SIEGESTONES
Copyright (c) 2003 Patrick Matthews, Live Oak Games
This game is played on the following board:
There are 20 stones for each player off board, and also 9 neutral stones (called towers).
- TURN - On each turn, each player must do one of the following actions:
- Drop a friendly stone on an empty cell.
- Each friendly stone has a threat rating (TR) equals to 6 minus the number of adjacent towers.
- Drop a tower on an empty cell.
- After the turn, the player places a friendly stone on every tower he controls (this is just to help figure out who owns what towers).
- A tower is controlled by the player with the greatest TR sum of his adjacent stones (provided that this sum is greater than four).
- GOAL - Wins the player that controls four towers.
- If the board is fully occupied before that happens, wins the player with more controlled towers. If both players control the same number of towers, wins the one with more stones on board. Otherwise, it is a draw.
The second criteria to decide a winner seems to give an advantage to the first player. Perhaps a better criteria is to win the player with greatest TR sum of all his pieces.
Control examples (in the diagram, towers are represented by red marks)
The tower at d6 is black, since the is a total TR of 15 for black and only 10 for white.
The tower at b3 is also black. There are 3 white stones and 3 black stones, but one white stone is adjacent to two towers, which reduces its TR by one, so Black wins the tower by 15-14.
The tower at b1 is not controlled by White, because his TR is only 4 (it must be at least 5 to control a tower).
The tower at e4 is also not controlled by anyone, since there is a tie of 5-5 between both players (each player only has one adjacent stone).
Check the official game website.