| Overview |
Bridges is a two-player abstract board game played on a hexagonal board, designed by Marc Rebillet.
Players place tokens and join them with bridges, trying to score more points than their opponent. It is a
territory-scoring game, like Tumbleweed and Yodd.
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| Board |
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Bridges is played on a hexagonal board with eight cells per side. Larger boards can be used for a deeper game and smaller boards can be used for a shorter game. The center cell is a permanent hole. A token may not be placed on the hole, but a bridge may pass over it.
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| Objective |
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The goal of Bridges is to score more points from completed bridges than the opponent. |
| Play | ||||||
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The game begins with an empty board except for the center hole. There are two players: Orange and Light Blue. Starting with Orange, players take turns making 1 or 2 steps per turn. However, Orange makes only 1 step on the first turn. Each step can be either:
If a player makes two steps, they may be made in any combination and are applied in order. A token placed as the first step may therefore be used to build a bridge with the second step. Beginning with the second turn, a player may pass without making any steps. Placement A player may place a token on an empty cell, provided that it is not the center hole, is not occupied by a bridge, and is not adjacent to another token of either color. Bridge segments are not considered tokens, but locked bridge endpoints are. Therefore, a player may place a token adjacent to a bridge segment, but not adjacent to a bridge endpoint. The diagram below shows legal placements with green checkmarks and illegal placements with red crosses:
Building a Bridge To build a bridge, a player selects two of their own unlocked tokens lying on the same line with one or more empty cells between them. Every cell between the two tokens must be empty and free of existing bridges. The center hole is considered empty for this purpose. After a bridge is built, its endpoint tokens and every cell between them are locked for the rest of the game. A locked endpoint cannot be used to build another bridge, and no later bridge may cross or overlap the locked path. The diagram below shows one legal and two illegal bridge attempts:
Scoring A bridge scores one point for every cell strictly between its two endpoint tokens. The endpoints themselves do not add to the score. The diagram below marks every scoring cell with +1:
End of Game The game ends immediately when both players pass consecutively. The player with the greater score wins. If the players' scores are equal, compare their longest bridges. If these are the same length, compare their second-longest bridges, and so on, until a pair is not the same length. Whoever built the longer of the two wins. In the scoring diagram, both players have four points, but Orange wins the tie-break because Orange's longest bridge is worth three points while Light Blue's longest bridge is worth two. If both players have identical ordered bridge lengths, the game is a draw. |
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