Dvonn
Dvonn is a two-player strategy board game in which the objective is to accumulate pieces in stacks.
Rules
Equipment
Dvonn is played on a board with 49 spaces. The board has a hexagonal layout 5 hexes wide. One player has 23 black pieces to play, the other 23 white pieces. There are also 3 neutral red pieces, called Dvonn pieces.
Object
The object of the game is to control more pieces than the opponent at the end of the game.
Placement phase
The game starts with an empty board, and proceeds in two phases. During the first phase the players place their pieces on the board, starting with the three red Dvonn pieces. Pieces can be placed on any unoccupied space. White starts, and the players alternate. So Black is the first to place a piece of his own color. The first phase ends when all pieces are placed on the board, filling it completely.
Movement phase
The second phase involves the building of stacks of pieces (a single piece is also considered a stack) by moving stacks onto other stacks. A stack is controlled by a player if his color is on top. A stack is immobile if it is surrounded by 6 neighboring stacks. The black player will have the first move in this phase. Any mobile stack of height n (with n>0) can be moved in any one of the 6 directions by exactly n spaces by the player controlling it, if it lands on another stack. Single Dvonn pieces can not be moved, but they can be part of a stack. After each move all stacks which are not connected via a chain of neighboring stacks to any stack containing a Dvonn piece are removed from the board.
Passing and game end
A player who has no legal move must pass, and a play may only pass when no legal move is available. The game ends when both players have no legal moves. All stacks controlled by one player are collected into one tower. The winner is the player with the highest tower.
History
Dvonn was released in 2001 by Kris Burm from Belgium as part of his Gipf project of abstract strategy games. Other games in this series include Gipf, Zèrtz, Tamsk, and Yinsh.
