Jumpin

Jumpin, published by Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M), 1964 (author uncredited)

Jumpin is played on a 6x11 board. In the handsome original bookshelf edition the two armies are Silver and Gold, and each starts with twelve pawns as shown. The object is to maneuver all your pawns into the opposite home area.

So far this sounds like a version of Chinese Checkers on a square grid, but Jumpin makes an interesting change to the rule of movement. Pawns may not move except by jumping, and a jump consists of leaping over a single pawn or an unbroken line of pawns, in any orthogonal direction. The pawns being jumped can be of either color, and are not removed. The jumping pawn lands on the first vacant square after the jumped pawn(s). Multiple jumps (using the same pawn) are allowed on the same turn.

Since pawns cannot move apart from jumping, a player must be careful not to strand one of his own pawns. Otherwise he will waste considerable time trying to get back to it.

Jumpin needs a slight rule tweak to take care of the possibility of a player refusing to move his last pawn out of his goal area, thereby preventing his opponent from winning. The same problem arises in Chinese Checkers, where one proposal is to require that any pawn in the home area which can jump out of the goal area over an enemy piece must do so. The rule proposed by Sid Sackson, which strikes me as more elegant, is to change the winning condition: a player wins when his enemy’s home area is fullly occupied and contains at least one of his own pieces. This rule makes the game proceed exactly as it does when both players “play fair.”

Jumpin is sometimes available on eBay, where I recently got my copy. Does anyone know the name of the author of this game? If so, I’d like to hear from you.


	Questions, corrections, comments: Send me e-mail at markthom@flash.net


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