ABALONE VS MATCHING GAME

Abalone is a two-player abstract strategy board game designed by Michel Lalet and Laurent Lévi in 1987. Players are represented by opposing black and white marbles on a hexagonal board with the objective of pushing six of the opponent's marbles off the edge of the board. Abalone was published in 1990 and has sold more than 4.5 million units. The year it was published it received one of the first Mensa Select awards. It is currently sold in more than thirty countries. The board consists of 61 circular spaces arranged in a hexagon, five on a side. Each player has 14 marbles that rest in the spaces and are initially arranged as shown below, on the left image. The players take turns with the black marbles moving first. For each move, a player moves a straight line of one, two or three marbles of one color one space in one of six directions. The move can be either broadside / arrow-like (parallel to the line of marbles) or in-line / in a line (serial in respect to the line of marbles), as illustrated below. A player can push their opponent's marbles (a "sumito") that are in a line to their own with an in-line move only. They can only push if the pushing line has more marbles than the pushed line (three can push one or two; two can push one). Marbles must be pushed to an empty space (i.e. not blocked by a marble) or off the board. The winner is the first player to push six of the opponent's marbles off of the edge of the board.

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Matching games are games that require players to match similar elements. Participants need to find a match for a word, picture, or card. For example, students place 30 word cards; composed of 15 pairs, face down in random order. Each person turns over two cards at a time, with the goal of turning over a matching pair, by using their memory. Most matching games are objective, with correct answers in the rules for what counts as a match, pair, etc. Some however, like Dixit or Apples to Apples, are about subjective matches picked by one or more judge players. Here the correlation between a match holds value only as other players decide it, but rules dictate who will make those decisions and when.

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