Lines of Action - Modern Classic?
When we first started the Mind Sports Zine, we enjoyed a healthy debate as to how to make it as easy-to-read as possible. Putting news from all mind sports on one page would make for an unreadably long page; putting news from each mind sport on a different page would cause there to be lots and lots of very small pages. Clearly there was a happy medium to be found somehow...
Card games were an easy-to-find category. Mental skills was another obvious split. Chess was its own category right from the start simply due to the volume. Oriental games were easy to identify for another section: go, shogi and xiangqi. Later we added mah jongg and renju too. This still leaves a lot of games, though, old and new.
We eventually decided on the division between proprietary games - whose ownership is established and protected - and classic games like draughts whose public domain rules have passed into folklore. You aren't forced to buy a dominoes set from a particular manufacturer; companies all around the world sell them.
At first we categorised Lines of Action as a proprietary game due to its history. Lines of Action, nearly universally abbreviated to LoA, was first published in Sid Sackson's seminal 1969 book "A Gamut of Games" as the invention of Claude Soucie, fellow member of the New York Game Associates, an informal group of Big Apple buddies dedicated to game design and criticism.
Does the publication of a set of game rules in a book render them as proprietary? Certainly book content remains intellectual property, else there would be the full text of several textbooks up here by now. The rules were published in the "Mathematical Games" section of "Science" magazine and they have been reprinted on many web sites in recent years.
Another argument in favour of the game's proprietary status is that you still can purchase it as a branded boxed game. A German firm called Hexagames sold it for a while. After their demise, Abacus Spiele put out a boxed set of LoA. Indeed, it's still available.
However, we think that there is a bigger community which plays the game due to the rules being publicly available rather than through familiarity with the proprietary edition of the game. This is the hallmark of a classic and accordingly we welcome the game to the Classic categories throughout our site.
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| The start position and a few possibilities
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The game itself is most usually played with a standard checkers set - a 8x8 board and 12 pieces for each of two players. One set of checkers is two rows of six along the top and bottom edges of the board, the other set in two similar rows at the left and right edges, leaving the corner squares empty. Players try to move their pieces until they are all in one connected group, where diagonals are considered to be connected.
Players alternate turns, which consist of the movement of one piece. Each piece moves in a straight line. The distance of the move is the number of pieces of either colour anywhere along the line of movement. You can jump over your own pieces, but you can't jump over your opponent's pieces. Instead, you can land on them to remove them from the game. (Note that this gives them a smaller number of pieces to try to connect - at the extreme, being reduced to a single piece is enough to win.)
There is a very rare case in which a move can reduce both players to a single group. MSO World Championship rules adopt Soucie's original resolution that as both sides have achieved the victory condition, the game is a draw.
Postal players, such as the popular "Knights of the Square Table" postal games community who have built up an extensive LOA literature, artificially declare this a win for the player making such a move. Beware!
The game is resurgent online; a sizeable community plays correspondence games on Richard's PBeM server and tournaments take place at the end of each year. The final round of the fifth of these tournaments is in progress at the moment. Defending champion Jorge Gómez Arrausi looks like a strong contender to retain his title. Also favoured are highly-rated Hartmut Thordsen and former co-champion Dave Priddy, instrumental in the elimination of Dave Dyer, himself a former champion and one of the strongest of all-time.
Face-to-face play, though, is exemplified at the Mind Sports Olympiad where our Lines of Action World Championship gets bigger every year. E-mail veterans won the first incarnations but the competition has gotten fiercer since then! Of course, playing with a half-hour clock ticking away is quite different to the move-a-week deadline usual by e-mail.
Also at MSO 4, LoA computer programs clashed at the return of the Computer Olympiad. The state of the art in computer LoA is being developed at the University of Alberta's GAMES group, a hotbed for research into many facets of computer mind sports. Students there developed the programs which would go on to claim Computer Olympiad honours, Mona and YL. YL claimed the gold, but there is very little between the two.
Mona is currently taking part in the e-mail tournament mentioned above. She attained a perfect 7-0 record in the preliminary round to reach the final and so far has scooped all four of the games that she has completed in the final. Could this be another triumph for machine over man? We will follow with interest and report results of all LoA competitions, digital or biological, in person or by e-mail, here in the Classic section of our Mind Sports News.
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