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From:Schmidt Spiele
Cost:$23
Players: 2
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Type of game: Abstract strategy
Skill level: 10
Complexity: 3
Reviewed by: Ben Baldanza, Issue 5.2 (18), Spring 1998
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Out of the box, Gipf looks like a lot of other abstract strategy games: a folding board printed with a grid of intersecting lines, round plastic pieces, and no dice. It only takes a few games, though, to see that Gipf stands tall above many of its peers.
The object of the game is to be the last player to add a piece to the board. The board consists of a hexagon formed from 5 dots per side. The dots are connected with lines so that 37 intersections, or spots, are created. Each corner dot has only one line extending into the grid; the middle dots on each side have two lines into the grid. Pieces move along these lines.
Each player places three of his eighteen plastic discs onto the board on the alternating first "spots" from each corner dot. Play then begins, and in each turn a player must enter a piece on one of the 24 outside dots and slide it along a path to an adjacent spot. The last player to do so is the winner.
If a spot is vacant, a piece may move there without issue. If a spot is occupied, the new piece slides the existing one and any others immediately following in the same line forward by one space, ala Abalone. The only restriction on this movement is that pieces cannot be forced off the board or onto any other dots, only onto empty spots. It should be clear now that the dots are used only as entry-points for pieces, not as part of the playing surface itself.
The heart of Gipf is in capturing pieces and managing resources. If a line of four like-colored pieces is created then those pieces are immediately removed, along with any other pieces in the same continuous line! In this way, each player can capture the other player's pieces and at the same time recover their own pieces from the board in order to re-stock their own supply of pieces.
Throughout the game, each player's reserve shrinks until they repossess pieces through this process. The winner is the player who forces the other to run out of pieces in his reserve, through capturing to shrink the total pieces available and by positioning of pieces to make it impossible for the opponent to create a line of four of his own color to repossess.
Gipf requires sound thinking and planning to win. Resource management— getting pieces back while stopping your opponent from doing the same— is the key. Patterns seemingly occur out of nowhere to the untrained eye; six sides of entry with various length lines of pieces which are moved forward as a single unit allow attack and defense from every angle.
The standard game replaces each player's starting three pieces with "gipfs". A gipf is simply two standard pieces stacked on top of each other. Gipfs need never be removed from the board, but if a gipf's owner chooses to do so it dissolves into two normal pieces. Lose all three of your gipfs and you lose the game.
This adds some intriguing possibilities. It may be advantageous to repossess your own Gipf piece (knowing it must be re-entered as two separate pieces, and that by losing all three Gipfs you lose the game). It is also possible to over-focus on the protection of your three Gipfs at the expense of your total resources. All in all, this is a nice complement to the basic game.
Not content with his own simple but wonderful creation, designer Kris Burm has promised to expand the game with potentials— new pieces with special abilities. The original Gipf game would be interrupted and a different game played for the right to add a potential to the original Gipf game, which would then resume. The possibilities here are endless, obviously, with potentials having their own potentials, and many unique contests before the original game which started it all is completed.
Gipf is exactly what a two-player strategy game should be: fun, intellectual, no luck involved, simple to understand, yet complex enough to allow endless plays without boredom. Like other fine abstract strategy games, each contest is unique and each opponent will address the situations somewhat differently. This makes for countless hours of mind-bending enjoyment. My guess is that this game will quickly move into every strategy-lover's top ten. Highly recommended.