Adaptoid
Overview
Adaptoid is a two-player abstract board game invented by Néstor Romeral Andrés in 2008.

Board

Adaptoid is played on a hexagonal board with four cells per side using special pieces: adaptoids, legs and pincers. At the beginning of the game there are 12 white adaptoids, 12 white legs, 12 white pincers, 12 black adaptoids, 12 black legs and 12 black pincers.

 

 

White adaptoids, legs and pincers:                 

Black adaptoids, legs and pincers:           

Objective

The goal of the game is to capture at least 5 enemy adaptoids. The first player who achieves this objective wins the game.

A player also wins the game if the opponent is left without a single adaptoid on the board.

Play

The game begins with an empty board.

The first player puts one white adaptoid and one black adaptoid somewhere on the board. Then the second player decides whether he wants to play with the White or with the Black pieces.

After setting up the initial position and choosing sides, the player with the White pieces begins the game.

On each turn a player performs the following actions:

  • Optionally, a player can move one of his adaptoids.  An adaptoid can move up to as many cells as the number of legs it has (initially, none of the adaptoids can move since they don't have any legs).  An adaptoid cannot pass an occupied cell but can finish its movement on a cell occupied by an opponent's adaptoid.  In this case the adaptoid with more pincers stays alive and the other one is removed from the board and counted towards the number of captured adaptoids for the corresponding player.  If both adaptoids have the same number of pincers then they both are removed from the board and the number of captured adaptoids is increased for both players.  Captured adaptoids can be reused again during the game.  Below are two examples of the optional movement step:
 
The Light adaptoid (highlighted with the yellow color) has three legs. It can move to any cell marked with a blue dot.  Note, that it cannot move to the cell occupied by the Black adaptoid because the Black adaptoid has more pincers (two) than the moving Light one (zero).   The Dark adaptoid (highlighted in red) has two legs. It can move to any cell marked with a blue dot.  Note that it can move to the cell occupied by the White adaptoid because the White adaptoid has less pincers (zero) than the moving Dark one (two).  Also note that the highlighted adaptoid cannot reach the D7 cell because it requires three legs (the adaptoid cannot pass the occupied D6 cell).
  • After the optional movement of an adaptoid, a player must create a new adaptoid OR add a leg or a pincer to one of the existing adaptoids.  Creating a new adaptoid is done by placing an adaptoid on any empty cell adjacent to another adaptoid of the same color already on the board.  Below is an example of this step:

A new Black adaptoid can be placed on
any of the cells marked with a blue dot.

  • The last action is removing all the opponent's adaptoids which don't have enough empty cells surrounding them: a piece is removed if the number of empty cells adjacent to it is less than the number of extremities (legs + pincers) the piece has.  All removed opponent's adaptoids are counted towards the number of captured adaptoids for the player performing the move.  Below is an example of this step:
 
The White player places a new adaptoid on D4 (highlighted in yellow). The Black adaptoid on D5 has 4 extremities (2 legs and 2 pincers) but only three empty spaces surrounding it (C4, E5 and E6).
  The Black adaptoid on D5 is removed from the board and counted towards the number of captured adaptoids for the White player.

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