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GrabberGrabber just so happened, the afternoon of sunday the 16th of January 2011. I had no special reason to seek another game, but suddenly the idea behind the combinatorial game Clobber merged with the method of capture of Emergo and that basically was it.
In retrospect it was only Clobber's object and its initial position that fitted Grabber's mechanism. A game that has more right to be mentioned as an ancestor is actually a traditional Hawaiian one called Konane. But fence two rows of men around a two square 'hole' and you get a 5x6 board.
The next day, when I found the initial position to be somewhat crammed and tainted by a somewhat cumbersome way to avoid symmetrical play by black, I decided to enlarge the board to 6x6 and allow for a variable initial postion by starting with a full board and having the players remove one friendly man on each of the first two turns.
A mysterious turn order imbalance.
Grabber was programmed on the Axiom Game Engine. When playing against itself, two out of three games turned out to be won by the second player. After carefull examination no bug was found in the program. The phenomenon is as yet unexplained.
Below is a game between the Axiom Game Engine and itself.
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to move
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Axiom Game Engine against itself
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