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Breakthru, by Alex Randolph (1965) Breakthru is Alex Randolph’s answer to the problem of Tablut, which R. Wayne Schmittberger discusses in his New Rules for Classic Games. Tablut is a descendant of Hnefatafl, a very old Viking game, in which one player tries to move his King from the center of the board to an outer edge, while the other player tries to capture the King. Apart from the King, both sides have a quantity of undifferentiated pieces. The rules for movement and capture need not concern us; the problem that Schmittberger finds with Tablut is that the game strongly favors the King’s side. Breakthru is a game closely related to Tablut but with a different rule for movement and capture. The game is often available for auction on eBay, which is where I recently acquired my copy. I don’t know whether it removes the Tablut imbalance sufficiently. If anyone has played it enough to know I’d be interested in hearing from you. Breakthru is played under good lighting (to distinguish the silver and gold pieces) on an 11x11 board. The gold fleet consists of one tall piece, the flagship, and twelve short pieces, the destroyers. The flagship starts in the central square, and the gold destroyers on any 12 of the 25 squares in the central 5x5 square. After the gold player arranges his fleet, the silver player positions his 20 destroyers anywhere outside the central 5x5 square. The gold player may then either move first or pass. (One possible starting position is shown below.) Thereafter a move consists of either: moving the flagship, like a chess rook; or moving two destroyers, like chess rooks; or capturing an opposing piece, by moving a flagship or destroyer one square diagonally to occupy its square. The object for gold is to maneuver the flagship to any square on the edge of the board, and for silver, to capture the flagship. As an alternative to these published rules, I suggest that one player sets up both the gold and silver fleets and decides which fleet will have the first move, and the other player then decides whether to take the gold or the silver fleet. This would help to remove any imbalance still burdening the game. |
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