Iqishiqi

The game commences with the single neutral black stone at the central cell of the board.

Alternate Names

The name is a derivation of IQI (ichi) which is the number one in Chinese, OSHI which peans push and QI (chi), game, that is the game of pushing one stone.

No. of Players

Two

Equipment

An Iqishiqi board, one black stone, and 75 white stones are required for play. Each player "owns" three non-adjacent board edges. It may be useful to highlight the six board edges with two differing and alternating colors to distinguish them to the players, but I here follow the description given by the creator/author and assume the two players can keep track of which sides they own. The players may want to have each face a board edge, rather than a corner, and control that edge and its two non adjacent edges. Here is a Iqishiqi board with colored edges if that is helpful.

History

Iqishiqi was invented by Joāo Pedro Neto in 2003.

Objective

When the neutral stone is pushed to a board edge, the player owning the edge wins the game. If the neutral stone is pushed to a corner, the player that made the push wins. The game is also won by stalemating the opponent.

Play

With alternating turns, each player drops a single white stone at any vacant cell on the board. The newly placed stone either starts a new group or becomes part of a larger group. Here, a group is a single stone or a multiple stones that are all connected. For groups of two or more, every stone in the group must be adjacent to at least one other stone in that group. After the drop, the player must push the neutral black stone along a "line-of-sight" from one of the stones in the group that was added to. The distance the neutral stone is moved is dictated by the number of stones in the group that was added to. The neutral stone may be pushed along the line-of-sight from any stone in that group, including the newly added one. If the player cannot make a move to push the neutral stone, that player is stalemated and loses the game.

The neutral stone must be pushed the exact distance specified by the number of stones in the group. The neutral cannot be pushed onto or through other counters and it cannot be pushed off of the board. If the only push available to a player would push the neutral stone further than the edge of the board, onto another stone, or through another stone, then there is no legal move and the player loses the game.

The player owning red edges just won by playing the last counter (marked here with an X), pushing the neutral stone one cell down and stalemating Blue.

Strategy

Variations

Sources

1. Neto, Joāo Pedro and Jorge Nuno Silva. Mathematical Games, Abstract Games. Dover Publications, Inc. 2013. ISBN 978-0-486-49990-1

2. http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~jpn/gv/iqishiqi.htm

3. Iqishiqi at BoardGameGeek. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/172250/iqishiqi