ECLIPSE

Copyright (c) 2005 Michael Howe

This game is played on any empty square board (say 8x8):

TURN - On each turn, each player drops a friendly stone on an empty cell adjacent to another empty cell or friendly stone. If it is adjacent to a friendly stone, then all enemy stones at horizontal or vertical adjacent lines change color (i.e., they become friendly stones). There is a swap option after the third drop, i.e., the second player may choose the adversary color and pass his turn. GOAL - When the board is full, wins the player with more stones.

 

An example White's turn. If he drops at the green dot, he will flip colors of all the marked black stones. He will not change the black stone at e5 since it is at a diagonal, not orthogonal adjacent line. Also, the three vertical black stones at column 'f' does not change since they are not adjacent to the cell where the drop is made. White could also drop at the red spot, but then no captures would be made, since that cell is not adjacent to any friendly stone.

Eclipse can be seen as a game template with two arguments: (a) how to define adjacency, (b) how to define the range for color change. In the actual rules, these arguments are (a) chess King adjacency and (b) chess Rook move range. So, shortly, we can define this instance as Eclipse[King,Rook].

There are many other options, like Eclipse[Knight,Rook], Eclipse[Knight,King], Eclipse[Ferz+Alfil,Bishop], ... (check other move ranges at Piececlopedia). We can also consider pairs of arguments, like Eclipse[(Ferz,Rook) + (Dabbabah,King)]. This expands to thousands of possible variants (some better than others, of course).