The Game of Temples

Le Jeu des Temples is a 1992 unpublished game by Laurent Escoffier.

Each player has nine pieces plus one temple. There are also 32 shared tiles. Each player owns its nearest half of the 10x10 board.

• Initially, each player drops a tile and places her temple on it.
• Phase I: Each player, on her turn, places one tile on her half of the board, until all tiles are on the board. In the first nine tiles, they also place her pieces on top of those tiles.
• Phase II: On their turn, each player can either 
• (a) move a friendly piece to an (orthogonally or diagonally) adjacent empty tile (or the tile with the enemy temple, cf. win condition)
  
• (b) move any tile to an (orthogonally or diagonally) adjacent empty square. The moving tile must be empty or occupied by a friendly piece.
• Wins the player that moves a friendly piece to the tile occupied by the enemy temple.
• It is not allowed to block the game by surrounding your own temple with friendly pieces.
  

The ruleset provides a good idea, the two-level movement of different tokens, ones owned, ones shared. However, it seems to provide many ways to develop drawish strategies, like blocking (which the rules try to explicitly prevent, usually a bad sign) or unmaking the previous adversary move if he makes a tile movement. Perhaps a Ko rule and/or a misère stalemate rule could prevent problems the game design might have.