Surakarta, the board game

Surakarta rules: the capturing move is the whole game

On your turn a stone either steps or takes, and the two motions are built differently. A step goes to any empty neighbouring point, straight or diagonal, and a stone may not take anything by walking into it. A capturing move leaves the grid, comes back in somewhere else, and only then takes. That is what the eight arcs drawn outside it are for.

To capture, a stone sets out along a rank or a file, runs off the edge, and carries on around one of the eight circular corner loops that join the edges in pairs. It comes back onto the grid facing inward, keeps going along that new line, and takes the first piece it meets, provided the piece is one of the opponent's pieces and the route has been through at least one loop. The piece is removed and the attacker stands on its point. Jumping is not allowed, so the route may cross any number of empty points but stops at the nearest occupied one. It never turns at an intersection; only a circuit turns it. One route may run through several circuits, and it may pass back over the point the stone set out from, which counts as empty from the moment it leaves.

A straight run down a file takes nothing, because a route that misses the circuits does nothing at all. And the stone sitting beside yours is often the one you cannot touch, while a stone on the far edge is already in range. That is an unusual way to take a piece. The English Wikipedia entry calls the method possibly unique and says it is not known in any other recorded board game. We have not found a counter-example either, which is not the same as there being none.

The longest capture takes a neighbour

The owner finds this game "strangely addicting", and says the loop system "makes my head dizzy" because it requires you to understand the consequences of movement. That is why a grid this small is hard to hold in your head, and the two sections that follow are the same observation counted out.

We ran every attacking stone against every target on an otherwise empty grid, to find the ceiling. It is twenty three points, and sixty-four routes reach it. Follow one of them: it starts on the second point of the top row and ends on the point diagonally below and to its left. Those two points touch. A single diagonal step covers the same ground, and a step is not allowed to take anything. That route crosses three loops, which is not the other ceiling. Four circuits is the most one capturing move can cross, and nothing here runs past twenty three points.

The four corners are safe forever

Every circuit is anchored to an edge point that is not a corner, four to each edge and sixteen in all, and the four corners are attached to nothing. No capture route ever travels the outermost rank or file, because entering one would mean entering at a corner, and a corner has nothing to enter by. A stone standing there cannot be captured, and by the same geometry cannot capture. Those four points are the only ones where either is true.

Each side starts with a stone on two of them. Both players therefore open holding two pieces that can never be taken and will never take anything, which leaves each of you ten pieces that can do the work.

Java, France, and a name a city had first

The game is named after Surakarta in Central Java, and the city stood on that island a long time before the game did. It was founded in 1745 as the new capital of the Mataram sultanate and took its formal name from Kartasura, the capital before it. The village already on the site was called Sala, after the sala tree, and Dutch speakers turned Sala into Solo, which is what nearly everyone calls the place now. Search the bare word and you get the city: hotels, palaces, batik, the river.

The game's own history is thin, which is what happens to an abstract played on lines scratched into the ground. Traditional boards were drawn in sand or volcanic ash and played with shells against pebbles, which is equipment that leaves nothing behind. In Javanese the game goes by permainan, which simply means the game, and by dam-daman. Surakarta is the label Europe attached to it: the earliest publication under that name appeared in France in 1970, and Sid Sackson's The Book of Classic Board Games calls it Roundabouts. Related games are played in rural China and Korea with pieces that do not step diagonally, and a seven by seven version with fourteen stones a side, bas-basan sepur, belongs to Yogyakarta. No ancient board survives to point at. The 1970 printing is attested and so is the Sackson name, and everything earlier than that is guesswork, the age of the game included.

What this table decides that the old rules leave open

The traditional ending is an agreement: when neither side can make headway the game stops, and whoever has more pieces in play wins. A table two people reach by link cannot poll them for an agreement, so this one settles it with numbers. Taking the last opposing stone wins outright. Otherwise the 160th accepted move draws, with captures counted in that total, and taking the final stone on move 160 still wins rather than drawing. Before the limit, a side left with no legal move at all loses, and either player may resign.

Captures stay optional, which is the traditional rule left alone: you may see a capture and decline it. The turn cap and the blocked-side rule are this table's own adjudication, added so a game between two strangers can finish, and not a claim about how Surakarta has always been settled. Other sets of rules answer it their own way.

Playing Surakarta online, and an opening with nothing in it

A Surakarta game opens with nothing to take, for either side. We checked the starting position against the shipped rules: with twelve stones filling the two rows nearest each player, every route out of them meets a stone before it has been round a circuit. The position has to be prised open before any of that matters, and that opening is where most of the strategy lives. Trading early feels generous and usually hands the other side the lines.

Setting a board out here is one click, and what comes back is a link. Paste it to the person you want in the other seat and they are sitting down the moment they open it, in the next room or another country, with nothing to sign up for and nothing to download. If your opponent is next to you, keep one screen between you and pass it back and forth. Or take the computer: it counts pieces, drifts toward the middle of the grid, and avoids leaving a loop route open. That opponent is also the reason this one could ship at all: it is how each game here gets tested from the inside before a seat is offered to anybody. In the owner's words, "I have play tested every game that ships."