Games of Soldiers

KANGA

Copyright (c) 2002 Tijn van der Zant, Marco Wiering

This game is played on a 7x7 square board (other dimensions are possible):

GROUP - A set of orthogonally connected stones of the same color (like in Go).

TURN - At each turn, each player drops a friendly stone on an empty cell.

A group with no adjacent empty cells is captured (there is no Ko rule).

A line with an odd number (>1) of stones of the same color can be captured in a custodian fashion, i.e., the line is captured when placed between two enemy stones (orthogonal or diagonal) or between an enemy stone and an edge.

GOAL - A player wins if he have a group adjacent to two opposite edges.

Some capture examples
These are some examples where the black stones would be captured if White played at [1].

An endgame
Black has already a winning position (even if it is White's turn). He just needs to drop at one of the [1] to create a group adjacent to two opposite edges.

The inspirational games where Go and Pente. Kanga is kind of Gonnect with custodian captures.

Check the game's webpage:

Kanga was invented in 2002 when Tijn van der Zant and Marco Wiering were sick of playing Go and Pente all the time. The question was whether a real cool game could be invented instead. So they thought of many ideas, but most of them did not work out well when playing. Some of them were pretty dull, static. and predicable, and others were always winning for the player who started the game. After some time they thought it would be cool to make a game in which the goal is to make a connected line from one side to the other side. This was the main idea of the game, but some additional rules to make the game more attractive were invented after that. This led finally to the game Kanga. The game of Kanga is really very dynamic, one needs stategic and tactical knowledge to play it, and the game can change very rapidly, thereby making it less dull than most other games. The rules are quite simple, but it still requires a lot of thinking to make the best moves, just like in Go. The name Kanga was discovered, because when the inventors played the first game, a song was playing on the radio with the word Kanga repeated several times. If anyone knows which song it is, please contact Tijn van der Zant.

	Some capture examples These are some examples where the black stones would be captured if White played at [1].
	An endgame Black has already a winning position (even if it is White's turn). He just needs to drop at one of the [1] to create a group adjacent to two opposite edges.