The parade of games from The Great American Trading Company continues. Upthrust is from their Inventors Collection, and the inventor in question is Sid Sackson. Sackson is one of the most respected names in the game industry. When you get a Sackson game, you have a good idea of what to expect. The game will be fairly simple, but with surprising depth and scope for strategy. The systems will work— they won't be broken or flawed. They'll also be fairly traditional— Sackson may be an inventor, but he's no longer an innovator.
Upthrust fits this profile like a glove. As with the rest of the Inventors Collection, a game which could easily be cobbled together at home with odds and ends has been given the royal treatment. The game board is crafted of wood with screened markings and drilled holes, and the four sets of four colored pegs are also wooden. It comes in the atrocious Inventors Collection box, although thankfully this one has a plastic film over the front window (so you can store the game without worrying about the pieces falling out, unlike others in the series.
The game board is essentially a 4x11 grid, with a line cordoning off the top five rows (the scoring area). The pegs all begin in the bottom four rows, arranged so that no two pegs of the same color share a row or column. Pegs can never change columns— there will always be exactly one peg of each color in every column.
The goal in Upthrust is to score the most points by maneuvering your pieces into the most valuable rows in the scoring area. Since the values increase as you approach the top of the board, this means trying to get your pegs as close to the top as possible. A couple of extremely simple rules govern movement.
Any peg can move upward a number of rows equal to the number of pegs in its current row. No more, no less. So at the start of the game, the first player always moves a peg four spaces. A peg can't move if it would land on another peg, or if it would land in a row which already holds another peg of the same color. That last restriction is waived in the scoring area— you can have any number of your own pieces in the same row there.
The game ends when there are only two pieces left outside the scoring area. Those pieces don't score anything for their owners. All other pegs are worth the value of the row they're in (60, 40, 30, 20, or 10).
Upthrust looks simple, yet the first time you play you'll make mistakes which only become apparent after the fact. It takes a while to catch on to the nuances of movement. Moving a peg changes the number of spaces other pegs can move in both the originating and the terminating row of the moved peg. It's easy to make assumptions based on one of these remaining fixed, when in fact they both change. Going deeper, changing the number of spaces pegs will move can render other pegs immobile, because they'd now move into rows which already have pegs of the same color. This, in turn, can force a player to move a particular peg if it's the only one they can move. That, too, will change movement values, and so forth down the line.
The game tree may be deep, but it's not very broad— there are never more than four branches from any node, and in many cases even fewer. Compared to games like Chess or even Othello, that's tiny. It strikes me that it wouldn't be hard to devise an unbeatable computer AI, and a sharp player could be almost as tough.
The average player, though, will make mistakes— and have fun in the process. Upthrust is a fast game with no luck, yet with few enough choices at each juncture that anyone in the family can join in without being intimidated. This is the best of the Inventors Collection. It's fair to call it overproduced for what it is, but so's a wooden chess set. What you get is a nice game in a fine edition which won't look out of place on an end table.