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!