For the past few weeks the games of choice have been on an 8X8 board using checkers.
The reasons have been threefold.
To start a lot of summer cabins will have a checkerboard secreted away somewhere, and checkers can be easily fashioned even if a few with the set are missing. Most gamers will have played a checker game, or two, where a checker or two have been replaced with pennies, or bottle caps.
Secondly, many games on an 8X8 board are easily learned, and that means they can be played by a rather broad age range.
And finally there are a lot of competitive games with lots of depth to try on the old checkerboard.
And that brings us to the game Breakthrough, created in 2001 by Dan Troyka.
Breakthrough was actually designed for an 8X8 Game Design Competition.
It was also the competition winner, so that in itself should suggest it’s a fine game.
You will need an 8x8 game board and 16 black counters and 16 white counters. Of course other colours may be substituted.
Each player has 16 counters occupying two rows on opposite sides of the board.
The winning condition is about as simple as it gets. A player wins by moving one piece to the opposite side.
Pieces move one space straight forward or one space diagonally forward, but capture only diagonally forward.
Capture is by displacement.
The great strength of Breakthrough is the simple, straightforward ruleset. It can be taught in a few minutes.
The game’s core moves come rather naturally to a play, the simple march forward.
But that does not mean it’s an easy game to be good at.
The game never really bogs down as pieces have no choice but to move forward.
Yet, you will need to develop a strategy to be good at Breakthrough.
A piece can shift around an opponent piece by moving directly in front of it, where it cannot be captured, then moving diagonally around it.
That means a single piece cannot by itself prevent an opponent piece from breaking through, so defensively you will need to work pieces in pairs, or chains.
You then need to watch for a weak spot in the line to attack on offence.
Another very nice feature of Breakthrough is that draws are mathematically impossible, which is rather an uncommon feature for move-based games (draws being too common in many checker games as an example).
Breakthrough certainly offers enough to keep you playing it for hours trying to find the right strategy to consistent wins.
