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.