This week at our adult’s club we played Chinese Chequers. This is not a game which can be traced back to Ancient China: it was invented in 1893 in Germany. It was originally called ‘Stern-Halma’ as a variation on the older American game of Halma. ‘Stern’ means ‘Star’ as the game board looks like a six-point star, and ‘Halma’ comes from the Greek word to ‘jump’. In 1928 a marketing scheme in the USA saw ‘Stern-Halma’ renamed as Chinese Checkers. In the UK we use the spelling Chequers.

We played a two-player game, although the game can be played by up to 6. The winner is the first player to move all their pieces from their home point to the opposite point of the star. Movement is either by step or by jump. A step is from one point to the next point along a line. A jump is along a line, and can be over your own pieces or your opponent’s pieces. Steps and jumps cannot be combined. The strategy is to build ladders so you can move your pieces quickly across the board. We also discovered a nice way of zigzagging along a straight line of pieces.

We followed this game with Five Field Kono, a lovely replacement game from Korea. As with Chinese Chequers the winner is the first player to move all their pieces from their side to the opposite side of the board.  There is no jumping over or capturing, just pure movement in space as each player moves one piece from an intersection to the next empty intersection. Players can move forwards and backwards, and will at some point have to move backwards when the other player blocks their path.

We had a few minutes left at the end, so we played Brainline, a 4 in a row game, and Picaria, a 3 in a row game.

There is a game of deduction called Battleships which many people have heard of, but the connotations of war and destruction make me uncomfortable. Today we played a game called Zone X (Invicta, 1975) which has been described as “pacifist Battleships”.

The player taking the role of the Zone Maker chooses a target square on a grid e.g. G9; they draw two straight lines through this target, which creates four zones; each zone is given a colour (blue, red, green and yellow). The Zone Breaker then calls out a square e.g. H4. The Zone Maker says which colour zone H4 is in e.g. green (which means their guess was too high) and the Zone Breaker puts a green peg on their search board. The Zone Breaker tries to find the target using as few pegs as possible. We found the children did need watching quite closely to make sure they were giving out accurate information when naming the colour zone, and they also needed some guidance in understanding that if they already had a green peg in their search board their next guess should be lower down.

The next game was Black Box (Waddingtons, 1977). One player chooses four targets on a 8×8 grid; the other player tries to deduce the positions of the targets by shooting ‘rays’ into the grid and seeing how they bounce around. The actual rules are so fiendishly complicated you need a PhD to understand them. Oh stop, Anna has a PhD. On well, we are not people to be deterred (or more importantly to think we have wasted any money), so we made up our own rules and the children were our guinea pigs. With our rules, the deducer probably relies a bit too much on luck to work out where the targets are, which makes the game less satisfying than using pure strategic thought. Hopefully this won’t be a game which ends up at the back of the cupboard.

We ended with a quick round of Stay Alive, the popular marble dropping game from three weeks ago.  Next week we will play Halma, a replacement game where jumps are allowed and ladders need to be built.

Mancala: a game so good we played it twice. There were some people who could not make it last week, so we bought back Mancala to introduce them to this fascinating redistribution and capture game. See last week’s blog for the game’s history and an overview of the rules.

This was the first week we had a paying customer who wasn’t someone we already knew! Thanks for coming Sylvia: we hope we made you feel welcome and we hope to  see you again next week. I introduced Sylvia to some 3 in a row games: 3D Noughts and Crosses, and Picaria. Another table played Score Four (Lakeside, 1978), a 3D 4 in a row game. One of the plastic pins in Score Four was missing when I bought it, so I fashioned a replacement out of a bamboo skewer. I am so proud of this I feel the need to tell everyone about it.

 

After last week’s intergalactic alien hunt, this week we moved to a Danish pond i.e. we played Frog Rush (Lego, 2011).  I see Frog Rush as an example of a replacement game i.e. the winner is the first player to get all their pieces across to the opposite of the board, and occupy the spaces that the other player started in. Examples of replacement games include Chinese Chequers and Halma.

In Frog Rush, each player has five frogs. There is a special die, a roll of which determines that the player can either: move one frog either 1, 2 or 3 spaces in any direction; leapfrog over an adjacent frog to an empty space; move the stork to capture a frog which is on the pond. When all of one player’s frogs have reached their home, or all of one player’s frogs have been captured by the stork, the game ends. Each frog on a home bench scores 3 points, each frog on a home rock scores 2 points, and each frog on a home shore scores 1 point.  The most points wins.

It didn’t take the children long to work out a strategy: a frog on the pond is vulnerable to capture by the stork, so they moved their frogs around the pond along the shore. This took a bit longer but was definitely safer. The children played in pairs, and also as a four. As a four things did get a little congested and the game lasted longer than we expected.

There was just enough time for a quick game of Five Field Kono, a lovely replacement game from Korea. There is no jumping over or capturing, just pure movement in space as each player moves one piece from an intersection to the next empty intersection. Players can move forwards and backwards, and will at some point have to move backwards when the other player blocks their path.

Next week we will play Zone X, a game where one player hides a target and the other player has to find out where the target is in the fewest number of moves.

 

This week was Mancala week at our Board Games Club for Adults. Mancala refers to a genre of games, rather than one specific game. There are hundreds of variations. The board has a series of shallow holes (or pits), and players take turns to move (or sow) their pieces (or seeds), dropping them into each pit in turn in an anti-clockwise direction. The winner is the player with the most seeds at the end of the game. There are only a few rules, but they take a bit of thinking about (especially the capture rule).

According to Mohr (The New Games Treasury, 1997), the “very earliest boards come from northeast Africa. Boards have been found carved into the stone of the pyramid of Cheops and in the temples at Luxor and Karnak, establishing Mancala as one of the oldest games in the world”. Mancala spread throughout Africa (in almost every African nation some version of Mancala is played) and into Asia, the Caribbean and South America. It is known in Europe where (to quote Mohr again) “unfortunately it has remained little more than a curiosity”. Mohr is correct: this is a great game that deserves to be better known.

You can play Mancala online for free. There is no need to log in – play as a single player. Choose your difficulty level and start playing. The one advantage of this online version is that it tells you the number of seeds in each pit, saving you the time of counting them!