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