Press Ups

Press Ups, aka Touch and Go, Basis 10 or Touch Down, is a 1974 board game by Yigal Bogoslavski, published at Invicta Games, among others. (GB patent 1524371)

Players place their ten pieces (10 reds and 10 blues) like in the diagram, while 29 green pieces occupy the remaining squares. The 7x7 board allows pieces to be pressed down, which is just an aesthetical replacement for dropping pieces on empty squares.

The first player presses one friendly piece. For the rest of the game, each player must press some unpressed piece adjacent (orthogonal or diagonal) to the last pressed one.

When no more moves are possible, wins the player with more friendly pressed pieces.

Possible variants:

• change the King-like adjacency to a Knight-like, ie, the next piece to be pressed must be a knight's jump from the previous pressed piece. 
• include a first phase where players, alternately, drop their friendly pieces on empty squares (they place all green pieces at the remaining squares)
  

A review on Games & Puzzles #43:

§

The move by blocking previous cells is a ludeme better known in Amazons (using a Queen-like adjacency). Alex Randolph's 1982 Plop is played with two Chess Knights on a 8x8 board, where each movement creates a wall on the initial square. The goal is to capture the single enemy Knight or stalemate the adversary. Around 2000 I submitted to The 32-Turn Challenge a Chess variant with this idea, The Knightliest Black Hole, where each move also removes an empty square from the board, but the game has several versions of the classical Knight. WAG's page about Slimetrail includes other abstract games with this type of move.

Jeux et Stratégie #37 presents another game with this idea, Numeration,

The first player marks the number 1 at an empty 5x5 board. Then, each player marks the successor of the previous number on an adjacent cell (orthogonal or diagonal), until the last possible move. That player scores the last number marked number, and sums to their total. The matches continue until one of the players reaches a predetermined goal.

Another example is found in GAMES magazine #39 (1983), called Sque-e-e-eze Play by Robert Mansfield:

A Argentinian old challenge

I found at the Argentinian magazine El Acertijo #17 (1995) the following challenge: 

Definition: A five-line is a piece that results in joining five segments of equal size, aligned consecutively by right angles. There are a total of 23 different five-lines.

The challenge is to use these 23 five-liners to build a perimeter with an area as large as possible, assuming the five-lines are supported by a ground level.

The first example, presented by Héctor San Segundo, the puzzle inventor, had a total area of 491:

In a subsequent number, the best answers to the challenge were presented:

The best result was 793 by Marcelo Iglesias. But Héctor had found a result with 811 units of area (the one shown above).

Afterwards, there was a new record by Pablo Coll with 814 units of area:

He argues, in the text above, that if the perimeter made by the five-liners were able to exactly follow the semi-circle, the maximum area would be around 830 units. So, 814 units is pretty close to that theoretical maximum.

The magazine does not seem to include more information about this puzzle.

Nowadays this problem might be solvable by searching for all valid possibilities. We cannot enumerate and try all solutions (23 factorial is still pretty big) but by searching with some good heuristics, this seems a doable problem.

Hexagonal Checkers

There are abstract games with hexagonal boards from the 19th century. And Checkers is a much older game. Also, Chinese Checkers, from 1893, while not being a Checkers game, uses its name and applies the same jumping principle (but without captures). So, while using hexagonal boards to play Checkers seems like -- in retrospect -- a rather obvious idea, did it had to wait until the 1970s and 1980s for the first variants to appear?

The best-known variant is Christian Freeling's 1979 HexDame, applying the rules of International Draughts on a hexagonal setting (cf. at BGG),

Less known variants include:

1) Pskov Checkers (undated), which uses the rules of Checkers instead of those from Draughts, and promotions are only possible at the last corner space (instead of the entire last rows of HexDame).

one of the proposed board/setup for Pskov checkers

 

Here's a translated ruleset (from Russian)

2) Damex, that appeared in Jeux & Strategy #13, uses the rules of Dames (the name of Checkers in France) in a squared-liked hex-board:

Damex solves a problem from traditional Checkers, where even three Kings vs one does not force a win in all possible positions. In Damex 2 vs. 1 is a win.

The game is attributed to M. Lavictoire that sent the rules to J&S in 1980. According to Ralf Gering, this is an iteration of an older game from Joseph Boyer*, Les Dames Hexagonales, described in his book (authored together with Vern Parton) Les jeux de dames non orthodoxes et autres jeux à pions from 1956 (referenced at google books but not available, hélas!). 

(*) Boyer also wrote three books about chess variants, Les Jeux d'échecs non orthodoxes (1951), Nouveaux Jeux d'Echecs Non Orthodoxes (1954), and Nouveaux jeux d'échecs intéressants (1956).

In 1925, US Patent 1623881 specifies a Checkers-like game with an hexagonal grid:

The moves and goals, however, make it a distant relative of the Checkers family. But we were able to go back from 1956 to 1925. 

A bit earlier, in 1914, Hervey Dexter Thatcher submitted patent US1106991 for a King Bridge Checker Game, also using a hexagonal grid:

In this game there is a middle three hex bridge, and when a piece crosses it, it is promoted to 'King'. This game was published as we can see in the next pictures,

Kingbridge, AGPI Quarterly volume 7 [4]

 

a modern edition of Kingbridge

We can still step back 20 years, for a game by J. F. Beaman in 1894, described in US Patent 529582:

This is a proper Checkers game. So, our first 19th century hit! 

Another hexagonal checkers was patented by Charles E. Duryea in 1888 (patent US384195):

Can we go further back? Yes, here's US Patent 259695 by John F. Kingwill from 1882:

This (unnamed) game is basically a Checkers for three players. So, we have already some 19th century Checkers games! At BGG it was named Hexadraughts.

For the oldest entry, Ralf Gering mentioned a book by J. G. Lallement, Les Quatre Jeux de Dames from 1802 (which had a 2023 reprint),

If we zoom in the boards:

we notice the triangular/hexagonal nature of the connections between the board spaces!

So, after all, the idea did not have to wait for the Seventies!

 

 

 

The Damex solution for figure 2, from the J&S puzzle:

Spectrum

Spectrum is an uncredited 1975 game published by Intellect Games.

I was unable to find the entire ruleset and tried to reconstruct the game rules from the available information (if anyone have them, please let me know).

The game is played on a 10x10 board, with sets of six red and violet pieces, 16 orange and blue pieces, and (probably) 28 green and yellow pieces, for a total of 100 pieces. One player owns the red, orange and yellow pieces, while the other owns the green, blue and violet pieces.

The game starts with both players placing, in alternate fashion, their six red and six violet pieces in the board. These pieces must not be adjacent to each other.

Then each player, on her turn, drops one friendly piece on an empty square provided that it is only adjacent to pieces of adjacent colors in the color spectrum:

red ↔ orange ↔ yellow ↔ green ↔ blue ↔ violet

I'm assuming that a player passes if she has no legal moves; and the match ends after two consecutive passes.
 
Wins the player with more placed stones; or if both players have an equal number, the match is a draw.

Ralf Gering said about this game: The game appears to be flawed because the final scores are always very close (+/- 1). In fact it seems that the best the second player can achieve is a draw. Maybe the game can be fixed by multiplying the number of tiles of the remaining colors. The player with the smaller product wins.

Brax

Brax is an 1899 game by Frederic Denham (patent 406632), published at Fratelli Fabbri Editori.

Brax is a capture game where the goal is to capture all enemy pieces.

Each player has seven pieces, initially placed in the seven center intersections at the player's first row.

Pieces can move up to two lines of their color, and only one line of opposite color (notice that half the lines are red, and the other half are blue). Pieces cannot move over intersections occupied by pieces, or onto intersections occupied by friendly pieces.

Capture is by replacement; a piece that moves into an enemy-occupied intersection captures that piece. Captures are not mandatory.

The game includes another rule named braxing. After moving, if a player threatens a capture in the next move, she can optionally call a «brax» (the threat does need to come from the last moved piece). When a brax is called, the adversary must move that piece in his next turn (if several are threatened, the player can choose which to move). If two pieces of one color and one piece of the opposing color are left on the board, the player with the single piece can no longer brax.

If both players only have a single piece, after five turns without capturing, the game is a draw.

The game includes extra star pieces to allow matches with three or four players,

Brax is also featured in Roger Millington's Games and Puzzles for Addicts,

Here's an older board design:

The game also has a Wikipedia entry.