Tournament

Tournament — also called Agon, Queen's Guard, and Royal Guards — is a race for two. It is the oldest known abstract played on a board of hexagons, first published in London in 1842 and a favourite of the Victorian parlour.

The board is a large hexagon of 91 smaller hexes: a central throne and five rings around it.

White and Black each have one queen and six guards. The queen is the crowned hexagonal counter. A guard is a round counter.

Be the first to put your queen on the throne with all six of your guards on the six cells of ring 1.

Both queens start on opposite corners of the outer ring: White on the left corner, Black on the right corner. The twelve guards alternate White, Black around the border, with empty cells between them. The other four corners of the outer ring start empty, and every inner cell starts empty.

White moves first. In a parlour the first player was chosen by lot; here White leads, and a series of games can swap the seat that opens.

On your turn you move one of your own pieces onto an adjacent empty cell.

You may not step into a cell that sits directly between two enemy pieces. That is the same geometry as a capture, below, and moving there would hand yourself to the opponent.

If none of your pieces has a legal step, and you have nothing waiting to be put back, the turn passes.

There is no capture that removes a piece. You throw an enemy back by moving so that the enemy stands directly between two of your pieces. The three cells must be one of:

The move that closes the line is the one that counts. Every enemy that move closes a line on is thrown back, even two or three at once.

A thrown piece stays where it is until its owner's turn. That turn may not be a normal step. The owner picks up the thrown piece and puts it back:

Neither may be put back on a cell that already sits between two enemies, when some other legal cell exists. If every legal cell is between two enemies, the piece may land on any empty cell of the kind above, so a mandatory return cannot stall the game.

One piece is put back per turn. When the queen and one or more guards were thrown together, the queen is put back first. The guards follow, in any order, one a turn. Those turns replace ordinary steps, so a double throw costs the opponent two turns of progress.

Putting a piece back can itself throw an enemy, by the same sandwich.

If all six of your guards stand on ring 1 while your queen is not on the throne — the throne empty, or holding the enemy queen — neither player can ever finish. You lose at once, and your opponent wins.

A touched piece had to be moved, if it could be. The digital table chooses the piece and the cell together, so that custom is not enforced.