Kesch
|
To the left, the board set-up for Kesch is illustrated. Tower - represened by a queen |
In Kesch, black goes first, and players take turns moving their pieces. After every move, combat ensues, during which pieces direct their attacks. During combat, each piece has one attack which it may at any time direct on any single enemy unit. Pieces can withstand one attack at a time, but any piece which is attacked by two enemies at the same time is overwhelmed, and dies. If a piece kills an enemy unit, and has not been simultaneously killed itself, it may then turn its attack on any other enemy which lies within range. In this way it is possible to kill multiple enemies in a single turn. After combat is resolved, the other player takes his turn. This continues until one player destroys his opponent’s tower and wins the game.
That much is essentially the same as in Warlord, a Kesch variant. However, the pieces in Kesch are somewhat different; here they are, listed roughly in order from least to most valuable:
PEASANT
Attacks: Any adjacent square with pitchfork, sickle, or club.
Move: One space diagonally, either forward or backward.
SPEARMAN
Attacks: Any of the three squares in front of the spearman, or any of the three squares beyond those. To clarify, spearmen may not attack their flanks or rear, but they may attack over other pieces' heads with their long spears.
Move: One space in any direction.
ARCHER
Attacks: The archer can only attack along the two forward diagonals, but any number of spaces distant. Archers may not shoot over other pieces’ heads.
Move: One space in any direction.
KNIGHT
Attacks: Any adjacent square with longsword.
Move: Any number of spaces orthogonally or diagonally, but cannot jump over pieces.
Overrun: A knight can kill a piece by moving onto the square it occupies. This ability comes off as an attack, so other pieces may simultaneously kill the knight before it can direct its attack on any other pieces this turn. Towers may never be Overrun.
TOWER
Attacks: The princess who inhabits the tower has one attack to adjacent spaces with boiling water, broken crockery, old helmets, pet cats, and anything else she might throw out of the window.
Move: Obviously, the tower is stationary.
Special: The tower can't be Overrun by knights. If your tower is taken, you lose the game.
Movement Option: Marching
If two or more of your men stand next to one another in a diagonal line, they may all March one space together in the direction of the line. Marching may be done forwards or backwards, but no pieces which are currently under attack may March. Thus you may March units into danger, but not out of or through danger.
Discussion
Kesch is a game refered to throughout novels and shortstories in the world of Minerva; after years of dithering with other options, I've finally designed it based on Warlord. Kesch is essentially a more "Dark Aged" version of the game which progresses somewhat less rapidly and with fewer complications, and also without the anachronistic armored-yet-unmounted warlord. Those who have already played Warlord will notice that Kesch is similar, though it has been simplified in the following ways:
Board and Piece Construction
Minervans usually carve Keschpieces out of wood and stain them two different colors, with red and dark brown being the most common. (In the four-player boards, colors are often gold and red allied on one side against blue and black on the other.) The peasants are shaped like gumdrops, the spearmen like tall tetrahedrals, the archers like vertical crescents on small stands, the knights like kite shields, and the towers like large cyllinders. It is common throughout Drekmir for players to provide their own pieces with their mark placed on the bottom of the tower, and to wager these on a series of three games; if one player can win all three games, he takes his opponent's set of pieces for his own. If the victor does not desire the entrire set and merely wishes for a trophy, it is common for him to take only the tower, which has his opponent's mark on it and thus provides proof for his victory.
Gameboards are usually of wood, carved onto tables, treasure chests, or simple wooden boards, though parchment is also quite common, with lines drawn in ink. It is usually only the better-crafted boards which will have checkered sqares; most will simply have lines down, with the positions for the towers marked with Xs.
Variants
The most popular variants have four players. In these games, the board setup is usually the same, although 10x10 and 12x8 boards are used as well. Gold controls half of the light pieces at the northeast, Red the other half at the southeast, Blue the northwestern half of the dark pieces, and black the southwestern half. In this four player setup, Gold moves first, followed by Black, then Red, and then Blue; otherwise rules are the same. Victory is usually afforded to the player who, on his move, taken the enemy Tower, unless he needed help from his ally to accomplish this (he moved a spearman into position while his partner's archer was already firing at the tower). In the 12x8 version, however, and sometimes in the 10x10 version, each player has a tower of his own, in which case only the play who lost his tower is the loser; his partner takes a draw.
|
Kesch differs from Warlord in that it is a more "historically accurate" game. The removal of the warlord make knights the most powerful pieces, as would have been taken for granted in a Dark Ages board game; gameplay usually features a larger number of kills than Warlord, and once the board is somewhat clear, archers typically climb up the sides of the board, preparing the way for a knight to take the Tower. Based on a few test games, it seems that pieces are of similar value to their counterparts in Warlord. |
Peasant: Spearman: Archer: Knight: Tower: |
1 point 2 points 3 points 4 points Game |
Note that the option to March may have been out-of-period for an ordinary Dark Ages game, but Minerva is undergoing a second Dark Age in the aftermath of a corrupt Enlightnment, during which more complex rules could have developed, and hundreds of years before this, king Whitesword revolutionized warfare by training all of his soldiers (including peasants) to fight as a unit, making the concept of organized marching feasible. Remember that Kesch is a game of Whitesword's empire, unlike Svelfwld, which is discussed below.
For information on the original Warlord game, see This Page.
Svelfwld
| White has 12 warriors and a king (noted with a "+") while black has 24 warriors. White's goal is for the king to escape to the edge; Black's goal is to kill the king. On your turn, move one piece any number of slots up, down, right, or left, following the lines in the board (though pieces cannot change direction mid-move). If, after your move, an enemy piece has been surrounded, with two of your units on opposite sides orthogonally, that piece is removed; after any enemies are removed, check to see if your own piece is surrounded, in which case it is also removed. White goes first, and turns alternate until White wins by moving the king to the edge of the board, or until Black wins by slaying the king. |
Construction and Variants
The piece construction depends on the construction of the board. There are many ancient boards carved in great slabs of stone or on mighty oakwood tables; these have deep grooves, and the pieces are spherical stones of light and dark rock (or else of light and dark metal) with a golden ball for the king. These rest neatly in the intersecting grooves, and roll along the lines to their positions. Other boards sometimes have no lines in them and simply have indentations carved out in an 11x11 pattern for the pieces.
On more cheaply designed boards, such as those of parchment or with lines merely drawn in with charcoal, it is common to use coins, pebbles, or painted chips of wood.
An alternate form of Svelfwld is played in Allacia using these flat pieces on an 8x8 kesch board, (with pieces placed on the intersections to create a 9x9 playing field). In this game, there are 8 defenders and a king arranged in a cross formation, and 16 attackers.
Justification and Discussion
Svelfwld is a variant of the northern European family of games including Tablut, Fithcheall, and Hnefatafl; in fact, the design of Svelfwld attempts to closely reconstruct Tawlbrydd, the Welsh Tafl variant - the Celts of Minerva's land of Tarc ("Tarkhe" in common writing) would have played a Dark-Ages Celtic version of the game. That being the case, then, the rules are similar to those generally assumed by most modern reconstructions of Hnefatafl, with these rules specific to itself:
To begin explaining these rules, it is worth mentioning that my Hnefatafl experimentation began with Viking Siege, a computer version of Hnefatafl with 7x7, 11x11, and 13x13 versions available for play. Based on extensive playtesting of Viking Siege, I have found that White has a strong advantage in the larger boards, but a strong disadvantage in the smaller board. Many of the changes made to Svelfwld reflect simple ways of weakening White on the 11x11 board to render a fairer and more playable game. It is also important to note that my changes to the popular modern rules of Hnefatafl in my design of Svelfwld are made in accordance with the findings reported by Neil Peterson in Hnefatafl: An Experimental Reconstruction, an excellent paper which attempts to reconstruct the rules of the Hnefatafl games with an empirical approach combined with historical information. Take note of Peterson's conclusion:
It is my belief that this game was changed over time to be more reflective of the game of chess and the modern medieval mindset of the "divine right of the kings". As was mentioned earlier, Robert ap Ifan's rules seem to imply another possible answer to the Linnean rule of stopping the king from moving. If the king is required to say gwrheill and can then proceed safely between two players, this implies that if he does not say that word he cannot proceed in that fashion. It is also worthy of note that the attacker can capture the king with only two men if he first warns the defender by saying "watch your king" Taken together these two rules may very well be the remainders of earlier rules that allowed the king to be captured in the same way as any other piece. Combined with playing to the side of the board {that is, allowing a victory by White for moving the king to any square on the side, rather than to a corner square --Mark} this may very well be enough to balance the game back to something that is more playable.
My own experiments with real-life 9x9 Hnefatafl games indicate that treating the king as a normal piece does indeed make for a very balanced game. Unfortunately, Svelfwld itself is not easy to test, since 11x11 boards, with the pieces to fill them, are difficult to come by. The trials with 9x9 board games used a more advantageous setup for White (the pieces were arranged in a cross) while the 9x9 board should give Black a greater natural advantage of a lower ratio of free space to pieces. Until I have an opportunity to test the 11x11 Svelfwld board for balance, I will assume that these two differences roughly cancel one another out in terms of fairness.
To provide some justification for the other rules, I'll begin with the colors. The Celts are white, while the Teutons are black, to represent local sentiment; king Whitesword, while idolized throughout the rest of Minerva, is despised by the Celtic traditionalists, who would have viewed his forces as agressors had their kings as defenders. Therefore White goes first.
Regarding the lack of a throne at the center, this represents a controversial decision, as the throne is usually thought to be a special spot where other units can't move. However, differentiating the center from other areas of the board requires several other rulings to be made - can pieces move across the center, can pieces be killed by pinning them against the center, can the king himself move back onto the center, and so on, but all such questions are obviated by treating the throne as a normal square. Moreover, it is unrealistic from a simulationist standpoint to prevent others from standing on the throne; in a real attack, no one would have worried about whether social customs only allowed one particular person to sit there.
The precise rules for moving between enemies in the real historical games are also somewhat cloudily understood, so my own ruling is merely one possible interpretation. It may seem complicated, but can be expressed as a simple rule: on your turn, your pieces kill surrounded enemies first, and then your enemies kill your surrounded pieces. Again, it is difficult to know for sure whether this reflects the way the game would have been played, but it has the advantage of simulating actual combat; a moving warrior would have the initial advantage of surprise, but a single man could not safely stand between two enemies for any length of time.
Email the creator at harkenbane@juno.com