Surakarta

Opening Position

Alternate Names

Solo; Permainan (The Game, Bahasa, Indonesia); Roundabouts (in Sid Sackson's The Book of Classic Board Games); Car Gonu and Bike Gonu (Korea)

No. of Players

Two

Equipment

A Surakarta board and twelve each of black and white counters are required for play. In Java, the board is often drawn in the sand.

History

The game dates at least to the sixteenth century CE and is probably much older. It is played on the island of Java. It was first described in English by games historian R. C. Bell.

Objective

The objective is to capture all enemy counters, the first to do so being the winner.

Play

Alternate turns entail movement of a single counter one step in any direction, orthogonally or diagonally, to an unoccupied intersection. A capture is made by entering a path along one of the circular arcs at the corners, following it around and continuing along the trajectory. After it releases from the arc and encounters an enemy counter on the trajectory, it captures by replacement. This looping capture may begin from any node on the board other than the four corner points. A counter may potentially run through four different loops in one move by continually running along an unobstructed trajectory; but a loop cannot be run without a resultant capture.

Variations

There are many variations of this game throughout rural areas of Korea and China. Typically, Chinese and Korean variations do not allow diagonal movements but do allow loops to be run without resulting in a capture. Versions are known from Korea utilizing the same board with only six counters per player.

A version from Korea known as Car Gonu utilizes only six counters per player commencing with the above opening position.

A smaller version of the game, shown above, is known from Korea. It uses four counters per player. The larger version is also played in Korea. To distinguish the games there, the name of the larger version translates as Car Gonu, whereas the name of the smaller one translates as Bike Gonu.

Sources

  1. Sackson, Sid and Klutz Press. The Book of Classic Board Games. Klutz Press, Palo Alto, CA. 1991. ISBN 0-932592-94-5