SUFFRAGETTO VS TAK

Suffragetto was a board game published in the United Kingdom around 1908 by the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and manufactured by Sargeant Bros. Ltd. In modern terms, it was developed to "enact feminist ideology in a hybrid fantasy-real world environment" to support the activist strategies of the suffragettes. The game is a contest of occupation featuring two players around a grid board representing the streets of Edwardian London. One player plays 21 green markers as the radical suffragettes, the other player plays 21 dark blue markers as the police constables. The objective of the suffragettes is to break through police lines and enter the House of Commons, while at the same time preventing the police from entering Albert Hall. The objective of the police is to disrupt the meeting of the suffragettes by entering Albert Hall, while at the same time preventing them from entering the House of Commons. "Arrested" suffragettes are confined to the "prison" section of the board, whereas "disabled" constables are confined to the "hospital" section. The game is won by the first player who introduces six markers into the opponent's base. The WSPU were enthusiastic about manufacturing and selling the game, as it would allow the organisation to continue running without having to depend on donations from wealthy individuals. Oxford's Bodleian Libraries has the only known surviving copy of the game. Suffragetto was among several children's games designed at that time around the themes of gender, resistance, and social relationships, along with the contemporaneous games Panko and Pank-a-Squith (1909). The goal of the latter was to navigate a suffragette (led by Emmeline Pankhurst) down a long path from her home to parliament, past obstacles placed by the Liberal government (led by Prime Minister H. H. Asquith).

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Tak is a two-player abstract strategy game designed by James Ernest and Patrick Rothfuss and published by Cheapass Games in 2016. The goal of Tak is to be the first to connect two opposite edges of the board with pieces called "stones", and create a road. To accomplish this, players take turns placing their own stones and building a road while blocking and capturing their opponent's stones to hinder their efforts at the same. A player "captures" a stone by stacking one of their pieces on top of the opponent's. These stacks can then be moved as a whole or broken up and moved across several spaces on the board. The vertical stacking and unstacking of stones gives a three dimensional element to the game play. A player may move a single piece or a stack of pieces they control. A stack is made when a player moves a stone on top of another flat stone of any color. The stone on top of a stack determines which player has control of that entire stack. All stones move orthogonally in a straight line on the board. There is no diagonal movement. A player can also move a whole stack in addition to single stones. A stack can be moved like a single stone, moved in its entirety one space orthogonally (North, South, East, or West), or it can move several spaces orthogonally by breaking the stack and placing one or more flat stones onto the squares being moved onto. The player can leave any number of stones, including zero, on the starting space, but must place at least one piece for each subsequent move. There is no height limit for stacks, but the amount of stones a player can remove from the stack and move is set by the "carry limit" of the board. The carry limit of the board is determined by the dimensions of the board. For example, if the stack was on a 5x5 board, the carry limit of the stack would be five. Because standing stones and capstones can't be stacked upon, there are no stacks with these pieces at the bottom or in the middle of the stack. Both of these stones however can be moved onto other flat stones to form a stack with them as the head. A capstone may "flatten" a standing stone and use it to form a stack with the capstone as its head, but it must do so alone. For example, a stack with a capstone cannot flatten a standing stone by moving as a stack onto the standing stone, but a stack can be used to move a capstone across the board so that the capstone alone moves to flatten the standing stone as the final movement.

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