typical of the epoch) but the third was a quite interesting abstract board game. This one is called Le jeux de la Guerre (The game of War) and, despite the fact that the author's name was lost, it seems a proprietary game - with an inclusion at the board of the label Avec Previlege du Roy (with the King's privilege). 

 

Here's a picture of the board:

 

 

and I was able to dig the rules written by Charles Sorel in his book La Maison des Jeux Academiques published in 1668 [free access at Google Books].

Here are the relevant pages:

 

 

 

A nice discovery!

Quads galore

Quads is a 1986 game by Edmond C. Leonard. It is territory game, as it is a Go variant,

@ boardgamegeek

But there are several other games called Quads: one a battleship clone and another a variant of dominoes.

But the fourth game, by Kris Burm at 1996, is a really interesting tiling game,

Against Entropy

After a long hiatus, I've been solving all the problems that arised due to the ephemeral features of the internet. Google services are becoming more and more unreliable, many diagrams and pictures were lost after one of those services was discontinued. I recovered most losses and the posts are back with all the original information. Also, I saved all photos in Github if blogger (which is owned by Google) also decides to lose this new batch of pictures. Life and work are constant fights against entropy, which is just a big word for loss.