AVALAM BITAKA

Copyright (c) 1995 Philippe Deweys

This game is played on the following board.

Using my diagram editor...

STACK - A stack of 1 to 5 stones of either color. A stack with more than 5 stones is invalid. A stack belongs to the player with the color of the top stone. TURN - On each turn, each player may move any stack (of either color) to any adjacent (orthogonal or diagonal) cell which is occupied by another stack, providing that the final stack is valid. GOAL - The game ends when no more legal moves can be made, i.e. all the stacks are isolated, or there are no valid moves. The winner is the player who owns more stacks.

An example Since stacks cannot have more that 5 stones, there is only one possible move for the 4-stack, moving north up to the black single stack.

Some words from Stephen Taverner's review - [...] after a couple of games, you realise that most of the time you want to move your opponent's counters on top of each other rather than move your own pieces - this reduces your opponent's available moves, and at the same time, you can attempt to draw your opponent's counters away from your own. The next thing you find is that you can create little pockets of your own counters (or a majority of your own counters), which are guaranteed to become your towers at a later stage in the game. This makes the corners of the board very desirable. The other thing I have noticed is that once towers start forming, interesting situations occur. Strange deadlocks occur when lots of towers of size 2 are next to each other, for instance (moving any of these towers will usually allow your opponent to make a safe tower of size 5).