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.
