Tumbling Down

This is a neat little game that I discovered pretty much entirely by accident, but have grown to like for a novel but intuitively logical movement mechanic. It was designed in 2001 by Michael Shuck, and was one of the finalists of the 2001 8x8 Game Design competition (it lost to Breakthrough). That’s all I really know about it. So... onwards!

Equipment

The game can be played on a standard chess- or checkerboard with standard checkers or any stackable pieces. You'’ll need quite a few --29 for each player, to be precise -- so if your Checkers set can’t cut it you might have to consider coins. If you don’t have a board, print one here, as always.

Rules

The game is set up as shown, with a four-high stack in each player’s corner surrounded by two three-highs, then two lines of two-high stacks, and finally a line of single pieces (stacks of height one, for consistency). Different starting arrangements are of course possible -- you might consider nuking one of those lines of doublets if you’re low on pieces, for example, or just do something completely different. This is merely the setup suggested by the designer.

The goal of the game is simple: to capture your opponent’s king. By capture, though, I don’t mean remove (there are no “captures” in the traditional sense in this game), but rather “dominate” -- gain control of the stack by landing a piece on top of it (as in Focus). And by king I don’t mean a single piece, but rather a dynamically defined stack. More on that later. First: moving your pieces around.

Moving and Tumbling

There are two types of moves, standard “moves” and “tumbles.” I’ll talk about tumbles in just a second -- for now, moves:

At any time, you may move the top piece of a stack to a diathogonally adjacent space (assuming, of course, that your piece is on top). For stacks of only one piece, this would involve moving the entire “stack.”

You don’t have to move on to an empty space, though -- if there is another stack adjacent to you, you can move the top piece onto the other stack, regardless of any potential height difference. For example:

 By moving this piece, white relinquished control of the smaller stack to gain control of the larger stack. Sorry about the art for this post, by the way. That whole ghost-piece thing did not work out as well as I thought it would.

And that’s all there is to moves. Fairly simple -- short-range; covers a little ground. But what if you want to move a whole stack?

Enter the “tumble.” This is pretty much exactly what you might expect -- knocking over a stack and having the pieces tumble into new areas. It’s not as messy as that may sound, though -- essentially it means laying out the pieces of a single stack in a straight line such that the top of the stack lands furthest away. Alright, that’s confusing. Let’s do pictures.

 How are you supposed to represent tumbles with arrows? That’s hard.

As you can see, each piece in the stack moves, and once the tumble is complete the space that the stack used to occupy is completely empty (in other words, the bottom of the stack doesn’t stay where it was -- I could see this as being potentially confusing. I also smell a simple variation). You can tumble a stack in any direction including diagonals. If a piece tumbles onto another stack, the tumbling piece goes on top, as you might expect. So for example:

 The same tumble, if that middle white piece had been there.

Oh, and one other thing -- if you tumble into an edge or corner, the edge “stops” the tumble, and all pieces remaining that still need to be tumbled are not tumbled. The is the only situation wherein a tumble can stop early -- normally it must continue until it’s been laid completely flat.

 Tumbling against an edge

Kings

As I said before, the goal is to capture the enemy king. As I also said before, “capturing” just means getting one of your pieces on top, which can happen either by moving onto it or tumbling over it. But before we can do that, we must know: what is the king?

At any given time, a player’s king is the tallest stack made up entirely of his own color -- his tallest “pure” stack, if you will. But what if a player has multiple “highest” stacks? Well, then they are all kings. Sounds pretty good, right? Now your opponent has to capture all of them, right? Nope. If you have multiple kings, you lose if any one of them is captured, so it’s usually best to make sure you only have one king. Your king can change every time you make a move (if you make a new highest stack, if you tumble your current king, etc), so make sure you’re mindful of where your kings are!

 A game with each player’s kings marked. Yeah, I pretty much
reused this from the preview image. Shhh.

Obligatory closing comment: and that’s all there is to it!

Yavalath

What a weird game. That’s all I can really say -- this is just a weird game. It’s incredibly simple and almost instantly familiar, but at the same time the gameplay is almost completely foreign. It’s weird.

Why is it so weird? Well, for starters, it was designed by a computer. I don’t know about you, but that throws up a couple weird flags for me. It is the only game I’ve ever heard of to have such an origin, and it’s interesting that such a unique and creative game came out of a program.

The “designer” in question is a program called Ludi which, as far as I’ve garnered from some light googling, takes in the rules to a few dozen games, mixes them up and scrambles things around, and then spits out a brand new game. As far as I can tell, Yavalath seems to be its flagship offering, but I’m sure there are many others out there that I just haven’t heard of yet.

Okay, so the game came from a program. But where did the program come from? It was created by none other than Cameron Browne, a rather big name in the realm of modern abstract strategy games. He has written what is still the only book on Hex strategy (Hex Strategy: Making the Right Connections, 2000) as well as a great compendium of many other connection games (Connection Games: Variations on a Theme, 2003). He also has no shortage of original games to his credit, many of which you will no doubt see here in the future. But enough of this -- on to the game!

Equipment

The game is played on a standard hexagonal hex board with five squares to a side. If you have an Abalone board lying around you can use that, or, if not, you can print one here and play with checkers or coins or whatever else.

 Yes, I know that’s actually a trihexagonal tiling. I’m hoping you don’t.

The game can be played on a larger board as well, although it probably isn’t necessary unless playing a variation. Depending on how good you are, you could need anywhere from ten to thirty pieces each, so make sure you are well stocked.

Rules

The game couldn’t be simpler: players take turns dropping pieces anywhere on the board trying to make four in a row. If you make four in a row you win -- but if you make three in a row before then, you lose. It is this losing condition that makes the game so interesting, and from it the strategy arises: you don’t try to make four in a row. You try to make your opponent make three in a row.

How do you do this? Well, by forcing your opponent to block you from getting four in a row in such a way that he makes three in a row doing so. Make sense? Of course not. But just look at the picture.

 Now it makes sense, I hope. Black’s only response is a losing one.

Forcing moves like this are pretty much the backbone of the gameplay, which generally doesn’t last as long as other comparable games simply due to the fact that there are so many times where you don’t really have a choice about where you go -- you have to block or prevent a future three in a row, etc. Games generally play out quickly in exciting sequences of forced moves. It’s a fun game. Get on that.

Game of the Month, July 2009

I know it’s a day late, but hey -- those trophies don’t make themselves. The new Game of the Month is Focus, so you can look forward to more stacking games in the near future!

Also, blue? Yeah, that color is way out of place, but I have spent too long on this already. I’ll be moving on to more important things now...