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!

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!