CirKis
Encyclopedia
CirKis is a piece placing board game
, for two to four players, invented by Phil E. Orbanes
and developed by Winning Moves Games USA
in 2009. It received the French Game of the Year Award for 2009. The game is based on Penrose tiling
.
The first player must place a piece inside, or touching, the center circle. Then, every piece played must touch the piece previously placed on the board. So, on a player's turn, he/she must place a piece so it touches the piece that was just played by the previous player.
Players score points by completing circles and stars. If a player has majority of the five segments in the circle or star, he/she scores 10 points. A five point bonus is awarded to the player who completes the shape if they do not have majority in the shape.
A player can earn a free turn - play anywhere, in three ways:
Board game
A board game is a game which involves counters or pieces being moved on a pre-marked surface or "board", according to a set of rules. Games may be based on pure strategy, chance or a mixture of the two, and usually have a goal which a player aims to achieve...
, for two to four players, invented by Phil E. Orbanes
Philip Orbanes
Philip E. Orbanes is a board game designer, author, and founding partner and president of Winning Moves Games in Danvers, Massachusetts. Orbanes is a graduate of the Case Institute of Technology . He was a Senior Vice President for Research and Development at Parker Brothers until the 1990s....
and developed by Winning Moves Games USA
Winning Moves
Winning Moves Games is a maker of classic card games and board games, puzzles, action games and adult party games.-History:Winning Moves Games was founded in 1995 by four game industry professionals: Tom Kremer , Philip Orbanes , Mike...
in 2009. It received the French Game of the Year Award for 2009. The game is based on Penrose tiling
Penrose tiling
A Penrose tiling is a non-periodic tiling generated by an aperiodic set of prototiles named after Sir Roger Penrose, who investigated these sets in the 1970s. The aperiodicity of the Penrose prototiles implies that a shifted copy of a Penrose tiling will never match the original...
.
Gameplay
The game is played on a circular board, which contains the scoring pegs, and has a storage well for each of the four colored sets of pieces. There are 80 total pieces divided into four identical sets of purple, red, green and yellow.The first player must place a piece inside, or touching, the center circle. Then, every piece played must touch the piece previously placed on the board. So, on a player's turn, he/she must place a piece so it touches the piece that was just played by the previous player.
Players score points by completing circles and stars. If a player has majority of the five segments in the circle or star, he/she scores 10 points. A five point bonus is awarded to the player who completes the shape if they do not have majority in the shape.
A player can earn a free turn - play anywhere, in three ways:
- If he/she completes the center star
- If he/she is the first player to use his/her silver piece
- If he/she places a piece that is completely surrounded and there are no adjacent spots for the other players to play.
Strategy
- Each player has the same exact pieces. There are large pieces that cover three segments of a circle. If a player has the chance to play these, he/she has immediate majority and will score 10 points when the shape is completed. There are no pieces covering three segments in a star.
- The smaller pieces like the arrow and wedge will come in very handy later in the game when trying to navigate out of tight spots.
- Free turns can be very valuable, but if the game results in a tie, the winner is the player with the most amount of pieces remaining. This means that it took less moves for that player to reach 40 points.