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That said, some designers have re-used elements of chess to create something familiar yet new, and Melting Chess seems like a good example of this. After creating an 8x6 game board of 48 tiles that show a dozen knights, bishops, rooks, and kings, the two players take turns moving their tokens on the board. To move, a player chooses a face-up tile orthogonally adjacent to their token, moves their token in the style of the chess piece depicted on that tile to another face-up tile, then flips face down the tile that their token previously occupied. If you can't move on your turn, you lose.
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• A similar winning (i.e. losing) condition is at works in Fano330-R-Morris from Masahiro Nakajima, curator of The Museum of Abstract Strategy Games in Japan. The game board shows a geometric plane of seven points and seven lines, with each line having three points on it. Players (black vs. white) first take turns placing their pieces (two triangles and two circles each) on the board, with at most two non-identical pieces on a point, then take take turns moving one of their pieces from the top of a stack to an adjacent space. If you can't move or if you create a line of three pieces of identical shape or color, you lose.
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Losing situation for black, which can't move without creating a line
• The gist of Ira Fay's Ouroboros is that you want to stuff the opponent with as many colored discs as possible — but to do so, you must risk giving them opportunities to rid themselves of discs.
In more detail, you fill the board with discs in four colors, then on a turn you (1) place a black stone, collect the colored disc you covered, then give the opponent all discs either diagonally or orthogonally adjacent to the stone; (2) remove a pair of stones from the board by discarding the appropriate set of discs: four-of-a-kind, full house, etc.; or (3) discard a disc from your collection. Whoever has no discs in front of them after the first turn wins.
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• You can think "football" (a.k.a. soccer) when hearing how to win Iqishiqi from João Pedro Neto and Bill Taylor — get the ball to one of your goal lines — but since you're airdropping highly precise kickers from the sky and can also win by stymieing the opponent, the comparison isn't that apt.
The ball starts at the center of a hexagonal field, and on a turn you place one stone somewhere on the playing field, either alone or as part of a group. At least one stone in the group must be in line with the ball, and the ball then moves along that line away from the group a number of spaces equal to the number of stones in the group. If you move the ball off the field or the ball can't move that many spaces, you lose; if you land the ball precisely on one of your goal lines, you win. This movement is hard to picture at first, and the number of options available to you during a game seems immense.
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• Finally, we have Ni-Ju from Romeral Andrés himself. In this tile-placement game, the tiles count as both winning conditions and the things that will satisfy those conditions.
Each player has twenty tiles, with each tile showing four squares on it. Players take turns placing tiles onto the playing area, with each placed tile being adjacent to at least one other tile. If one of your tiles is ever surrounded by tiles of your color in a pattern that matches that central tile, then you win (as with the white player in the image below). If both players have placed all of their tiles with no one winning, then you take turns moving a tile with at least one free edge to a new location.
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