Omnigon

Opening Position

No. of Players

Two

Equipment

An Omnigon board and two sets of pieces are required for play. The two teams (here) are Orange and White. Each team has one royal piece called a Helios, two Bi-Gons, one Tri-Gon and three Star-Gons. All pieces, except the Helios, have marked arrows which tell which direction they may travel on the board and also act as shields, meaning that a piece is defended from attack from the direction the arrow is pointing.

From left to right the four pieces are the Bi-Gon, the Tri-Gon, the Star-Gon, and the royal Helios.

History

Omnigon is a registered trademark (Copyright 1988, 1990 Gametree, Inc. All Rights Reserved) game created by Mike Flynn and Published by Gametree, Inc. (P.O. Box 6532 Boise, Idaho 83707) made in the USA under Patent Nos. 4305585, 4411433. It is sometimes considered to be a Chess variant, but has many differences from any existing Chess games.

Objective

Omnigon has some similarities to Chess in that the objective of both players is to capture the opponent's "royal" piece, called a Helios. Captures are by replacement. There is no check or checkmate in Omnigon.

Play

The board is setup as shown above. Alternate turns entail the movement of a single friendly counter which may then be followed by rotating that counter.

Any piece moves along an axis as indicated by one of the pointing arrows on its surface. Only one piece may occupy any one cell and there is no jumping. A piece need not move the entire distance that it is able to move, but must stop at the edge of the board, when it encounters a friendly piece, or when it encounters an opposing piece. If the opposing piece is not shielded at that side, it may be captured by replacement. After any move that a player makes he may then rotate the piece that he just moved to change the direction of shielding. The piece may be rotated to any of the six possible angles, but a piece cannot rotate unless it just moved. The Helios only moves one cell at a time in any direction and is not defended from attack in any direction.

Sources

  1. Omnigon BoardGameGeek page. https://boardgamegeek.com/image/17342/omnigon

  2. Omnigon by Funky-Bob. http://stormfield.free.fr/messites/loisirs/omnigon/

  3. Omnigon at the Chess Variant Pages. http://www.chessvariants.com/d.photo/omnigon.html