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Burrow

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Burrow

Burrow

2021

Designed by Corey Clark

Published by (Web published)

Description

Burrow is a whole series of draw-free annihilation games based on the general concept of capture-templates. To begin a turn, a player takes one of his pieces and captures-via-replacement some enemy piece. Some aspect of the capture provides a template whereby the piece may perform further captures. The template can be the minimal bounding box containing the move, the directions used to achieve the capture, or even the number of friendly pieces in the line-of-sight. Burrow is meant to be a game system and the only presiding rules, aside from the objective of annihilation, are that the template informs all further captures, that the capturing piece must keep moving until it has no available capture according to its template. Remember also the mechanism of movement must allow unlimited translation in both dimensions of the board in making the initial capture. Also the game is played on an 8x8 board with a regular alternating pattern of pieces. I invite anyone to put on their designing caps and suggest their own Burrow games. Here are some of my own. Note: as a general rule in these 4 Burrow games there is no jumping over pieces of any color. However in others jumping may be allowed. Box Burrow: this is closest to the original. In Box Burrow the template is the minimal bounding box with the capturing piece and the initial piece to be captured at opposite corners. A Further convention is that the capture is achieved by a number of orthogonal steps within the bounding box, with each step approaching the piece to be captured (taxi cab distance). You may orient the box in any way you like, whether rotated or flipped as long as each capture has the capturing piece and next piece to be captured at opposite corners. Sweep Burrow: By far the easiest of the variants so far, Sweep Burrow's template is simply the two orthogonal directions involved in making the initial capture. The only further convention here is that if the capture was made with just movement in one direction, you cannot employ a second direction. Distance Burrow: The template for Distance Burrow is the minimal distance needed to be traversed to capture the initial piece. Each step must bring the capturing piece closer to the next target. Tumburrow: Tumburrow has the most distinctive template of these. The template is to count the number of friendly pieces (aside from the capturing piece itself) a queen's move away from the first capture. The other convention is that every capture must only involve movement in no more than two directions (orthogonal and diagonal) however these directions do not provide template data. Donauts: Donauts is a related game played on a different sized board. The board is 9x8 and the capture tempate is bishop movement on the projective plane of a torus. Check the images for diagrams related to Donauts. —description from the designer

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Game data sourced from BoardGameGeek, used under their API terms.