Triad
Opening Position
No. of Players
Three
Equipment
A Triad board and nine each of red, green and blue counters are required for play.
History
Triad was invented by Cameron Browne. It arose out of discussions with Joao Neto and Bill Taylor in November 2002.
Objective
The game ends when all of the counters of any one player have been captured. The two remaining players then count their remaining counters and the player with the most left wins the game. If the two remaining players have an equal number of counters at this point, the game is a draw between them.
Play
The game commences with the board set up as above. Each player controls one of the three armies of like-colored counters and their corresponding like-colored cells. Note that I had to show the cells as a slightly different color than their corresponding counter in the illustrations so that they would show up. Here, one player controls red counters and lavender cells, dark green counters and bright green cells to another, and blue counters and aqua cells to another. Red has the first move.
On their turn a player must do three things:
Move a single friendly counter in any of the six hexagonal directions along a straight line and across vacant cells to land on any vacant foreign cell, that is, a cell of an opponent’s color. The opponent who owns the cell where the counter stops becomes the candidate and the other opponent becomes the bunny.
All opponent’s counters immediately adjacent to the landing cell are captured and removed from the board. Capture is compulsory and the move that grants the player the most captures in a turn must be taken. This is the Compulsory Maximum Capture Rule.
The moving player must then place a counter belonging to the bunny on any empty cell, unless a player has just been eliminated.
The candidate becomes the next player to move.
Strategy
Variations
Sources