Форме
Overview
Forms is a two-player abstract board game played on a square board with a rectangular grid that was invented by Steven W. Meyers in 2007. A newer ("advanced") version of this game was invented in 2011.

Board

Forms is played on a square board with 18x18 cells.  Other even sizes can be used like 8x8 or 12x12.

Objective

A player wins if all his stones are removed from the board.

No draws are possible in Forms.

Standard rules

Initially the board is filled with black and white stones as shown in the following picture:

Players move alternately, starting with the player with the black stones.

A move consists of three steps:

  1. A player selects one of his stones.
  2. The player moves the selected stone to any cell occupied by an opponent's stone (the opponent's stone is removed from the board).
  3. The player removes all stones (both black and white) that aren't connected to the moved player's stone with some chain of adjacent (either horizontally or vertically) stones (both black and white).

Below is an example of a move:

A player selects one of his black stones. The player moves the selected stone to a cell occupied by a white stone. The player removes all stones that aren't connected to the moved black stone.

Advanced rules

Initially the board is filled with black and white stones arranged in the checkerboard pattern.

Players move alternately, starting with the player with the black stones.

On each turn, a player can do either a capturing or a non-capturing move (but not both the same time):

  1. The capturing move is made by moving a player stone to an orthogonally adjacent cell occupied with the enemy stone. The enemy stone is removed from the board.
  2. The non-capturing move is made by moving a player's stone to an empty cell reachable by one or more orthogonal slides (i.e. there should be a clear path of orthogonally adjacent empty spaces between the source and the target cell).

After making one of the mentioned above moves,  the player removes all stones (both black and white) that aren't connected to the moved player's stone with some chain of adjacent (either horizontally or vertically) stones (both black and white) - same way as it is done in the "standard rules".

The non-capturing move (the 2nd option) must produce the removal of at least one stone to be legal (so, every move in Forms produces at least one capture/removal).

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