DIAMOND VS SÁHKKU

Diamond is a two-player abstract strategy board game invented by Larry Back. The invention was inspired by the game Kensington, which uses a similar board pattern and game objective. Rules for Diamond were conceived in 1985 and finalized in 1994. Diamond introduces a new board geometry and neutral pieces, with the aim of enhancing the game dynamic and lowering the potential for draws. Diamond was featured in the February 2013 issue of Games magazine. The Diamond gameboard consists of interlocking squares and triangles. White and Black each control 12 game pieces of their own color. Neutral pieces (red-colored in the diagrams) enter the game via captures. The pieces are played on the line intersections (called points, as in Go). White and black (but not red) pieces can move along straight lines to adjacent unoccupied points. A player wins by being the first to occupy all four corners (points) of a board square with their pieces. Capturing moves are possible in the Movement phase. If the points of a triangle contain exactly one white and one black piece, either player can capture the opponent piece by occupying the remaining open point ("cornering" the enemy piece on the triangle). The captured piece can be cornered on one triangle (see Example 1), or simultaneously cornered on two different triangles (Example 4). The captured piece is immediately removed from the game and replaced on its point by a neutral piece. If a move simultaneously corners two opponent pieces on two different triangles, then neither enemy piece is captured (Examples 2 and 3). A piece can move safely to a triangle point even if the other two points of the triangle are occupied by enemy pieces (Example 5).

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Sáhkku is a board game of the Sami people. The game is traditional among the North Sámi, Skolt Sámi, Inari Sámi and Lule Sámi but may also have been played in other parts of Sápmi. Sáhkku is a running-fight game, which means that players move their pieces along a track with the goal of eliminating the other players' pieces. Many different variants of sáhkku have been played in different parts of Sápmi. The oral transfer of the sáhkku rules between generations was largely broken off during the 1900s (see Sáhkku today). A few of the local variants have survived into our time, other local variants have been reconstructed based on a combination of memories and written sources, and for some places only fragments of the local rules are known from old documents. A sáhkku board (sáhkkufiellu, bircunfiellu or sáhkkulávdi) can traditionally be designed in a number of different ways. At its simplest, a sáhkku board has three parallel rows of short lines, and the pieces are placed on these lines. The lines are called sárgat (one sárggis) in Sámi. It is common to draw the short lines as vertically connected to each other, so that the board appears to consist of just one row of very long lines, but the game is still played as if these were three separate rows of short lines. Such boards often also have three horizontal lines intersecting the vertical lines in order to illustrate that the lines are still in practice divided into three parallel rows. Some boards feature only a central horizontal line crossing the connected vertical lines, but the game is still played as if there were three rows of short lines. A special type of sáhkku board is the so-called Návuotna board which has three rows of squares (ruvttat, lanjat) instead of lines. The central line/square of the middle row, sometimes referred to as "the Castle", is indicated by a sáhkku-symbol ("X"), sun symbol, or other ornament.

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