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Refugia

Period

Modern

Category Board, Space, Territory

Description

Refugia is a modern experimental game with a goal of consolidating stones. Stones enter unconnected, and can only move by fleeing from concentrations of enemy stones. Thus it is a movement game with a territorial aspect. The game includes capture-by-hopping moves, which create mutual-enemy stones as an intermediate stage before possible reconversion back to player's stones. This mechanism keeps the game provably finite. The pseudo-territories formed by the clumps of stones, have boundaries that can erode and shift; so the game is more tactical than strategic. Shifts in strategic concerns do occur, however, as the game evolves from first mainly claiming territory by placement density, to a race to agglomerate or capture, to fights to recapture vs blocking to retain lead in a tactical end game. Because the effect of the mutual-enemy stones on movement is symmetrical but not the same for the two players, the game requires considerable mental concentration.

Rules

2 players. Each plays Discs. -

--- Goal: Most friendly-stone adjacencies at the end of the game. Ties are broken by comparing piece counts. If it is still a tie, the last player to move loses.

--- Play.
On your turn you may do one of the following:
1. Pass

2. Place one of your stones on an empty cell of the board is not adjacent to your existing stones.

3. Move to a location with fewer adjacent enemies than the starting location.

Moves are made in one of the following ways while keeping the above restriction:
-- A. Step to an adjacent empty location.
-- B. Hop your opponent's stone and replace it with a mutual enemy piece.
-- C. Hop a mutual enemy piece and replace it with a stone from your supply.

Note that the number of enemies is based on a count of both the opponent's stones and the mutual-enemy stones combined.