THE LAST CAPTAIN

Copyright (c) 2002 João Pedro Neto 
with special thanks to Bill Taylor

This game is played on a 8x8 square board with the following setup:

SHIP - A stack of stones of the same color.  Some ships may also have a captain (identified by a stone of different color). MOVE - A player on his move, must do one of the following things: Move a ship on a straight line (orthogonal or diagonal) up to the number of empty cells as the number of stones the ship has, or until it finds the board edge or some non empty cell.  When moving the captain counts as a stone. So, ships with captains increase their move range by one unit.  Pick a captain and N stacked stones below him, and move them up to N cells on a straight (diagonal or orthogonal) line. For all enemy ships in-between, remove UP TO the same number of stones as the number carried by the jumping captain. The cells in-between must have no friendly ships.  The destiny cell can be an empty cell or a friendly ship with no captain (and in that case, this ship keeps the captain plus all carried stones), but the ship must land on the next cell of the last captured ship.  The captain may jump off-board, and he and the carried stones are all removed from play.  Captures are mandatory, and so, have preference over moves. SINKING - If a captain is left with no stones, he is removed from the board. GOAL - Loses the player with no captains left.

The point of obliging the captain on landing on the next cell of the last captured ship, is to use the tactic of positioning one stone ships on empty cells, in order to cut escape paths and force captures that may lead to defeat.

An example White may start by moving a captain plus some stones into the top of a friendly ship. This new ship threats to move into cell [1] and capture all stones of black ship g3. His range are 6 cells, since it has 5 stones plus one captain. Black could respond to that move, by moving h2-h4, and removing 4 stones of h3.