Dipole

• Board
• Objective
• Play
• External Links

The Dipole is played on a common 8x8 checkerboard.

The game starts with two stacks of 12 checkers, one light and one black, as shown on the following picture:

A player wins if his opponent stays without checkers on his turn.

Players move alternatively, starting from the player with the light checkers.

Players take turns moving an entire stack of player's checkers or just a portion of one (also called a stack here), one stack per turn. The number of cells (both dark and light ones) a stack is moved must equal the number of checkers in the moved stack. The moved stack can land on dark cells only but light cells are included into the count. It's allowed to jump over other stacks.

There are three kind of moves:

• Simple moves: a stack can be moved forward or diagonally forward to any empty cell. A player can also move a stack beyond the board boundaries as if the board cells extend there. In this case the moved stack is removed from the board. Players typically remove single checkers from their far row because they have nowhere else to go.
• Merging moves: a stack can be moved forward or diagonally forward to any cell occupied by another stack of the same color. In this case both stacks are merged together.
• Capturing moves: a stack can be moved in any straight line (i.e. horizontally, vertically or diagonally) both forward and backward to any cell occupied by an opponent's stack if and only if the size of the opponent's stack is equal or smaller than the moved player's stack. In this case the entire opponent's stack is removed from the board.

If an opponent cannot make any legal move then a player gets an extra turn.

• marksteeregames.com - Mark Steere's official site.