The Rules of Emergo

Section [1]: Board, pieces, stages, capture.

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Diagram 1

>>>Emergo is played on the board of diagram 1. A cell is identified as the intersection of a horizontal line, numbered 1 to 7, and an oblique line, marked A to G.
There are two players, 'black' and 'white'. Initially the board is empty. Each player has 12 men in his colour 'in hand'.
>>>White begins. Players move - and must move - in turn.
>>>There are two stages in the game: the entering stage and the movement stage.
During both stages stacks may arise as a result of capture. These stacks are called pieces, and they come in four kinds:
>All white.
>White with black prisoners.
>All black.
>Black with white prisoners.
The top man of a piece determines its owner. Formally, a single man is also a piece. 'The number of pieces on the board', for instance, includes all single men.
>>>Object: The object of Emergo is capturing all the opponent's men, which means burying them under your own.
>>>A move may be:
>Entering a man.
>Entering the 'shadowpiece'
>Moving a man or a piece of one's own colour.
>Capturing one or more men.
Men are entered in turn and never leave the game. The shadowpiece is the stack of men a player has in hand after his opponent has entered his last man.
The shadowpiece may consist of more than one man as the result of captures made during the entering stage:

If one player is busy capturing, while the other player is busy entering his men, the shadowpiece grows for the first.

Much of the strategy of the entering stage revolves around the shadowpiece! Please note for the moment that it is always entered as one piece, and that this very move concludes the entering stage.

>>>Capture: Capture is obligatory and has precedence in both phases.
>>>A player captures the top man of an opponent's piece on an adjacent cell, by jumping the piece, taking the top man along under his own piece, and landing on the cell beyond, which must exist & be vacant for the capture to take place.
>>>Maximum capture is obligatory: if the capturing piece can continue its course in a similar fashion in any direction except a 180 degrees turn, it must do so, taking care beforehand to establish the route that brings the maximum number of captured men. If there's more than one way to meet this criterion, the player is free to choose.
>>>In a multiple capture the capturing piece may visit a cell more than once as well as jump a piece more than once!
The capture of a single man reduces the number of pieces on the board by one. Since there is, after the entering stage, no mechanism to increase the number of pieces, a game of Emergo is always 'spiraling upward', that is, the number of pieces steadily decreases while their size increases.


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The rules of Emergo

Section [1]: Board, pieces, stages, capture
Section [2]: More about capture, entering
Section [3]: More about entering, movement
Section [4]: Draw