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Crossings (game)

Crossings is a two-player abstract strategy board game invented by Robert Abbott. The rules were published in Sid Sackson's A Gamut of Games. Crossings eventually evolved into the game called Epaminondas, but its rules are different enough to make the gameplay significantly different than that in Epaminondas.

Crossings is played on an 8x8 board, with an initial setup as follows; number signs are black stones, zeroes are white stones, and periods are empty spaces:

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........
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00000000
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White begins the game, and after that play alternates, one move per player.

In Crossings, a group is a series of same-colour stones adjacent to one another in a line, whether horizontal or vertical or diagonal. Single stones can be considered a one-element group, but the rules in A Gamut of Games treat them separately. Note that a given stone may belong to one or more groups.

Play is as follows:

A player potentially wins the game if they get a stone on the home row, or row farthest from their side. If their opponent cannot get a stone of their own onto the first player's home row in their next move, the first player wins. Otherwise those stones are "locked"; they cannot be moved or captured. The next attempt at crossing, as this is called, will determine the winner (unless it, too, is immediately followed by a counter-crossing, and so on.)

Note that the game may suffer from the same symmetric issues as Epaminondas, and can result in a tie if, somehow, all eight home-row spaces on both sides hold the result of crossings and counter-crossings. This is undoubtedly extremely rare in actual play, however.

References