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 BBG:

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.

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]. 

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)

Diu Fang

Diu Fang is a Chinese traditional game, apparently from the Central Asia region. In China it is known as square chess, game of squares, or playing squares (fang means square).

The game is played on a board with 7x7 or 7x8 intersections (but there are other sizes depending on the region),

The rules as stated by Olli Salmi:

• Each player has enough stones to fill half the intersections.
• The board starts empty and each player, in his turn, drops one friendly piece on an empty intersection. 
• When a player has four pieces making the corners of a square, he captures an enemy piece from the board. However, any piece forming a square cannot be captured.
• When all pieces are placed, pieces start moving to any adjacent empty intersection. Moves are mandatory, even if it means unmaking a square.
  
• Wins the player that captures all enemy pieces.

A Chinese text translation (from the previous link) states:

[...] The goal is to form a "fang" (square) by occupying one square of the board, which allows the player to capture one of the opponent's pieces. [...] Once all the pieces are placed, each player removes one of the opponent's pieces and begins moving their pieces. The objective remains to form squares and capture the opponent's pieces. Players can also dismantle and reform their existing squares to capture more pieces. The game ends when one player loses all their pieces, resulting in a loss.

"Diu Fang" has two variations: "Wei Fang" (aggressive strategy) and "Tian Fang" (peaceful strategy). In Tian Fang, players agree not to aggressively encircle the opponent's pieces, making the gameplay less confrontational and more harmonious compared to Wei Fang, which is more competitive and intense.

It is not stated if it is possible to form squares with 45º or other angles.

The game is reminiscent of Nine Men Morris and Alquerque (some boards have diagonal connections). It seems to have the same «win strategy», as in Morris, that allows the alternate movement of making and unmaking a square, thus capturing a piece in every two consecutive turns.

Details about this game (or family of games) are also described by Shimizu et al. in [1].

it is possible to note the diagonal lines at the board's middle

The authors state, besides the previous rules:

• The first stone must be placed at the middle (assuming a 7x7 board)
• "The players take turns in placing stones on the points of intersection of the lines, with the aim of creating a square around a field, while at the same time preventing their opponent from doing so."
  
• "The players take turns in taking a stone of the opponent which is not part of a square off the board and then moving one stone vertically or horizontally from a neighbouring point to the point left vacant by the removed stone. When a player manages to create a square of four pieces of his own he is allowed to remove an opponent’s piece from the board. This is repeated again and again. So a player aims to create squares himself, as squares of four stones are safe and no stone can be taken from it." This paragraph seems to mix two different rules. Each piece move means unconditionally removing an enemy piece. Then, an extra capture is possible after a new square if made. This would make for a much faster game.
  

The Ludii portal has some reconstructions that can be played (search for Fang).

In the main Fang variant, Ludii ruleset mainly follows [1]:

• 7x7 board, with diagonals in the square formed by the central 3x3 lines. 24 pieces per player. 
• Black plays first. Players alternate turns placing a piece on one of the empty spots on the board. 
• The first stone must be placed in the central spot. 
• They attempt to orthogonally surround an empty point with four of their pieces, making a square. 
• When all of the pieces are placed, players alternate turns removing one of their opponent's pieces from the board. They then move one of their pieces along the lines of the board to the place left vacant by the piece they removed. 
• When a player makes a new square, they may remove another of the opponent's pieces from the board. Pieces that are in a square around an empty point may not be captured, and captures are not made in the placement phase. 
• The player who captures all of the opponent's pieces wins.

This surrounding of an empty intersection does not appear at [1], which just says creating a square around a field. Anyway, this rule implies 45º angle squares. And this ruleset does not refer to any other type of square. So perhaps Salmi's description skips this detail, which seems probable to me (using different shapes of squares feels too modern).

[1] Shimizu et al., Game boards in the Longmen Caves and the game Fang, BGS 5.

Happy 45²

Cabale

Cabale is a 1999 game by Roland Siegers, published at Goldsieber Spiele.

It's a blocking and scoring game for 2 to 4 players, with (too?) many different elements.

There's a video from channel Exacting Games explaining the rules:

And here are the rules (written by Jay Tummelson, taken from BGG). 

Cabale is a rebranding of 1986's Winkeladvokat.

Connect 4 with a twist

I'm (re)reading the Jeux et Strategie magazine and, in issue 28, I found this,

The translation: The game is played on a Go board. A border line represents the ground. The game is played on the intersections. The objective of the game is to align four stones in any direction. The constraint: starting from the second line, a stone can only be placed if the intersections directly below it, vertically, are occupied. The first move must therefore be made on the first line; the second move can be made either on the first line or on the intersection of the second line that is vertically aligned with the first stone, and so on.

At first I was hoping for a surprising little variant, but the rules, as I read them, just describes the classic Connect-4. Anyway, it made me think of a possible variant including captures: if the last placed piece has the effect of surrounding an enemy group, that group is captured, and all remaining pieces follow gravity. The player that makes the winning pattern wins (if both have a winning pattern, wins the player that just moved).

An example: 

a) Black (X) to move
b) Black plays at 1, forcing White's 2, then answer at 3
c) White plays at 1 making atari at Black's left group, but Black plays at 2 capturing White's group
d) The white pieces are removed, and the black pieces fall down, making a 4 in-a-row

. . . . . . . .      . . . . . . . .     . . . . . . . .     . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .      . . . . . . . .     . . . . . . . .     . . . . . . . .
. . o x . . . .      . . o x . . . .     . 1 o x . . . .     . . o x . . . .
. . x o x o . .      . 3 x o x o . .     2 x x o x o . .     . o x o x o . .
o . x o o o x .      o 2 x o o o x .     o o x o o o x .     x x x o o o x .
x . x o o x x .      x 1 x o o x x .     x x x o o x x .     x x x o o x x .
     (a)                  (b)                 (c)                 (d) 

I suspect that the game does not need a large space before either the game ends or captures become unavoidable. 

There are two modifications that I think are needed:

• The winning pattern must be a 5 in-a-row (4 in-a-row is too easy)
• The winning pattern must be exactly a 5 in-a-row (allowing for matches to develop more)
  

Choosing an appropriate number of columns and rows for this ruleset is left as an exercise for the reader!

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.

1915 Corona

Corona (Crowns) is a game from 1915 which the next picture were sent to me by Fred Horn.

It states it was manufactured by The Corona Company, game producers from Los Angeles, with a copyright from the 1910s (it's hard to see).

The picture of the board gives an extra clue, the copyright was from June 1915,

The printed rules are,

If we zoom in the top of the pieces box, we get some hard to read information,

But we find an alternative name, 'Crowns'.

Using this information I went to Google patents and was able to find patent US87328614A from U.C.Upjohn, an application filed in Non, 21, 1914 and published at 1915-06-29, which corresponds to the board printed text.

The board and patented ruleset is as follows,

A Game is Born

Inside my website World of Abstract Games, there is one page dedicated to Checkers variants. It includes regional rulesets and several other more recent inventions. Around 2001 or 2002 I included another one that I called "Board Draughts" with the following text:

In Board Draughts, each player also starts with 8 stones of the first two rows. Stones cannot capture and just move and jump forward. The goal is to move all stones to the last row (where they are removed from board). Wins the player with no stones left. I don't have information about if jumping is mandatory, but I would guess that it is.

The game rules were copied from the rule's book of a 200 pack game that I had bought several years before,

Of course, 18 years passed and I had completely forgot all about this.

Last November, Ralf Gering sent me an email asking for more details about Board Draughts. He had noticed that the rules, as stated, were not complete. It seemed that [Ralf's Words],

jumping must be mandatory, otherwise it would be just too easy to block the opponent's stones. Which leads to another question: What do you do if your stones are blocked, which can still happen (albeit rarely)? In my opinion the player who is blocked should lose the game (as in "normal" draughts), which would add another strategic layer to the game.

I agreed and included that on the ruleset. Ralf also gave a puzzle for this adapted game,

(solution at the end)

...and asked about the source of the original rules. I really didn't remember, but he was able to found some old email where I had mentioned the 200 pack game. I check it and indeed found the original text (in Portuguese),

Here there is also a Go-like variant where a group of surrounded checkers are captured and removed from the board. But at the time I didn't add it to the checkers page.

Anyway, I sent this information to Ralf and he was able to found a 1998 German edition called "200 Spiele: Viele Spiele für die ganze Familie", published by Peri-Spiele, an Austrian game business.

with the same game collection.

Ralf then commented,

Your game is actually called Halma-Dame in German! It was described by Erwin Glonnegger and Walter Diem in "Das große Ravensburger Spielebuch" (1974) [They also describe Blockade (=Bloqueio) just before they describe Halma-Dame!], by Hajo Bücken and Dirk Hanneforth in "Klassische Spiele ganz neu" (1990) and by Theo Hartogh in "Alte Brettspiele neu entdeckt: Mühle, Dame, Halma" (1999). The Portuguese translation is, however, misleading and (partly) outright wrong. According to the German sources pieces are allowed to leap over opponent's pieces, but that's not mandatory. The object of the game is to occupy the two farthest ranks that is the start position of the opponent. Pieces are never removed from the board. Nothing is said about blockades in the German rules.

So, my initial attempt to make sense of the Portuguese text, resulted in a (partially specified) new checkers game. I changed the checkers webpage to reflect this.

This is a small example of what I think is an important effect in the history of board games. Some regional variants, even new games, could have been created due to misunderstandings between people from different lands, communicating with difficulty without a proper shared language. Others might be born from reading underspecified rules or bad translations from books describing games. These misunderstandings produce ambiguity when trying to play the game afterwards, within your own family or community, and there is the need to create patches to make the game playable again. A bit like mutation in evolution.

s i * X * O

A  Tile - laying Boardgame  by  Fred Horn© Fred Horn  25/11/2016

Introduction On SPIEL’16 in Essen I did meet Mr. Christer Ekberg from Sweden who was presenting a newly published game TREXO by Förlago AB.  The material to play the game reminded me strongly of something I did invent in the last part of the 70’s nearly forty years ago. Looking through my historic files I found the Notes for a game on a 8x8-board, using domino-like game-pieces with the symbols of ‘noughts and crosses’: an X  and an O. It was easy to see that this game (it never got a name!) with a few adapted rules could be played on the Board and with the Tiles of the TREXO-game. -- Fred Horn

Aim of the Game

To be the Player with more “lines” with 6 of his symbols on a ‘line’.

Material

=  Board with 10 x 10 squares

=  45 Tiles ( 1 x 2 ) – 2 squares with on 1 square an  X  and on the other square an O

Start

The Board is placed between the 2 Players on the Table.

All Tiles are placed in a “Stock” next to the Board.

One Player picks 1 Tile and place it anywhere, according to the grid, on the Board.

The other Player choses his symbol:  X  or  O .

The first Player do have two options: or to start play or to let his opponent start.

When the starting Player’s Tile is West/East, than the other Player places his Tiles North/South and in reverse when the first Player does have North/South the other places West/East.

Play

=  After ‘start play’, Players’  Turns alternate.

=  In his Turn a Player takes a Tile from the “Stock” and places it to his wish anywhere

     on the Board according to his orientation (North/South or West/East).

=  Players try to get 6 (exactly 6 !) of their symbol on a straight ‘line’ on the Board.

     N.B. The symbols do not need to be adjacent, other symbols or open squares in

     between are allowed.

    If a Player makes a ‘line’ with 6 of the opponents symbols that does not count.

=  When a Player has made a ‘line’ (if possible to make 2 or more -‘lines’ with 6- in the

    same Turn, each ‘line’ counts) with 6 of his symbols, he end his Turn by picking a Tile

    for each ‘line’ from the “Stock” placing it “blind” in front of him to mark his “Score”.

=  When the “Stock” is empty game ends.

=  Each Player counts his “Scored” Tiles. Player with the highest sum wins.

     When it is an equal sum the game ends in a Draw.