Serpent társasjáték

Angol leírás

IntroductionSerpent is a drawless annihilation game for two players: Black and White. It is played on the hexes (cells) of an initially empty hexagonal board. The recommended size is 6 cells per side, although 5 and 7 are also valid. Each player has a sufficient supply of stones of their own color.

Definitions:
A snake is a maximal set of connected stones of the same color. A single stone is an egg.

A head or tail is a stone in a snake that is adjacent to exactly one stone in that same snake. A snake must have a head and a tail.
The body of a snake consists of stones adjacent to exactly two stones in that same snake. A snake may have no body.

A survival path is a continuous sequence of empty cells from an egg, head or tail of a snake to an egg, head or tail of another friendly snake, such that filling the sequence and the endpoints with friendly stones would create a single valid snake.
An egg or snake is alive if it has a survival path to an egg, head or tail of another friendly snake; if not, it is dead. A group is also alive if there has never been more than one group of its color on the board.

Turns:Black plays first, then turns alternate. On your turn, perform one of the following actions:

Place a stone of your color on an empty cell adjacent to at most two friendly eggs and to no friendly snake.
Move the head of a friendly snake to an empty cell adjacent to its tail, if doing so brings it closer, via a survival path, to the nearest friendly stone (egg, head or tail of another snake); if both endpoints have survival paths, move only the one farther from the target, so that it ends its move adjacent to the one that is closer to the target. However, you may choose to ignore that target by removing it as a result of moving, instead moving on to the next closest one, and so on.

At the end of your turn, remove all dead friendly or enemy eggs and snakes, provided that the removal creates a connected set of empty cells that their owner cannot play next turn, invalidating any dead formation that cannot be removed because of it. If the only stone removed is the one you just placed, your placement is illegal.

End of the game:You win if the last enemy egg or snake is removed from the board.

To balance the game, before starting, the first player places a black stone on an empty cell, and the second player chooses a side. This balancing method is called the pie rule.

—description from the designer