Shrinking the board a wee bit with India

 I recently posed a question with the Abstract Nation on Facebook asking what were three games players preferred on an 8x8 checkerboard.

Not surprisingly there was a lot of commonality in answers and IMHO a few gems missed.

So over the coming weeks I’ll offer a few short reviews of what I see as the best games to be played on an 8x8 checkerboard with the added constraint you have only two sets of 24 pieces – basically you buy two matching common checker sets.

This is #10.

When it comes to this little 8x8 & 48 project, it is being fuelled in part by the versatility of the basic checkerboard.

While the checkerboard is 8x8, it just as easily plays as a 9x9 board as noted in the posting previously with Renpaarden.

And now I will shrink our versatile board just a bit, with a game that plays on a 6x6 board.

Now of course you can go pretty wild in terms of smaller configurations within an 8x8 board, but of course it can be confusing remembering which squares are in play and which aren’t taking away from the actual game experience.

But, 6x6 is easily envisioned, the outer squares around the entire board out of play.

And, as you will see in the photo here, you can easily use a felt marker to ‘gently’ mark your 6x6 area, without taking away from the overall board.

So welcome to Martin Windischer’s 2003 designed India.

This is a crossing game of a type. You win if you move a stack of size one to the opposite side, or conversely a player with no stacks of size one, loses.

India starts with each player having 12 pieces on the two rows closest to them, and an additional 12 pieces off board.

On a turn a player must do one of the following actions:

• Drop an off board stone over a friendly stack.
• Move a friendly stack to an (orthogonal or diagonal) adjacent empty cell.
• Capture an (orthogonal or diagonal) adjacent enemy stack with exactly one less stone than the moved stack, with captured pieces removed.

India isn’t the greatest game ever, but the need to grow stacks to hold dominance in capture, but also maintain single stones to win – you best have two because lose the last one you have and you lose the game – means some tense decisions. This is very much a game of resource management and balance that makes it a fine first 6x6 game for this effort.