Epaminondas (game)

Epaminondas is an abstract game created by Robert Abbott in 1975. It is an expanded and improved version of the 'Crossings' by the same creator, published in 'A Gamut of Games', Sid Sackson's gamebook. It is played by two players on a 12x14 cm board. Each player has 28 pieces of a different color from those of the opponent.

The concept of clarity applied to an abstract game means the ease with which players can see how the game is going, what are the strong positions, where are weaknesses, what pieces are threatened and, in general, the transparency with which manifests the structure of the game itself. According to its author, this is the greatest virtue (and not the only one) of the Epaminondas game, named after the famous Theban general who is credited with inventing the military formation called the phalanx.

The following figure shows the initial placement of the tiles.

Players alternate turns playing.

There are two basic possibilities of movement: either move a single piece like the king in chess (that is, to any one of the eight adjacent unoccupied squares), or move two or more pieces at the same time, as long as form a phalanx.

A phalanx is an alignment of pieces of the same side, contiguous, located in the same horizontal, vertical or diagonal line; It can move in that same line of formation (forwards or backwards) as many squares as it contains pieces, at most. When a phalanx moves, the pieces that form it must move maintaining their relative positions, one after the other, always in the original direction of the phalanx and without being able to pass over any occupied square. Only part of a phalanx can move, but never more squares than pieces of it move.

If in its movement the first piece of a phalanx reaches a square occupied by an enemy piece, it stops there immediately and the enemy piece is captured and removed from the board. If this counter piece were the first of an enemy phalanx shorter than the attacking one and located on the same line of movement, the entire phalanx would be captured.

A phalanx cannot capture enemy phalanxes of equal or greater length than itself; therefore, a single piece (which can be considered as a minimum phalanx) cannot capture in any case.

The same token can belong to several phalanxes at the same time.

The objective of the game is to have more of your own tokens on the last row of the board (which is the first of the enemy) than the ones your opponent has on your first row at the beginning of your own turn.