Last week the focus was on a pair of game designers with interesting pedigrees.
Croatian mathematics professor and draughts master, the late Ljuban Dedić, who created Croda, and former chess champion Emanuel Lasker who created Lasca (Laska).
But what of the games?
Dedić developed Croda out of his dissatisfaction with the number of draws in International Checkers, which is less an issue unless players are expert, or very evenly matched.
With Croda, Dedić seems to have started from the base of Turkish Checkers, itself one of the more dramatic checker variants.
Croda starts with pieces on squares of both colours, filling the closest three rows to each player, for 24 pieces per side.
That means the board has a lot of pieces to start, 48, of the 64 squares occupied.
The key element of Croda is piece movement. A man moves one square forward, either straight or diagonally. The diagonal move of a man is the only diagonal move in the game. All other moves, whether capturing or non-capturing, are orthogonal only (again think Turkish Draughts).
The ability to diagonally move through a seeming deadlock which can occur with orthogonal only movement, is Dedić’s mechanic to reduce the number of draws.
It certainly keeps Croda more fluid, and creates a definite freshness for checker players.
If a man ends its move on the opponent’s backrank, it promotes to king. This marks the end of the move.
A king moves any number of unobstructed squares horizontally or vertically, like the rook in chess. Kings may not move diagonally. There are many checker variants using the so-called ‘flying king’ and it does make for a dramatic end game.
For me, Dameo, is still the most dynamic checker variant, but it does stray farther from the base game we all know. Croda is closer to the heart of draughts, and is definitely worth exploring.
In the case of Lasker, it is played on a 7×7 board with play taking place only on alternating squares, so that only 25 of the 49 squares are actually used.
The one issue is 22-pieces start on the board, leaving only three squares available for opening move, leaving the start of a game rather mechanical.
The playing pieces are known initially as soldiers; when they reach the last row of the board, they become officers, with the same ability as kings in English draughts to move and jump backwards, but that comes from the original release of the game, and is more fluff than relevant to game play.
The major difference between Lasca and other draughts variants is that instead of pieces being removed from the board when they are jumped, they are placed under the piece that jumped them, forming a column. Yes this is a mechanic taken straight from Bashni created years earlier.
“A column is under the control of the player whose piece is on top, and has the move and jump capabilities of that piece (so that, for instance, a column with a black officer on top is under Black’s control, and can move and jump in either direction.) If a column is itself jumped, only the top piece is removed to go under the column doing the jumping,” details a ruleset.
Capturing is mandatory when possible; this means that a clever player may be able to force his opponent to capture several pieces of his colour, then capture his opponent’s piece from the top, leaving a powerful column composed of several pieces of his own colour.
A player wins the game when:
* the opponent has no legal move, or
* all the opponent’s pieces have been captured, or
* the opponent resigns.
Lasca seems very much Bashni squeezed onto a 7x7 board, with little to set it apart.
Bashni is a fascinating game, and I’d stick to it, but Lasca does have a moderate historic fascination.
