shows how a game might start and some of the complexity later in the game
Realm is a new 4 person laska type game Made by brian white Check it out and contribute to its evolution.
Game 44 (game for four)
A new board game for 4 people which is more easily winnable than realm.
A Better more enjoyable game in my view! Easy to adapt a checkers board
to play it or to download the board.
Dammen Checkers on speed! played in north east Europe
Animation to explain laska
Diagram to help explain dammen rules
Everybody knows of chess, checkers, Backgammon, poker, bridge and monopoly
and soccer.
It is "normal" for the world to be arranged in this way.
One game gets dominance, perhaps because its practitioners were successful
colonialists,
perhaps it was favoured by a cultured elite and then the snowball effect
takes over and it excludes
other competing formats. Microsoft Windows is an example too.
Some of the other excluded games have merits too.
In fact, some include concepts which are never included
in the world leading games.
My favorite 'new' game is Laska.
As a boy, I tried to make a draughts or checkers like game based
on clashes between the old Greek, Roman and Phoenician empires. When the
game board is big enough for Italy, Sicily, etc., It is too big for any
short game. My games were fun though, and included 3 or 4 nations, boats,
passes, etc.
Laska includes a concept which I had thought of but never figured how
to include in a game.
In war, (chess and draughts are war games) very few conquerors
killed all their vanquished opponents. However
in war games, the vanquished are invariably slaughtered. How
about a war game which is less violent??
Please note that laska and dammen are officially
played on different size boards. However, in my experience, they work
perfectly well on an ordinary checkers board with 12 checker counters
each side!
Laska is such a game. It was invented by
a world chess champion called Emile Lasker in 1911. It is played on the
white squares of a 7X7 board. A checkers Board with 2 rows blanked out.
11 counters for each opponent with one empty row in between. Rules are
like draughts rules. The big and crucial difference is that when a player
is jumped, their piece is merely captured. The piece is placed under the
attackers piece and carried with him. If a player makes 2 jumps, they capture
2 pieces and these 2 are placed under making a 3 high pile. If this
warder is captured in a following move, the prisoners are released and
become a two story piece. If a 2 storey piece is jumped only the top piece
is taken prisoner and the the bottom piece remains on the square after
the jump. (You cannot jump back and forth over the same square). When you
reach the end row, you become a king as in draughts. A king can move in
any direction, non kings can only move and jump towards the end row. You
can most easily play it with a drafts game with 2 rows blanked out and
with lego or some equivalent brick as pieces. You can only
realize the complexity of the game as you play it. You can end up
with several monsters with 3 or 4 lives fighting it out. Sometimes a player
jumps a double piece only to find that they have released a
king underneath which captures them on the next move. The game ends
when one side captures all of their opponents. Its a really great game!
and I think that it could be modified for 3 or 4 players.
Laska
animation
shows how a game might start and some of the complexity later in the game
| Download a printable Laska board | Download a printable Dammen board |
