Unlur, a gem among games

In 2002 there was held a competition for abstract game developers. The main objective was to develop a game of unequal forces which means that the objective for the players are different. In Chess for example the goal for both players is to mate the king and both players follows the same rules, this leads to one player always have the same advantage at the start of the game. To make a game interesting you don't want this advantage to be too big. In Go which is a game of points you can adjust this advantage by giving one of the players a point handicap. In a game like Hex which is severely biased to the starting players favour this bias is negated by the second player having the option to swap colors. This swapping rule forces the first player to make a move that is not too good and at the same time not too bad, this adjust things very good but still in this case the second player has a tiny advantage.

In the competition Jorge Gomez Arrausi entered with the game of Unlur. This game has many similarities with Hex. It is played on a hexagon-shaped tessellation of hexagons. The game is played by placing white and black stones inside the hexagons, there is no restriction where to place the stones as long as the hexagon is not previously occupied. The goal of the game is different for the two players. White has to connect two opposing sides of the tessellation and black has to connect 3 sides that are not adjacent. After the first black move the next player has the option to either play a white piece, pass or swap color i.e. take the black pieces. By passing the black player places another stone and the next player again has the choice to play,pass or swap. After the second player chooses not to pass anymore the colors are decided. This nice contract opening of the game makes it possible to make the game very even.

In my opinion this game has a lot of appealing qualities. The board itself is very nice, it has six symmetry lines and six rotation symmetries, this is more than both Chess and Go. The game can't end in a draw, by stopping one player from creating his objective you automatically fulfill your own objective. The rules are very simple but the game has great depth. It is easily scalable, just increase the size of the board and you have the same game, just more complex.

There is a Spanish site called Ludoteka which allows you to play Unlur for free, unfortunately it is hard to get a good game as few plays it, but have patience and you might get lucky. Try this game out, you won't be disappointed.