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Roocala |
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Mancala games are impartial, that is: both players use the same material. There is a North/South division in which the pieces circulate, but not a Black/White one. Roocala is a merger of a mancala game like Oware and a partisan game with the same object like the twin games Swish & Squeeze. The idea The idea came after I read a post at BGG by a befriended Polish designer, Michał Zapała, about a mancala variant he had called "Aardvark Safari", that featured pieces with not only different point-values, but different functionalities. The follow-up posts made clear it wasn't a total novelty, but for me it was. Two of the pieces, one for each player, were partisan. That triggered the idea for a merger in me, which is different from having a partisan piece in an impartial game because it requires balancing the two concepts. I was pushed forward by the realisation that both a hexagonal board with sides of four cells and a square board with sides of 6 squares had a fairly even division of edge cells and interior cells, 18/19 and 20/16 respectively. So I decided intuitively rather than rationally that those would make the right boards. And of course the parent concepts should be as simple as possible, because I foresaw that complications would be inherent in the very idea. Neither of the parent concepts are particularly organic in their behaviour, yet I decided to treat the merger as an 'organism', because organisms allow a dialogue in which they may be stating their requirements. Like for instance the placement of the rooks which seemed logical but had opposing ones facing one another. So I stated: "A rook on an otherwise vacant square cannot captured". This means of course by another rook, checkers don't capture rooks. But if rooks were allowed to move and land on a vacant cell, it would create cycles and most likely forced cycles, so the rule became:
Thus one thing led to another. The ideal is a wholly self-explanatory concept that totally eliminates the inventor from the process. That would be great. In this case however, that ideal was pretty far off so it took more time than usual before everything fitted. But eventually it did. I've said more than once before that I was done, and it turned out I wasn't. So I'll say instead: Enschede, January 2025 christian freeling |