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 #11.
In terms of ‘Project 8x8 & 48’ few have more straight forward rules
than Boom & Zoom (Second Edition) from designer Ty
Bomba and released in 2018.
This is a much more basic design in terms of components than
the first edition, making it perfect here.
Each player has four towers, three pieces high, as seen in
photo of the game’s starting position.
From there, on a turn players do one of two actions; they
can ‘boom"’ (fire) or ‘zoom’ (move). In both cases the action is the
number of spaces equal to the tower's height. The move is in a straight line.
Pieces can zoom or boom in all eight directions, and
ultimately you want to get pieces across the board and off so they count at the
end of a game.
Along the way you get to blow up pieces. If you are in range
you simply remove the top piece of any opponent tower. You want ‘fork’
situations where a boom hits more than one stack.
The twist here is that the game ends when only one player's
pieces remain on the board, and the player who managed to exit the most pieces
off of the opponent's side of the board wins.
Therein lies the crux of Boom & Zoom, finding a balance
of getting pieces through to score, while maintaining some forces to defend
against your opponent getting too far ahead.
Games are generally close and you can find yourself facing
decisions about whether to boom a piece as it would bring the end of the game
closer, and you can see you are behind.
This one plays fast, but there is more depth, and strategy
than a first look might suggest.
A most-pleasant surprise to explore.
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