BILOBA

Copyright (c) 2003 Guillaume Demougeot

This game is played on the following board:

 

TURN - At each turn, each player moves one friendly stone.  A stone may move to an (orthogonal or diagonal) adjacent empty cell. Center - If a stone moves to the center cell, it must move again to an adjacent empty cell (no stone may stay at the center). A stone may also jump over one stone (of either color) landing on the immediate next empty cell. Captures are custodian, i.e., an enemy stone is captured when placed between two friendly stones (orthogonal or diagonal). After the removal of the captured stone, one of the two friendly stones must move to occupy the captured stone position.  Captures can be multiple (more than one custodian captures in the same move) Captures can create a chain reaction, i.e., the friendly moved stone after the capture may produce another capture, and so on... GOAL - A player loses if, at the beginning of his turn, he has less than three stones and is unable to capture enemy stones so that his opponent also have less than three stones. In this later case, the game is a draw.

 

Some capture examples In the top position, the marked black stone may jump over the white stone and capture the other. Then, one of those black stones may move into the cell of the captured stone. In the center position, the marked white stone can move to the center cell then move again to the southeast capturing two black stones. Then, two of those three stones may move into the cells of the captured stones (the marked cell can go to either, but cannot go to both, of course).

A chain-reaction example Black can capture the three white stones. First he moves the marked black stone to [1], capturing the c7 stone. By moving to that cell, he captures another stone (c6) and repeating the process, he captures the last white stone at d6. If this was a game position, Black had won the match.