DALDØS VS DVONN

Daldøs is a running-fight board game only known from a few coastal locations in southern Scandinavia, where its history can be traced back to around 1800. The game is notable for its unusual four-sided dice (stick or long dice). In Denmark it is known as daldøs in Northern and Western Jutland (Mors, Thisted and Fanø), and possibly as daldos on Bornholm. In Norway it is known under the name of daldøsa from Jæren, where, unlike in Denmark, a continuous tradition of the daldøs game exists. Daldøs has much in common with some games in the sáhkku family of Sámi board games. Sáhkku is known to have been played among Sámi on the northern coast and eastern-central inland of Sápmi, far away from Jæren and Denmark. Otherwise, the closest relatives of this game appear to be the tâb games from Northern Africa and South-western Asia, possibly apart from one unlabelled diagram in a codex from Southern England. The board is boat-shaped and has three parallel rows of holes, two of which (A and B) have 16 holes each, while the middle row has an extra hole in the prow of the ship. Each player has 16 spatula-shaped pieces with a bottom end fitting into the holes of the board. One player has pieces that are rather wide and thin; whereas the other player's pieces are more obelisk-shaped. At the beginning of the game, player A's pieces are placed in the holes of row A so that the spatulas are perpendicular to the row (un-dalled), and equivalently for player B. Later in the game, the pieces will be turned (fordallede, or dalled) so that the spatula is parallel to the rows. Two special dice are used. Each die is a four-sided long die with pyramidal or rounded ends, preventing the die from standing on end. They may be about 2 by 2 cm in cross section, and 4 cm long. The four sides are marked A (with the value 1, called dallen, i.e. the dal), II (2, probably called døs), III (3) and IIII (4). According to some sources, the dal is opposite to III.

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DVONN is a two-player strategy board game in which the objective is to accumulate pieces in stacks. It was released in 2001 by Kris Burm as the fourth game of the GIPF Project. DVONN won the 2002 International Gamers Award and the Games magazine Game of the Year Award in 2003. DVONN is played on a board with 49 spaces. The board has a hexagonal layout 5 hexes wide. One player has 23 black pieces to play, the other player has 23 white pieces. There are also 3 neutral red pieces, called DVONN pieces. The object of the game is to control more pieces than your opponent at the end of the game. The game starts with an empty board and proceeds in two phases. During the first phase, the players place their pieces on the board, starting with the three red DVONN pieces. Pieces can be placed on any unoccupied space. White starts, and the players alternate. So Black is the first to place a piece of his own color. The first phase ends when all pieces are placed on the board, filling it completely. The second phase involves the building of stacks of pieces (a single piece is also considered a stack) by moving stacks onto other stacks. A stack is controlled by a player if his color is on top. A stack is immobile if it is surrounded by 6 neighboring stacks. The white player has the first move in this phase. Any mobile stack of height n (with n > 0) can be moved (in a straight line) in any one of the 6 directions by exactly n spaces by the player controlling it, if it lands on another stack. Jumping over empty spaces is allowed, as long as the tower does not land on an empty space. Single DVONN pieces cannot be moved, but they can be once they are part of a stack. After each move, all stacks that are not connected via a chain of neighboring stacks to any stack containing a DVONN piece are removed from the board.

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