Struggle for Life in Nick Bentley's Meadow

I've already written about one 2021 game release titled Meadow in January, and now I'm going to cover another game with the same name — but this time the game features no adorable animals and nothing that resembles an actual meadow.

This Meadow is from designer Nick Bentley, and it's currently available for play on Board Game Arena. Here's Bentley's graphic representation of the game to get you into the spirit of playing:

Like many of Bentley's designs, Meadow is a two-player, perfect-information abstract strategy game. Your goal is to capture a certain number of your opponent's stones, with that number varying depending on the size of the hexagonal playing space. In the game shown below, the first player to capture 20 stones wins.

Each player controls stones in two colors: one with light red and dark red, and the other with light blue and dark blue. The first player places one of their stones of either color in an unoccupied space. Then players alternate turns in which they place one or two of their stones in unoccupied spaces; if you place two stones, they must be of different colors.

If after your turn, an opponent's group (which can consist of any number of stones) is smothered — that is, it touches no empty spaces on the game board — then you capture all the stones in that group, removing them from the board. You capture all smothered groups simultaneously. Then if an opponent's group contains more than five stones, it has overgrown and you capture it.

Continue taking turns until someone wins.

After a few turns...

Bentley introduced the game in June 2020 as follows:

Quote:

This game started as a variant of Blooms, but it plays so differently I think it wiser to make it its own thing.

The idea was to create a territory game where there's no such thing as permanent life. It came to me when I was thinking about how the idea of life in territory games is maybe the least life-like things about such games. A "living" group is immortal and static, whereas real life is always impermanent.

I tried a bunch of ways of doing it, but the first way I tried is the one I like most.

I've played Meadow three times so far and find the game brilliantly simple. As with many abstract strategy games, I feel like a doofus in the early turns because I could go anywhere, and I'm not sure why I should go anywhere in particular. I'm placing a stone because the rules tell me to.

Once you get a few stones on the board, though, you can start to picture the shapes that might exist in the future, then respond to that vision by ensuring that it happens or taking countermeasures to ensure that it doesn't. Here's another pic from a different game:

Then after another turn from each player:

The obvious move for blue is to E1 to expand its freedom to four spaces, and that's what I did, while also placing light blue at F4 to pinch the light red row and threaten a capture on the next turn.

An interesting thing to note is that you're often as much of a threat to yourself as the opponent is. My opponent had placed at E3 and F3 to sandwich my dark blue line, but in the process they cut off one space of freedom for light red. You can't necessarily help from squishing yourself, and sometimes you'll need to do it to finish off an opposing group, but you have to be aware of the consequences.

Thankfully, once you capture that opponent's group, you've freed spaces around your own stones, possibly making you safer on future turns. Sometimes you have tit-for-tat battles, trading one smothered stone for another as single spaces open, then close, but ideally you're looking at the big picture while doing this and building towards other attacks.

The risk of overgrowing a group sets limits on what you do because once a group hits five stones, it's stuck, unable to grow out of an opponent's attack since doing so would kill itself.

I'd invite you all to play Meadow against me on BGA where I go by the handle "Henry Rhombus", but I doubt I could handle lots of simultaneous games until I am far more skilled at holding the patterns and the potential flow of a game in my head. Even so, I hope you give it a try...