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 :-)