Description

The game is played by two players or two teams of two players and is a curious amalgam of Go and Monopoly. The object is to eliminate the opponent's stones. There is an outer circuit with roughly every other square being a "castle property", the others bearing various instructions (Monopoly-style). The inner board consists of 10x10 lines enclosing 81 squares, twenty of which are castles in five colored groups of four.

You start with your Knight (pawn piece) on the Start space and a box of fifty stones (men). The third box is the King's Treasury (bank). On your turn you roll, advance the Knight accordingly, and then add a stone to the central board. Stones are placed on intersections, as in Go, and mark possession of the territory surrounding the intersection. Taxes and commands on the outer board are ignored until the Knight has completed two circuits.

The outer board has spaces with named castles; when you land there, you pay the castle's owner a land use tax of two to seven stones, depending on the castle (the central one is worth more, for example). You own a castle by encircling it (as closely as possible). You control territory by encircling it. You can also trace a line across the board, which then gives you control of the smaller of the two parts thus created. Capture is as in Go: an encircled set of stones dies if it does not have any "eyes" --empty spaces inside it and the encircling enemy.

Stones can be exchanged freely, so you could, for example, sell captured opponent stones back to him in exchange for treasury stones in order to pay a fine. If you absolutely run out of stones, you can take some off the board.