DVONN VS SHATAR

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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Shatar (Mongolian: ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠰᠢᠲᠠᠷ᠎ᠠ Monggol sitar-a, "Mongolian shatranj"; a.k.a. shatar) and hiashatar are two chess variants played in Mongolia. The rules are similar to standard chess; the differences being that: The noyan (ᠨᠣᠶᠠᠨ, lord) does not castle. The küü (ᠬᠦᠦ, pawn) does not have an initial double-step move option, except for the queen pawn or king pawn. In old shatar rules, a pawn that reaches its eighth rank must promote to half-power tiger. But a pawn could step back to its sixth rank to promote to all-power tiger. It moves like a queen. The baras (ᠪᠠᠷᠰ or ᠪᠠᠷᠠᠰ, tiger; Persian: fers) moves like a promoted rook in shogi: like a chess rook or one square diagonally. It was called half-power tiger or half-power lion in old shatar rules. In modern shatar rules, a baras moves like a queen. The mori (knight; ᠮᠣᠷᠢ) cannot deliver mate. In modern shatar rules, the mori can give mate. The bishop (teme) and rook (terge) move as they do in standard chess. The game always starts by White playing 1.d4 and Black responding with 1...d5. This is the only time in the game a pawn may advance two squares; some sources claim this initial move can optionally be made with the e-pawn. In old shatar rules, Ujimqin player must make an initial double-step move with the queen pawn; in Chahar, the king pawn. In old shatar rules, baremate is draw. In old shatar rules, one special rule is called tuuxəi, like komi in Go. A player could leave the enemy with only two pieces remaining (noyan and another piece) at the end. Then he must start making checks using the terge or baras and make consecutive checks until checkmate. Before checkmate, number of consecutive checks is the number of tuuxəi. If a player wins by checkmate as in chess, he receives only one tuuxəi. A player usually leaves the enemy with one noyan and one küü to allow time to put his pieces into good positions for making consecutive checks.

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