Les Conspirateurs

Les Conspirateurs is a game that appears to be from late 18^th century France.

The game is played on a 17x17 board initially empty, with the following markings:

Each player has twenty pieces that start off board. The 5x9 rectangle is a safe area. The 39 gray squares at the board edges are the sanctuaries.

The rules:

• First, both players take turns to drop their stones on empty squares inside the safe area
• Then, at each turn, each player selects a friendly piece and either:
  
• moves it to an adjacent (orthogonal or diagonal) empty square
• jumps over an adjacent piece of any color to the opposite empty square; if other jumps are available, the stone can continue to jump in any direction (there are no captures, and jumping is not mandatory)
  
• A player wins when all his twenty stones are in twenty of the available sanctuaries.

The details about the game originate from R.C. Bell in his The Boardgame Book, pg 129:

Bell seems quite unsure about the game's origins, so this information might be wrong. As it is, it would make it 100 years older than Halma, the well-known 19^th century English game which uses the same types of ludemes. The only information besides the rules, is that Bell acknowledges Matthew Wurr as an artist, regarding Les Conspirateurs, which most probably means it was Wurr that drew the game images for this book. I also browsed the most probable books from the bibliography, without success.

In Discovering Old Board Games, a 1980 book also written by Bell, he states that the rules came «from a French text» translated by Miss Fiona Brookes. Unfortunately, nothing else is said.

I could not find any older sources that mention Les Conspirateurs. This is not a case where we don't know the rules of an older game. We do know the rules -- at least according to Bell -- the question is how old the game really is!

There is another reference I could not find online:

• Michel Boutin, Jeu de pions, les conspirateurs, Les Cahiers de l'animation #21, Ceméa, January 1998.

A game full of mysteries!

Swish and Morro

Swish and Morro are two games by Christian Freeling presented in GAMES #53 in 1984.

As said in the magazine article, both games use the same 8x8 board, material and also most rules, but each game has a different way to capture (one uses Checkers-like captures, the other uses custodian captures) which leads to very different dynamics.

Tricolor

Tricolor is a 1930 game by Maurice Kraitchik, and published at F.X. Schmid.

The game is played on a regular hexagonal board of size 5. The players have 18 pieces each that they place on their first three rows:

Definitions:

• Pieces are stackable and can be made of mixed colors. The stack owner is given by the color of the top piece
• The power of a stack is based on its size and the hex it is on
• The base power is the number of friendly pieces in the stack (up to a maximum of three)
  
• If the stack lies on yellow hex its power multiplies by 1; green multiplies by 2, red by 3
• note: the hex colors used in the post's setup diagram are not the same, please check the board below

Rules:

• On his turn, the player moves one friendly stack
  
• A stack with N friendly pieces moves up to min(3,N) hexes in a single direction (no turns are allowed)
• Stacks cannot jump over stacks (friend or foe) but can land on top of friendly stacks
• A stack can split when moving, leaving the bottom part in the initial hex (the part that stays may change owner, depending on its top piece); the moving range of the top part is given by its number of friendly pieces
• A less powerful enemy stack, in moving range, must be attacked (attacks take precedence to simple moves)
  
• The attacker moves on top of the attacked
  
• If the attacking stack is more than twice as powerful, the enemy pieces in the attacked stack are removed from the game (this is called killing)
  
• If not, the enemy pieces stay on the stack, and the order of the pieces remains unchanged (this is called capturing)
• If there are several attack options, the player decides which to execute
  
• Wins the player that captures and/or kills all the enemy pieces, or stalemates the adversary.
  

There is a price to pay for stacks with more than three friendly pieces, since these stacks stop having more power after three pieces. The only advantage is the ability to split the stack and maintain more moving range. Not sure if this is worth the risk of having many pieces in the same stack. However, the rule makes sense, to prevent players to build a singleton stack with immense power.

Ralf Gering comments on BGG referring some tactics: 

1. Force your opponent to capture on weak hexagons; 
2. A war is won by sacrifices; 
3. Invasions into enemy territory are more dangerous for the aggressor; 
4. Be smart when you dismantle a big stack!

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Tricolor is one of the oldest stacking abstract games, after Bashni  and Laska (which inspired Tricolor). It also has an option for three players (check original rules below).

Here is the first reference of the game on Kraitchik's 1930 book, Le Mathématique des Jeux (the following pages are from Dover's second edition, 1953),

Here's a review on Games & Puzzles #32: 

This is one of the first hexagonal board games with stacking pieces. 

I know only of one older example, and it is from US patent 437838, by Heinrich Sperl, that designed a game that was never commercialized (afaict) and, so, is quite obscure: