Dvonn is played on a board with 49 spaces. One player has 23 black pieces to play, the other 23 white pieces. There are also 3 neutral red pieces, called Dvonn pieces. 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.
The second phased 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 the 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 is removed from the board.
A player which has no legal move passes. The game ends when both player have no legal moves. All stacks controlled by one player are collected into one tower.
The winner is the player with the highest tower.
Dvonn was developed around 2001 by Kris Burm from Belgium as part of his Gipf project of abstact board games. Other games in this series include Gipf, Zèrtz, Tamsk, and Yinsh.
Rules
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