Bombardment

This is a great little game with a unique and exciting mode of capturing. Moving into the same space, a la Chess too boring? Custodial capture (see Tablut) got you down? Jumping been done too much (see Alquerque, Konane, Peg Solitaire, Bagha Chal, etc)? How about...exploding?

Yes, in this game, which was just recently invented in 2003 by Chris Huntoon (to the best of my knowledge), your pieces are bombs, and they kill each other as bombs should -- by detonating themselves and taking out their surrounding enemies. Very cool.

Equipment

The game can be played on a standard chessboard (if you really don’t have one, print one here) or extended to any square grid. Each player will need 16 identical tokens -- use coins or beans or buttons or whatever -- or more for larger boards (2 times the width of the board used).

Rules

The game is very much like Breakthrough -- it is essentially a variant thereof -- but the gameplay and strategy couldn’t be more different. Your goal is again to reach the other side of the board, but there is another victory condition: to destroy all of your opponent’s pieces.

 Hey, at least I didn’t use pawns again, right?

The initial game setup is identical to Breakthrough, as is the pieces’ movement (one step forward, either orthogonally or diagonally). However the capturing is, as previously stated, completely different.

On your turn, you can choose to either move or detonate a piece. Movement has been discussed already, so the good bit: if you choose to detonate a piece, it and all pieces surrounding it (including your own pieces!) are removed. So all pieces in a 3 x 3 square centered on the detonated piece are removed. As in, the piece and any piece diathogonally adjacent to it. Just look at the picture.

 The picture.

As previously stated, the winner is the first to reach the other side or to destroy all enemy pieces. Happy bombarding!

Dao

Slightly in the vein of Teeko, Dao is a much more modern and (compared to Teeko, anyway) more complicated take on the alignment genre. I’m not going to lie; I don’t love this game. I prefer Teeko for its elegance, but Dao could be said to have slightly deeper strategy. I chose it instead for its remarkable board: so small, yet with such strategy contained within. Just slightly bigger than a Tic-Tac-Toe board, it isn’t the smallest board I’ve ever seen (that honor goes to Taabel, I think), but for the complexity of the game it’s tiny.

Equipment

The game is played on a 4 x 4 square board with four distinct tokens per player. You can print one here if it’s too much trouble to draw one, and use whatever you have lying around the house as pieces.

Rules

At the beginning of the game, the pieces are set up along the long diagonals of the board as shown.

 As shown. Like I said.

The goal of the game is very simple: to align your pieces in either a straight orthogonal line (diagonal lines don’t count, as the starting position might suggest) or a 2 x 2 square, or occupy all four corners of the board. Furthermore, if you block one of your opponent’s pieces in one of the corners so that it can’t move, you automatically lose the game (this is to prevent cheap tactics that would make the game unwinnable for either player). This is only if all three adjacent spaces are occupied by your own pieces; it’s okay if the piece is blocked so long as at least one of the pieces blocking its movement belongs to your opponent.

Pieces don’t move traditionally, however. They move by sliding, which is a rather unusual form of movement not seen in a whole lot of games. Sliding in Dao works like this: a piece can move in any direction diathogonally, but must move as many spaces as possible in that direction. Think a Chess queen on ice, that can’t stop until it hits something (either the edge of the board or another piece).

 The blue piece in the corner can only move to those three spaces; it cannot stop moving until it collides with something. Note that if it chooses the diagonal path, blue will lose the game, as that is a cornering move

There is no capturing or jumping in the game, just sliding. My only advice to you: don’t forget about diagonal moves! It sounds silly, but I often overlook some great diagonal slides just because I’m biased towards orthogonal movement, I suppose.

Blue demonstrating one of the many winning positions

Snail Trail

This is a fun little game with an interesting mechanic that should provide some unique entertainment. There are many games called “Snail Trail,” and to the best of my knowledge this one was invented in 2001 by Don Green. It is slightly reminiscent of Amazons, although it is a much shorter and more simplistic game with intuitive rules that will have you up and playing in no time.

Equipment

The game can be played on a standard chessboard (print one here), or a grid board of any size and shape. You’ll need two tokens to serve as “snails” and quite a few more to serve as the trail -- you can use Go stones or beads or whatever you have lying around. You shouldn’t need more than thirty or forty, but may need up to sixty if both you and your opponent are good (those numbers are for a standard 8 x 8 board; your mileage may vary).

Rules

 The game setup. Look at how cute those snails are. I spoil you.

The game is very simple: each turn, you must move your snail a set number of moves. On the first turn, you move it one space. Then your opponent moves his two. Then you move yours three, and your opponent has to move four, etc.

Each time the snail moves a space, it does so diathogonally in any direction, like a Chess king. You can change direction as often as you want during the course of your movement.

However, here’s the catch: as the snails move, they leave trails behind themselves. So each time a snail moves into a new space, you place a token in the space that it previously occupied.

Now, snails cannot move into spaces that already have tokens in them. So if a player can’t move the correct number of spaces required on that turn, he loses the game.

White has won: it is black’s turn, and he must make
8 moves, but only 6 are available

Breakthrough

This is a truly remarkable game. The rules are so incredibly simple that it’s hard to believe the strategy can be as compelling and sophisticated as it is, but there you go. It was designed by Dan Troyka in 2001, and is one of my personal favorites for its incredible simplicity.

Equipment

Each player needs sixteen pieces -- checkers or coins or pawns or whatever -- that can be differentiated in some way (read: black and white tokens). The game can be played on any square grid board, so you can just use a standard chessboard if you’d like (print one free here), or a Draughts board, or whatever. Larger boards will simply mean longer games.

Rules

The pieces are setup exactly like pieces in Chess, if each piece were identical: the two rows closest to each player are filled with their tokens. For larger boards, this same setup will work -- just fill the nearest two rows.

The goal of the game is to get a piece to the other end of the board (your opponent’s home row). You only need to get one across to win the game.

Pieces move and capture almost like Chess pawns, with one major difference: they can move diagonally forward at any time, not just when they’re capturing. They still capture exactly like pawns, though, always diagonally forward. Like pawns, they cannot move backwards.

 Here, the white piece demonstrates valid moves while
the black demonstrates valid captures

The game cannot end in a tie -- ultimately someone will reach the other side. And that’s all there is to it. Ah, I love games that allow me to reuse existing models.

 The game is over: white will win in a few turns no matter what black does.

Amazons

This is a weird game, and a fairly recent one. It was invented in 1988 by Walter Zamkauskas, an Argentinean, and should provide no shortage of strategic fun for those who are looking for a unique challenge.

Equipment

The game is traditionally played on a 10 x 10 checkered board, although it can be easily adapted to an 8 x 8, which will merely provide a shorter game. Get the standard board here (or use a Draughts board) and the smaller here (or use a chessboard). In addition to this, you will need four tokens for each player (you can just use Chess pawns or whatever -- I don’t expect that you have four queens of the same color lying around), and a healthy stock of some small marker, like pennies or beads or Go stones or whatever. You’ll need quite a few -- up to around fifty -- and the color doesn’t matter (both players use the same tokens).

Rules

The game is set up as shown. Each, turn a player must do two things: move a piece (an Amazon) and place a new token (an arrow), in that order. Amazons move exactly like Chess queens, any number of spaces in any diathogonal direction. Arrows are “fired” by the Amazon that moved on your turn, and they travel out from the Amazon’s resting point to any space in any direction away from the Amazon. That is to say, the arrows move like Chess queens as well. They can stop at any point along their path -- they don’t have to hit something.

Neither Amazons nor arrows can travel over arrows or other Amazons. Once an arrow lands, it is stuck there, and nothing can pass over it. It acts as a barrier for all pieces for the rest of the game.

As the board fills up, some Amazons may become trapped by arrows. Once all of a player’s Amazons are trapped, so that he cannot move a single one of them, he loses the game. Simple, no?

 Victory for black

Teeko

I really like this game. It’s very simple, can be easily played with almost any materials, and there is just enough strategy to maintain one’s interest without turning off newcomers.

The game is very much like Tic-Tac-Toe, but it sadly cannot be played on pen and paper. It’s the brainchild of John Scarne, who, as far as I can tell, loved this game more than his children. I have read the book he wrote, Scarne on Teeko, which has the first fifty pages devoted to what a fantastic and amazing game it was that will, in a matter of years, completely replace Chess and Checkers as the most played and respected board games.

Needless to say, this was not the case. It enjoyed a bit of popularity in the fifties, but interest waned when people realized that, guess what, it’s only marginally more complicated than Tic-Tac-Toe.

Still, it’s a fun game, and it doesn’t take long to figure out the basic strategy (especially when I’m here to help you with it).

Equipment

The game is played on a 5 x 5 grid with four tokens per player. The original board design, which I personally don’t like, was played on the intersections of a double-crossed board, with each intersection highlighted with a circle. This is needlessly complicated for such a simple game, but if you have nostalgia for the original design you can print it out here. Otherwise grab a more standard grid board here.

Rules

The game is extremely simple: you are trying to get all four of your tokens arranged either in a straight line or bunched up into a square. The lines can be orthogonal or diagonal, and the square is just a 2 x 2 grid sort of thing.

  Victory for black

The board begins empty. Players alternate placing their tokens anywhere on the board, until they are all placed. If you manage to form one of the winning arrangements when you place your last token, the game ends there and your opponent isn’t very good at this. Otherwise, you enter the movement phase.

During movement, players alternate moving their tokens one space in any direction, diathogonally, just like a Chess king. There’s no capturing or jumping or any of that nonsense. The game ends when one player manages to maneuver into a victory situation.

Strategy

When you first play the game, it may feel like both of you are just randomly moving around until someone makes a stupid mistake. The trick of the game is to force victory, not by blindly trying to set up a winning position, but by setting up a “trap” -- a position in which you can win in two ways, or in which you cannot be blocked. There are quite a few traps (all discussed in the aforementioned book), and I cannot of course describe all of them, but I will leave you with one:

The standard trap (which is referred to as the “Scarne Trap” in the book) is a double victory. Black to move, and white can either get four in a row or a square on his next turn, no matter what black does (since black can only stop one of these victories). It will serve you well. There are many more traps like this -- perhaps you can discover some more for yourself.

The Scarne Trap

Peg Solitaire

This is the original “Solitaire” game, and for centuries it went by that name alone. About twenty years ago, however, that changed, with the advent of Windows 3.0 and a simple computer version of Klondike, a solitaire card game, which went on to become the most played computer game of all time (by many accounts). Since then Solitaire has taken on a completely different meaning, and hardly anyone has even heard of the name “Klondike.”

Thus we now know this classic game as Peg Solitaire, in reference to the fact that most physical versions use pegs in holes rather than pieces on a board. This has a few advantages, although the main one is that the game can be picked up and moved around without the pieces all falling off. There is no actual need for pegs, however -- just as you can play Checkers with a pegged board if you wanted to, you can just as easily play Peg Solitaire without one. I’ll be referring to the pieces as pegs, but it’s important to remember that this is an entirely arbitrary label.

Equipment

There are two main types of boards, the English and the European. Each has a different number of holes and thus requires a different number of “pegs,” for which you can just substitute pennies or checkers or stones or whatever. The English requires 32 and the European 36. As always, you can print out the boards for free by clicking on the links above.

 A European board

Rules

The game is very simple: the board starts completely filled with pegs. You then remove one of the pegs from anywhere on the board, and try to remove the rest of the pegs by simply jumping them over one another. A piece jumps over an orthogonally adjacent piece to an empty space just beyond it (read: exactly the same as every other jumping game). The piece that was jumped over is removed from the board.

You keep doing this for as long as possible. If you manage to remove all the pegs but one from the board, you win -- although a proper victory requires that the last peg occupy the same space that started empty at the beginning of the game. So if you had originally removed a piece from the center, your final peg would have to be in the center for you to get the “full” victory. Even a shallow victory, though, is something to be proud of.

 How do you even suck this badly? That’s just awful.

If there are no more available jumps but you still have more than one peg on the board, you lose the game. The fewer pegs you have left the better, though. Don’t beat yourself up just because  you can’t finish -- getting down to just two or three pegs is still pretty impressive.

It’s important to note that not all starting spaces can be won. If you can’t beat the game with a particular space starting empty, try another one. Most notable, perhaps, is that the game is not winnable if you start with an empty center on a European board. It has been mathematically proven to be impossible, so good luck with that one. Other spaces will work, though.

 There is no better way to score chicks than showing off your peg solitaire skills

Abalone

Abalone is a relatively recent game, invented by Laurent Levi and Michel Lalet in 1987, that has nonetheless become pretty popular as far as abstract strategy games go. It’s a very neat idea -- sort of a team sumo wrestling game -- that is probably unlike any game you’re used to. Although the rules might look a little daunting, they’re really very intuitive, and the game isn’t hard to get into.

Equipment

The game is played on a 5-wide hexagonal hexgrid with 14 tokens per player. You can print a free board here and use coins or checkers or whatever for the pieces.

Rules

There are many different setup shapes used, and no one has really manage to find the “best” one. I’m presenting the “standard” setup position because it’s the simplest and probably most familiar to the average person, but advanced players may be able to exploit it and create an overly defensive position that can lead to a stalemate. Hopefully you won’t do that, though. I trust you.

  The setup position

The goal of the game is to push your six of your opponent’s pieces off the board. You do this by moving groups of up to three of your stones around the board, pushing lines of your opponent’s stones. Black traditionally starts, and players take turns from there.

Moves are either “broadside” or “inline.” Inline moves are very much what they sound like -- moving a line of up to three stones one space along the “line” that they form. Just...look at the picture. Broadside moves consist of moving a line, umm, broadsidedly. Basically moving each piece in any direction other than along the line that they make up. You can move one, two, or three stones in a turn, but they all must adjacent and in a straight line (that is, you can’t move three pieces positioned in a triangle).

  Before. Not even the green triangles could survive this dearth of color!

  After. The white player has performed a broadside
move; the black player an inline

Using inline moves only, players can push lines of their opponent’s pieces one space. However, you can only push a line that’s shorter than the line you’re pushing with -- so a line of three can only push a line of two or a single stone, a line of two can only push a single stone, and a single stone cannot push anything. It is impossible to push more than two tokens at a time, since you can only push with a maximum of three stones. You can never push your own pieces, even if you’re also pushing enemy pieces with the same move.

If a piece is pushed off the board, it is captured and removed from the game. The first player to capture six of his opponent’s pieces wins -- and that’s it.

  The furthest pieces cannot push each other; they are equal in strength. The middle white pieces can push off one of the adjacent black pieces, and
the two closest black pieces can push off the closest white piece.

Focus

This is a fantastic, creative game developed by Sid Sackson some time in the early sixties (he’s very, very famous in the world of board games). The game was later marketed as Domination, by which name it is frequently known, which is pretty fitting given the gameplay. It’s a stacking game, in case you can’t tell, and has spawned a few variants. None are quite as cool as the original, though. It’s a game with some intense strategy that can nevertheless be learned and played in a matter of minutes.

Equipment

The game is played on a standard 8 x 8 checkerboard with the three squares in each corner removed. You can just put markers or something on a standard chess board to distinguish them as unplayable, or print out a dedicated board here.

Each player needs 18 tokens which can be stacked -- checkers work, as well as coins or anything else, although whatever you use should be distinctive from the sides (since they’ll be stacked). Basically, you just can’t use Othello pieces or play heads vs. tails for this one.

Setup

The goal of the game is pretty simple: you’re trying to control all the stacks on the board. Pieces start off arranged evenly in the center, in the following pattern:

Alternately, instead of setting them up like that, you can use a drop system. Since the game has dropping anyway (which I’ll explain later), it seems reasonable that the setup can be dropped too.

The rules for this are simple: players take turns placing one of their tokens on the board until they’ve placed all of them. You must place a token either on an empty spot or on top of one of your own tokens or stacks (you can’t place one on an enemy token or stack), and you cannot have more than five pieces in a stack. Once you’ve placed all of your tokens, the game starts normally.

Rules

Each turn, a player can either move one of their stacks or drop a piece onto the board. Your general goal is control all the stacks on the board, and a stack is controlled by whatever piece is on top of it. So no matter what pieces actually constitute the stack, it is owned by the player on top, and only they can move it.

Note that in the following explanations, when I say “stack,” that can mean just a single piece. It’s still a stack, it just has one piece in it.

Moving

Moving stacks is very simple: a stack can move exactly as many spaces as there are pieces making it up. So a stack of three pieces can move three spaces, always orthogonally, in any direction. Note that you can’t move a three-stack up to three spaces, you must move it exactly three spaces. Stacks can “jump over” other stacks without either being affected -- you can’t block a stack’s movement by surrounding it.

Splitting

You can also choose to just move part of a stack. For example, say you have a stack of height three, consisting (from bottom to top) of an opponent’s piece and two of your pieces. You can either move the whole stack three spaces, the top two pieces two spaces (since you’re moving a two-stack now), or the top piece one space.

However, note that if you move the top two pieces you will have left your opponent’s piece on the bottom. That piece is now at the top of its “stack,” so you’ve effectively given your opponent a new stack (albeit a very small one).

The above example illustrated. The orange markers represent the unwise move.

Stacking and Capturing

If you move your stack onto a space occupied by another stack you, umm, stack them. Your stack goes on top, and you now control the entire stack (if you didn’t already). You can stack pieces on top of your own pieces as well.

An example of stacking, if the white stack were to move onto the black stack

However, if you stack in such a way that your new stack has more than five pieces in it, then you must remove pieces from the bottom until it’s only five pieces tall (you can’t remove more than that). If you remove one of your opponent’s pieces then it’s captured and removed from the game; if you remove one of your own pieces then you get to keep it in a special stack off the board and will be able to put it back later. Which brings me to:

Dropping

If you have any spare pieces in your reserve, you can choose to drop one instead of taking a turn. You can drop pieces anywhere on the board, making them extremely powerful -- they can be used to take control of enemy stacks.

In a variation of the game, drops can only be made on an empty space or on one of your own stacks. This very much weakens the power of the move, which might be preferred by some players: it makes careful on-board strategy far more important. However, the game is more exciting if any drop is allowed -- a well-made drop can shift the tide of battle in an instant.

You can only drop one piece per turn, and, if you don’t control any of the stacks on the board, you must drop a piece. If you’re out of reserve pieces and you don’t have any stacks to move, you lose.

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Focus was Tabletop’s Game of the Month for July 2009. Way to go, Focus! We knew you could do it!

Nim

Nim is a very famous mathematical game (bear with me) that can be played just about anywhere with anything. It’s extremely simple, and has spawned a number of variations -- I will be presenting three here -- all based upon the simple principle of removing tokens from stacks. Sounds thrilling, right? The game is perhaps more interesting from a mathematical standpoint than a, you know, playing one, but it is still fun, and will provide an excellent challenge for fans of logical strategy. It’s just about as pure as you can get in that regard.

Equipment

Nim requires no board, only tokens. Any number of tokens will do, although you’ll probably want at least 15 or so for an interesting game. You can use pennies or checkers or buttons or matches or whatever. They don’t have to match in any way; you just need objects.

I can also be played as a pen and paper game -- just draw lines or circles or whatever and cross them out as they’re removed.

Rules

The general idea behind Nim is that you have “heaps” (rows, for our purposes) of tokens that players take turns removing. Whoever removes the last token loses (it is very occasionally played where whoever removes the last token wins, but this creates shorter games with the same number of tokens, so I will be disregarding it -- the strategy and gameplay is essentially the same either way).

In standard Nim, you arrange your tokens in rows -- the number of rows doesn’t matter, nor does the number of tokens in the rows. There are usually a different number of tokens in each row, though.

 Rows of length 5, 4, 3, and 4

Each turn, you take as many tokens as you want from a single row. You can take all the tokens in a row if you want, but you can’t take from multiple rows in the same turn. And that’s it -- as I said before, whoever takes the last token loses.

Circular Nim

I much prefer this variant of Nim -- first of all, once you know the secret to standard Nim, you can win every time, which kind of defeats the purpose. There’s surely a similar secret to Circular Nim, but I don’t know it and chances are neither does anyone I might happen to play against, making the game more fair. Also, it’s just prettier, and I think it’s a neat idea.

Instead of arranging tokens in rows, they are arranged in a circle. Each turn, you can remove 1, 2, or 3 adjacent tokens from the circle -- that is, they must be right next to each other. As tokens are removed, gaps form, and you cannot remove tokens across the gaps -- so if every other token has been taken (token, space, token, space, etc.) you could only take one token at a time, as none are adjacent to any others. As before, whoever takes the last token loses.

The game can also be extended with multiple circles, where you take out 1-3 adjacent objects from just one of the circles. This would provide a longer game and add variety to the strategy once you figured out how to win at standard Circlular Nim.

21

This is technically a Nim variant, although it’s probably the most different. For one, it uses absolutely no equipment. You can play this anywhere, provided you have two people who can communicate numbers to one another.

The game begins with someone saying a number between 1 and 3. The next person adds a number between 1 and 3 to it and calls out the sum. Whoever is forced to say a number 21 or higher loses. So, for example, a possible game could be:

2 (5) 6 (7) 9 (10) 13 (16) 17 (20) 21

And the first player would lose.

Hex

This is a very cool game invented by the mathematician Piet Hein in 1942, and then independently re-invented five or six years later by John Nash (the protagonist of A Beautiful Mind, if you’ve seen it). I’m not entirely sure, but I believe it was even referenced in the movie. Hein originally called the game Con-Tac-Tix, and it was known around Princeton as Nash, but when Parker Brothers decided to create a commercial version they called it Hex, which ultimately stuck. (It was also called Polygon at one point by less successful Danish marketers.)

Anyway, it’s a very interesting game that involves forming a connected line across a rhomboidal game board divided into a hexgrid. Sounds kind of mathy, right? It’s actually a really simple, fun game, and is the ancestor of many connection games to come, so it’s good to know how to play. It’s also really fun, so that’s a plus.

Equipment

The pieces for this game are a tad tricky. You need a lot. Up to 121 for an 11 x 11 board (the smallest ever really used), in fact. You probably won’t need anywhere near that many -- that’s the absolute maximum -- but you’ll still need a few. On average maybe about 20 to 25 tokens per player, which is certainly do-able. If you have Go stones those are absolutely perfect, although I realize most of us don’t.

The board used varies in size, typically from 11 x 11 to 19 x 19 (a nod to Go). Some boards use the intersections of a triangular grid, but the board I’m providing uses an actual hexgrid (although, to make it more friendly to a wider audience, I’ve chosen to go with a circular map -- if you have any objections, let me know via Twitter or Scribd). Grab it here, print it out, and enjoy -- but note that, due to the small size of paper, my usual advice of pennies and nickels won’t work. Anything small will, though -- beads, rocks, beans, backgammon pieces, bits of wood -- get creative and make it happen.

Since no token is ever removed from the board once placed, you can just fill in circles using two colored pencils, or with Xs and Os, or whatever. However, you’d end up eating quite a bit of paper before too long. To help remedy this, I’ve created some mini Hex boards, specially designed to be printed and colored on. Print them out and enjoy!

Rules

The goal of the game is incredibly simple: each player is trying to form a completely connected line from one edge of the board to the other by placing stones in any open space (the board starts completely empty). Each player is assigned a different pair of opposite edges that they must connect, so their lines must ultimately clash somewhere in the middle of the board, which is where the game really get’s interesting.

Formally put, players alternate placing tokens anywhere on the board. Each player places distinct tokens. The first player to form an unbroken line of their own tokens from one designated edge of the board to the opposite edge is the winner (you can’t win by connecting your opponent’s edges).

Victory for green. Those bowls haven’t changed in the slightest
over the course of these images. Don’t tell anyone.

Simple, right? Yes, it is -- even with the following rule:

The Pie Rule

Like just about all connection games, and many games in general, the player who goes first has a pretty strong advantage. This is no good, so a very simple rule was devised (I don’t know by whom) to minimize this advantage. It’s called the Pie Rule, or sometimes the Swap Rule, and it works something like this:

Players decide randomly who goes first. That player places a stone on the board wherever he’d like. The other player then has a choice: he can either play one of his stones and start the game normally, or he can choose to switch colors with his opponent. If he did this, the player who placed the initial stone would then place another stone of the other color, and the game would continue normally from there. So, if the Pie Rule were invoked, the first player would play two stones in a row of opposite colors, and he would play from then on with the color of the second stone.

This way, if the first move is really good, the other player can choose to switch colors, so as not to be at a disadvantage. Of course, now he’s actually at an advantage, so the person going first will generally not play a very “good” first move, to minimize damage in case the colors switch.

Make sense? If not, here’s one of those lame examples using fake names that no one likes:

Mohammed and Barnaby are playing Hex. Before the game starts, Barnaby decides to play and white and Mohammed decides to play black. Barnaby is randomly chosen to go first, and plays a white stone on the board. Mohammed decides that it was a good position, so he invokes the swap rule. Now Mohammed is playing white and Barnaby black. Mohammed doesn’t place another stone -- Barnaby’s first move has become his. Instead, Barnaby places a black stone on the board and the game continues normally.

The Pie Rule is a great way to even out the game -- otherwise the first player would have a pretty hefty advantage, which is no good. But you may be wondering -- why is it called the Pie Rule? Why don’t people just use “Swap Rule” instead?

Well, the name actually comes from the cutting of pie. For real. It’s the classic fairism wherein one person cuts a slice of pie in half to share with someone else. The other person then chooses the slice that he wants. Since it can be safely assumed that the other person wants to get as much pie as possible, the first person wants to make the two halves as equal as possible so as not to be stuck with a small piece.

And that’s really all there is to it. Hex is a great game that anyone can get into, so consider yourself lucky that you’ve found it.

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Hex was chosen as Tabletop’s first ever Game of the Month in June 2009. Congratulations, Hex! There’s no prize, obviously, but perhaps the increased attention will help you achieve the popularity you greatly deserve!