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Jump Sturdy | An easy to visualize goal is something of a prerequisite in a game inventing contest, so for this one I needed something that was both original and traditional, highly accessible, with an easy to visualize goal and not too long, thank you. I started out on a halma theme with discs of two different sizes, whereby smaller one could land on bigger ones, but not vice versa. That didn't work out, mainly because halma is a boring theme from a different age when time would run at a snails pace. So I turned to a simple breakthrough and race theme, along the lines of Dan Troyka's minimalistic but ever so deep game Breakthrough, but with some stacking involved of course. |
The breakthrough came, no pun intended, when I found a novel way of using stacks of two men whereby a top one becomes a somewhat stronger piece - as long as it is on top. The result is a simple and streamlined game with 'soft finitude', that is: the game cannot end in a draw unless both players would consider that the goal.