It’s been a while, but at last I return to you with...Paradux! This is a super simple, interesting game with novel mechanics that was designed by a man with quite possibly the most badass name ever: Cliff Blood. He designed this game in 2003 after winning the World Championship Lumberjack Competition using only his bare hands and an ax he fashioned from the jawbone of one of his opponents, I assume. I can’t actually find out anything about the guy (googling Cliff Blood brings back mostly pictures of ritualistic suffering) other than that he has a published game to his credit, and a very interesting one at that. It’s not quite as violent as I would have hoped, perhaps, but I’ll cut him some slack. Read on and enjoy, friends...
Equipment
The board is a fairly standard hexagonal hexgrid with four hexes to a side, slightly smaller than an Abalone board. You can, as always, print a free one here, and substitute checkers or coins or buttons for pieces -- each player needs ten.
The game is extendable to any size board, so long as you come up with a new setup position (the “standard” one is good, but you don’t have to use it) or simply introduce a drop phase instead (although this might change the game a little too much for your taste). But whatever. For every single size increase of the board, each player will need three more tokens. You might also want to alter the victory conditions to require more stones in a row as well -- five in a row for a five-wide board, for example. Just a thought.
Rules
The game is set up as shown, with the perimeter filled all around with alternating pieces and two positioned nearish to the center.
The first player to get any four (or more) of their tokens in a row is the winner. This is an unusual goal for a game that focuses on movement instead of dropping, but it works well.
Each turn, players can either perform a move or a switch. Switches are simple: you just swap one of your pieces with an adjacent enemy piece. Moves are a little harder to describe.
You must always move pieces in pairs as a single unit, like in Abalone, but only with two stones. The two stones must be adjacent to one another, and the movement can be in any direction so long as both destination spaces are empty -- using Abalone terminology, both “broadside” and “inline” moves are allowed.
But there’s a catch, and here’s where it gets interesting: one of the pieces you move must be yours, and the other must be your opponent’s. You can’t move a pair of your own pieces or a pair of your enemy pieces -- you must always move one of each. Good, eh? So with each move you have to not only help yourself, but make sure you aren’t helping your opponent too much -- thus the strategy deepens.
I think you can figure that one out for yourself.
Finally, there is a slight restriction, necessitated by the fact that both players always have the same moves available to them: you cannot “undo” your opponent’s last move. You can move the same two stones, but not to the position that they previously were in, and you can’t switch the same pair that your opponent just switched. Like the Ko rule in Go, this prevents an infinite repetition of the same positions, which is never good.
Players alternate turns, and the first player to line up four of their own pieces in a row is the winner. And that’s all there is to it -- enjoy!
