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Oject & Capture
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Here's the Emergo board with the 2x13 men in the initial position. A cell is identified as the intersection of a horizontal line, numbered 1 to 7, and an oblique line, marked A to G. There are two players, 'black' and 'white'. White begins.

  • Players move - and must move - in turn.
  • During play stacks will arise as a result of capture. These stacks are called pieces, and they come in four kinds:
    • All white.
    • White with black prisoners.
    • All black.
    • Black with white prisoners.
    The top man of a piece determines its owner. Formally, a single man is also a piece. 'The number of pieces on the board', for instance, includes all single men.
Object

The object of Emergo is to capture all the opponent's men, which means burying them under your own.

A move may be:

  • Capturing one or more men.
  • Moving a man or a piece of one's own color.
Capture

Capture is obligatory and has precedence over moving a piece.

  • A player captures the top man of an opponent's piece on an adjacent cell, by jumping the piece, taking the top man along under his own piece, and landing on the cell beyond, which must exist & be vacant for the capture to take place.
  • Maximum capture is obligatory: if the capturing piece can continue its course in a similar fashion in any direction except a 180 degrees turn, it must do so, taking care beforehand to establish the route that brings the maximum number of captured men. If there's more than one way to meet this criterion, the player is free to choose.
  • In a multiple capture the capturing piece may visit a cell more than once as well as jump a piece more than once!
The capture of a single man reduces the number of pieces on the board by one. Since there is no mechanism to increase the number of pieces, a game of Emergo is always 'spiraling upward', that is, the number of pieces steadily decreases while their size increases.

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