Unlur

Origin

Description

Objective

The finish of the game

play by yourself

play by yourself

Origin

This game was invented in 2001 by Jorge Gómez Arrausi, and was been awarded with the first prize in the Annual Game Design Competition organized by About Board Games, Abstract Games magazine and Strategy Gaming Society. The constraint for the games in the competition was Unequal forces, a characteristic that does not prevent in this game from being balanced for both players.

Description

Unlur is a game for two players, played on a hexagon-shaped tesselation of hexagons. A bigger board makes the game deeper, and a smaller board makes the games faster.

Ludoteka.com offers the option to play with 6, 7 or 8 hexagons on each side

It is played with black and white stones.

Objective

The object is different for both players:

The player who uses the white stones wins if he gets a connected group of stones of the own colour which is connected to two opposite sides of the board
The player who uses the black stones wins if he gets a connected group of stones of the own colour which connects three non-adjacent sides of the board

The sides of the board in Ludoteka.com are coloured in order to look better for the possible connections: white stones have to try to connect two sides coloured in the same shade, while black stones must try to connect the 3 dark sides or the 3 clear sides

The finish of the game

Due to the different objectives for both players, there are three different situations that cause the final of the game.

The player who makes the move gets his own objective, and so he wins the game
The player makes a move that complete with his own pieces the objective corresponding to the opponent, in other words, whites make an Y or blacks connect two opposite sides: in this case, the player who makes the move loses the game
The player who makes a move achieves the two objectives at the same time: if so, the player who has moved is the winner

Draws are imposible, one player must win. The development of the game implies that always one of the two objectives will be achieved.

How the game goes on

In each turn a player places a piece on his colour on any vacant hexagon.

Obviously White has a strong advantage because his objetive is easier; for this reason a sharp way has been developed in order to ballance the game:

At the start of the game white and balck colours are not assigned to the players; they place alternately black stones on any vacant hexagon until one player passes. During this first phase pieces cannot be placed on the outlying hexagons of the board.
When one player passes the other player will be white and he has to make white´s first move.
After this, the game continues normally; players move alternatively, each of them placing their own coloured pieces.

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