SURMOUNT Introduction: Surmount is a somewhat bold attempt to improve on an already great game; Mark Steere s Oust. Surmount takes from Oust its fundamental grow larger to capture mechanism and re-imagines it as a game where you can play anywhere you like, even next to your groups. Those familiar with Oust will wonder how you can allow unchecked growth without the game being an automatic first player win. Surmount manages this by allowing players to grow very quickly in a single turn to become as big as an adjacent enemy group. Whereas Oust, in true Steerian fashion, becomes a minefield of either banned placements or legal placements of which many are strategically equivalent, narrowing down the game tree and alienating players with stifling coldness and counter-intuition. Surmount comes from the philosophy that play should be as free as possible, giving players creative opportunities. In General, because the entire board remains open and most moves lead to different strategic outcomes, Surmount can be played competitively at a much smaller size than Oust and makes much better use of space while being inviting to new players with a comparative hotness. Equipment: Surmount is played on a size 4-7 hex hex board with an unlimited supply of stones in two colors. Gameplay: Turns alternate starting with Green. A turn consists of a basic move: adding a single stone to any empty cell without capturing, or else adding one or more stones to execute a capture. A turn on which a capture is made is typically broken down into three stages, the initial placement (which contacts at least one enemy group and expands one friendly group on the board), the intermediate placement/s (which make the expanding friendly group larger) and the surmounting placement (which captures an adjacent enemy group by replacing one of its stones). Initial Placement: The initial placement must contact at least one enemy group while expanding some friendly group already on the board. If you happen to make a move that qualifies as an initial placement, you are not obligated to make further moves and you may conclude your turn as if you were making a basic move. Intermediate Placements: If you want to make additional placements on your turn, you must end your turn by capturing one of the enemy groups you are adjacent to as a result of the initial placement. This may involve a number of intermediate placements to grow to be the size of one of these groups. If you need to make intermediate placements these are much more constrained than the initial placement in that all intermediate placements must not contact any additional groups of either color! When making the intermediate placements you must expand to be exactly the same size as one of the enemy groups you contact. Surmounting Placement: The surmounting placement involves expanding into one of the enemy groups by capturing a stone in it by replacement, thus capturing the entire enemy group and removing it from play. You must create a larger group than the group being captured with the surmounting placement. Like the initial placement, the surmounting placement can also be your only action on a turn, as long as you expand a group into an enemy group that is smaller than the group being created. Forced Passing: If you have no legal move on your turn, your turn is skipped over. Voluntary passing is strictly forbidden in Surmount. Tournament/AbstractPlay rule: when capturing a strictly smaller group all adjacent enemy groups smaller than the created group are captured as well This rule only exists to prevent a tedious wrap-up phase once the game has already reached a conclusion and it would be polite for one or the other player to resign —description from the designer

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