Michael is an astrophysicist and Carrie is a restaurant manager by day, an artist when the mood hits. We live in the PNW with our divo cat, Banjo! We're a pretty average nerdy 20-something couple, who love comic books, games, and science, but our interests don't stop there! Food, beer, art, cats, music and successful adulting are just a few of the things we tend to geek out over. We've decided to write a blog together in order to share our adventures as we explore our interests, whether it be something we already love or a new passion we've discovered.
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| Carrie and Michael! |
Along with ourselves, we'd like to introduce one of the first games we enjoyed as a couple. Abalone is a fantastic strategy game for 2! While wandering a brain game store, a clerk gave us a demo and we've been hooked ever since. Little marbles act as an army forcing your opponent off the board. The rules are simple, but the strategy can get pretty deep.
The object of the game is simple: be the first to knock 6 of your opponents marbles off the board. Each player takes turns making a move. Marbles can move one space per turn in any direction. Each turn, you may move a single marble, or a contiguous, aligned group of 2 or 3 marbles. A group must be moved in the same way, i.e. forward/back, or side to side and remain in the same configuration.
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| The game! Plus a kitty. |
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| The Rule book! Pretty straightforward. That's part of the reason why we like it! On the left you see a diagram describing the different types of moves you can make. |
You can move your marbles into your opponent's marbles. This is like a "battle" and is how the game progresses (i.e. how you are able to push your opponent's marbles off the board). If your moving group has more marbles than your opponent along your intended direction of travel, then your side "wins"; your marbles go forward one space and your opponent's marbles get pushed back. However, if your opponent's marbles are of equal to or greater number than your advancing group, you are not allowed to make this move and must make a different choice.
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| Moving the three wide marbles into the two black marbles causes the black marbles to be pushed back. The black side loses one marble in the process |
Of course, when you "attack" by pushing your opponent's marbles with a large group, you could leave your "unit" open to a counterattack flanking. A three-marble group is pretty strong along its front and back, but on the side it only takes a two-marble group to slice it into weaker groups. So, strategies revolve around moving your marbles as a larger group, choosing formations that allow easy maneuverability and balance defense and offense, and knowing when to best attack your opponent. In particular, it is generally not a good idea to leave marbles isolated. Lone groups of 1, 2, or even 3 marbles can be quite susceptible to attack and easily out-maneuvered. Attacking your opponent's pieces so as to split up their marbles is a smart strategy, as it can waste precious moves to bring back marbles once they have been isolated from the larger group.
Near the beginning of a game, Michael likes to choose a side and move his pieces all as a group toward that side. Loosing some pieces at the beginning of the game is fine if it means winning a better position on the board. He tends to look for places where he can bisect a group of marbles. This is nice because your opponent cannot push your marble if it is against some of their own, so this decreases the chance of a flanking counterattack. Carrie is generally good at stopping Michael's strategy, though lately Michael has learned how to use her counterattacks against her and push Carrie's pieces into a corner. She is not a fan of this.
Funny enough, for a long time both of us were under the impression that the game ended when ALL of your opponent's pieces were off the board. The game was still fun, but it took a whole lot longer. We also found out that Carrie is quite good at playing guerrilla warfare with a smaller army. So, even when Michael was winning, Carrie would still be fighting with her scrappy band of rogue marbles. She also enjoyed playing a little game she calls "hide and go fuck yourself" when she had clearly lost, but still had one or two marbles on the board. Basically, she would force Michael to re-group his whole marble army in order to finally pin down her flailing final pieces. In retrospect, this strategy is likely why the game isn't suppose to go down to that few of pieces.
So there you have it, Abalone in a nutshell of sorts! Simple, yet logically complex in the most delightful way! We hope you enjoy our little introduction and game synopsis! Check back with us soon for more fun and games!
=^.^=, Carrie and Michael
I infer that you bought that at Marbles. I used to work at that store! So much fun! My favourite game there was Quarto. It's another simple board game, but it plays much more quickly - in fact, the upper bound on the number of moves in a game (to my knowledge) is 16.
ReplyDeleteRobert, I think that you are correct, it was at Marbles! We'll have to check out Quarto! Every time we walk into that place we get sucked in and have to try every game that's out for demo!
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