Dmytro Polovynka

Five authentic Puluc variants adapted for two players

In another thread you can find a reference to five traditional Puluc variants. I tried to combine those rules with Bell’s rules to get five flavours of Puluc for two players. I hope you’re familiar with basic Bell’s rules - 5 pieces for each player, board with 9 spaces, throwing corn seeds instead of dice, capturing is made by putting the piece over another and after safely reaching home, all captives are killed and friendly pieces are liberated. If not - please read those first, or even play any computer Puluc game - usually those are based on Bell’s rules.

Traditionally Puluc is played in teams and each player gets his own set of pieces. Each player can have only one active piece on board, that is he can enter the next piece only if his own piece is captured, or it safely returned home. Board is also much longer in traditional Puluc and players throw seeds twice, not once, and then move accordingly (similar to how it’s done in Backgammon).

Traditional Puluc relies almost entirely on luck, so usually people prefer Bell’s rules, which give a player some choice, moreover it’s adapted for two players. However, there are five flavours of traditional Puluc, which can be blended with Bell’s rules to give the game for two players more variability.

Wee-wee ants

This is the basic gameplay in traditional rules, but there is an important difference from the Bell’s rules. Pieces move in the opposite direction in two circumstances:

This is what ants do - search for food along the road and return home either after finding something, or empty-handed if they reached the end of the road.

The second option means that a player makes a round-trip around the board. But how can the pieces which move to the opposite directions be differentiated? In the traditional Puluc there is no such problem - there is a single piece per player and the direction of movement can be simply memorized. In the modern Puluc it should be solved differently.

One of the options is to use the fact, that the board is wide and pieces may utilize the “right-hand driving” rule. This means that pieces moving west are on the northern part of the board, and pieces moving east are on the southern. By the way - this is very reminiscent of how wee-wee ants move - they move along the road from two sides, not clashing with each other.

Even if we offset pieces from the center, each space still should be only occupied by one piece - we can’t land on friendly pieces and enemies are captured.

Eagle

Pieces move the same as in wee-wee ants, but capturing rules are different. When the player’s piece lands on the opponent, both are immediately removed from board, and none of them takes part in the game anymore. The opponent piece (“the prey”) is considered to be killed, but own piece (“the eagle”) simply never reenters the game.

This is the fastest variant. But it inevitably leads to the situation where in the endgame both players are left with a single piece.

My proposal would be to let the “eagle” piece reenter the board. This is not really in line with the traditional version, but this makes the game be less reliant on luck and given that Puluc allows variety, this is a reasonable rule to accept.

Scorpion

Pieces move the same as in wee-wee ants, but there is one difference in capturing rule. In order to make a capture a piece can move both sides.

Personally I like the scorpion variation the most - this makes the game more aggressive and exciting, especially in the endgame, where there are few pieces left.

Army ants

In this variant pieces never move back - they continue moving forward whether empty-handed or with captives. After crossing the line between the road and the opponent house, captives are killed and all friendly pieces return home.

This is exactly what Bell’s rules are about. Realizing this made me think: if Bell’s rules are simply the army-ants adapted for two players, can’t we adapt other variants as well?

Fire

Same as wee-wee ants, but central space is marked with Fire. Every piece which lands on it burns and is removed from the game. If the piece had captives, those also burn. If a piece captures the enemy before reaching the Fire space, he returns home immediately.

Burned pieces are not counted towards the “killed enemy”, so technically if “green team” has captured only one opponent, but all “green” pieces burnt and all opponent pieces are alive - then according to the traditional rules, this is a win for a “green team”.

My suggestion is try to combine Fire with any previous variations and not to treat it as an independent variant. So, for example, one can combine Scorpion with Fire, or Army-ants with Fire.

Variability is integral part of Traditional Puluc. Which means that experimenting with rules is not prohibited.

This article on Board Game Geek