![]() ![]() The four-player game can be each man for himself, with each seeking to reach the diagonally opposite yard, or pairs of opposite (or adjacent) players can be partners who help each other, and the first pair to yard all 26 of their counters is the winner. The yards are at the four corners of the board behind the boundaries indicated by the broken lines in the illustration. Halma can also be played by four people, with each player having 13 counters. Players alternate turns, moving one counter at a time. Steps and hops may not, however, be combined in the same move. The color of a jumped piece does not matter a chain of jumps may be a mixture of friendly and enemy counters. A player may continue a chain of jumps as long as possible or stop wherever he pleases. The jumped piece is not removed.Ī connected chain of hops counts as a single move. (2) A "hop." This is a leap over another counter, as in checkers, except that the leap may be made in any direction, orthogonal or diagonal. (1) A "step." This is a move, like the move of a chess king, to any one of the eight adjoining cells. The goal is to occupy the opposing player's yard, and the first player to move all his counters into the opposite yard is the winner. The counters are identical except that the two sets are of contrasting colors. The Halma board one at the top left corner of the board and the other at the bottom right corner. If two players are competing, each begins by placing his 19 counters in a section called a "yard." There are two yards, The traditional Halma board has 16 cells on a side. Halma is still played in Britain but, although it was issued here in 1938 by Parker Brothers, it has never caught on in this country. He later became a prominent Boston surgeon. The game was invented in 1883 by George Howard Monks, a 30-year-old Harvard Medical School graduate who was then pursuing advanced studies in London. Matsuda's problem exploits the simple rules of a popular late-19th-century British proprietary game called Halma, after the Greek word for leap. The two new counter-moving puzzles are derived from one problem created by Matsuda. (Unfortunately the book is not available in English.) Fujimura has translated the puzzle books of Sam Loyd and Henry Ernest Dudeney into Japanese and is the author of several delightful books that contain his own original puzzles. The puzzles stem from Dialogue on Puzzles, a splendid collection of unusual problems by Kobon Fujimura and Michio Matsuda published in 1971 in Japan. Each family offers a series of unsolved problems and the opportunity to devise ingenious proofs that some solutions are impossible. Two new families of puzzles based on a long-neglected counter-moving game have recently come to light. ![]() "An admirable place for playing halma," said Chelifer, as they entered the Teatro Metastasio. ![]()
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