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Like many gamers, Ken has multiple game ideas burning in his head, and his first published design, Glaisher, was released by Spanish publisher nestorgames in March 2015. The name "Glaisher" comes from mathematician James Whitbread Lee Glaisher, and Glaisher's theorem relates to the partition of integers — that is, the separation of integers into smaller units with each of those units being themselves integers. Shoda teaches mathematics and English, and he says that the design started as a trick-taking game before morphing into its current form.
In the two-player game Glaisher, your goal is to connect opposite sides of the hexagonal playing space with a continuous chain of your pieces. Each player starts with three stacks of six tokens on the game board, with the tokens having yellow on one side and red on the other.
On a turn, a player moves one of their stacks of three or more tokens by partitioning that stack into two or more stacks — each with a unique number of tokens — and moving each of those stacks away from the original stack's location a number of spaces equal to the number of tokens in the new stacks. Since you start with three stacks of six tokens, your first move is to split a stack into two stacks (1 and 5, or 2 and 4) or three stacks (1, 2, and 3).
When you do this, if by moving you'd land a new stack on one of your own stacks, you simply place all of these tokens in a single stack. If you would land a new stack on one of the opponent's stacks, you can do so only if the stack you're moving contains at least as many tokens as the stack on which you would land; if this moving stack has fewer tokens, then you must make a different move. When you land a stack on an opponent's stack, you flip that opposing stack to your color.
After taking a turn, you take a spare token from the bag and place it on any empty space.
To make this explanation clearer, let's look at a few pics that I took today while playing against Ken, who teaches mathematics and English:
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Starting set-up
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After my first turn
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After Ken's first turn
One of the familiar elements of Glaisher compared to other abstract strategy games is how you can bait your opponent with a move that they'll want to counter, but which will only backfire if they do. Ken placed his single piece next to the three-stack that I moved on my first turn, and while I could split that three-stack into a 1 and 2 to capture it, he could then immediately recapture by moving his six-stack on the right-hand edge of the game board. Therefore, I needed to leave that piece alone, at least for now.
Another element that seems familiar is the need to play into the "holes" of the other player — that is, to make a move to which they can't possibly respond, such as place a stack of two tokens two spaces away from the opponent's four-stack. Since a stack can't be split into stacks of even height, a four-stack can be split only into stacks of 1 and 3 — which means that your two-stack can't be captured by that four-stack.
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Many turns into the game
As the game progressed, I was reminded of wonderful games like YINSH and DVONN, games in which your progress toward victory works against you by limiting what you can do on future turns. In YINSH, for example, you need to create three rows of five rings in order to win, but each time you create such a row, you must remove those pieces from the game board, thereby weakening your future ability to create another row.
In Glaisher, you want to spread out your pieces since you're trying to create a chain of tokens that goes from one side of the board to the other (with a corner space counting for both adjacent sides), but the more that you spread out your pieces, the fewer stacks you have available to move since only stacks with three or more tokens can be split — and if you can't split and move a stack on your turn, then you lose. Progress toward victory creates a handicap toward future progress, but in a natural way that's integral to the gameplay and not tacked on as a catch-up mechanism.
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Victory for red!
One other element to the game that becomes apparent only after the first few turns is that each move you make voids a space on the game board that you previously controlled. If you're trying to create a chain of tokens, but you need to remove that stack to make progress on the chain, then you've just punched a hole in that chain. Yes, you can use your end-of-turn token placement to fill that hole, but a single token doesn't provide much defense since it can be covered easily.
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My thanks to Ken for teaching me Glaisher, as well as DuploHex (another nestorgames release and yet another different take on the connect-the-sides challenge of Hex), while guiding me and my wife and son around Kamakura, which was considered to be the capital of Japan for a short time in the 1100s and 1200s. Ken will be demoing and selling Glaisher at Tokyo Game Market on Nov. 22, 2015.
If I learned nothing else today, I now know that playing a game that superficially resembles Go in front of the Great Buddha is a wonderful way to catch a woman's eye...
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