Epaminondas is an abstract strategy board game

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...

 invented by Robert Abbott and originally introduced in Sid Sackson

Sid Sackson

Sid Sackson was a significant American board game designer and collector.His most popular creation is probably the business game Acquire...

's A Gamut of Games

A Gamut of Games

A Gamut of Games, written by Sid Sackson and first published in 1969, contains rules for a large number of paper and pencil, card, and board games. Many of the games in the book had never before been published...

as Crossings

Crossings (game)

Crossings is a two-player abstract strategy board game invented by Robert Abbott. The rules were published in Sid Sackson's A Gamut of Games...

. While the original version used an 8x8 checkerboard, the current game uses a 12x14 board and different rules for capture. It is named after the Theban general Epaminondas

Epaminondas

Epaminondas , or Epameinondas, was a Theban general and statesman of the 4th century BC who transformed the Ancient Greek city-state of Thebes, leading it out of Spartan subjugation into a preeminent position in Greek politics...

, known for the use of phalanx

Phalanx formation

The phalanx is a rectangular mass military formation, usually composed entirely of heavy infantry armed with spears, pikes, sarissas, or similar weapons...

 strategy in combat, and the concept of the phalanx is integral to the game.

When published, it claimed to be one of the first modern games to acknowledge the name of its inventor in its rules.

Objective

If, at the start of their turn, a player has strictly more pieces on their opponent's home row than the opponent does, that player wins. To clarify, if black has more pieces on row A than white does on row Z at the beginning of black's turn, black wins. If white has more pieces on row Z than black has on row A at the beginning of white's turn, white wins. This allows an opponent the chance to capture some of the offending stones on the turn after an incursion, or to counterattack on the opposite side of the board.

Phalanx

In the game, a phalanx is defined as a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line of stones of the same colour, with no empty spaces or enemy stones between them. An isolated stone could be considered a phalanx of one, but officially all phalanxes consist of two or more stones. Note that a stone may belong to more than one phalanx, depending on the direction considered.

Movement

• White moves first; turns alternate afterwards.
• A player may move a single piece one space in any direction, as a king in chess
  Chess
  Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...
  
  .
• A player may, instead, move a phalanx any number of spaces equal to or less than the number of pieces in the phalanx. They must all move in the same direction, and that direction must be along the line of the phalanx. A phalanx of three stones along a diagonal may move three, two, or one spaces along that diagonal, and so on.
• A player does not have to move an entire phalanx; they may split it into two pieces, as long as the subset moved is continuous and only moves, at most, as far as its length.
• A phalanx may not move through or across pieces of the same colour.
• The head piece of a (two-piece or more) phalanx may land on a single enemy stone; it is captured. Similarly, any phalanx's head piece may land on the head of an enemy phalanx whose size is strictly smaller; the entire enemy phalanx is captured.
• Capture is not compulsory.
• To keep the game from ending in a draw due to copycat moves, there is an additional rule: no player may move a piece onto their opponent's home row if that move creates a pattern of left-to-right symmetry on the board.

External links

• play Epaminondas on Richard Rognlie's Play-By-eMail Server
• play Epaminondas on Ludoteka.com
• play Epaminondas on igGameCenter
• play Epaminondas on Super Duper Games.org