Emergo derives from the Latin 'Luctor et Emergo', the motto of he Dutch province of Zeeland, and meaning 'I wrestle and emerge'. You'll find this name is very appropriate. Emergo originates in the game Lasca, invented by the legendary world champion Chess Emanuel Lasker. Lasker made a classic mistake, showing once more that being a good player and being a good inventor are two different things. The mistake was this: he left a great idea where he found it, which was: in the game of Draughts. Thus he hooked it up to three interrelated principles of this game: an initial position, a forward orientation and promotion. None of these are needed to implement the essence of his idea, and applying them makes Lasca an overcomplicated game. Lasca is played on a square board, and so was the first implementation of Emergo, which is played on the dark squares of a 9x9 checkered board with dark corners. The game was a joint effort by Ed van Zon, who got me interested in Lasca's way of capture in the first place, and me. When I made the usual 'hexagonal translation', using exactly  the same rules, I found the game incomparably more dramatic, and so did everybody at the games club 'Fanatic' at Twente University in Enschede, the Netherlands. Few cared for the square version after its introduction. Emergo became a hexagonal game overnight.

EMERGO © Christiaan Freeling. JAVA Applet by Ed van Zon.

You can play Emergo in The ARENA: www.cybercomm.nl/~freeling/ARENA/Arena.html