Dmytro Polovynka

Five lines

Schaedler’s Five Lines: Racing game

Ulrich Schaedler is a serious game historian and he came up with the popular reconstruction of Five Lines.

Shortly his rules can be summarized:

There is some criticism for these rules - for example these rules don’t take into the account the most cited saying about “moving a piece away from the holy line” which should be an unexpected move. In Schaedler’s Five Lines player would never move a piece away from his holy line, except for a very unlucky throw when it’s an only move. This is fixed in Kidd’s rules. However, Schaedler’s rules are most often used nowadays.

Rules as originally stated by Ulrich Schaedler himself follow.

Rules

  1. The game Five Lines is for two players.
  2. The game board consists of 5 parallel lines. The line in the middle (the 3rd line) is called “sacred line”. It is possible to draw a transverse line to cut the board into two halves.
  3. The players sit at the short ends of the board with the five lines horizontally before them.
  4. Each player has five counters. At the beginning of the game they place their counters on the ends of the lines (from now on called “points”) at their right hand side of the board so that all the ten points are occupied.
  5. The aim of the game is to move all the five counters on the opposite half of the sacred line, i.e. at the left hand side of the players (a more simple possibility would be to try to place all one’s five counters anywhere on the sacred line).
  6. The players take turns in tossing the die and moving one of their pieces according to the result of the throw.
  7. The pieces are moved from line to line, i.e. from point to point, in an anti-clockwise direction. A counter having reached the last point on one side of the board is shifted along the line to the opposite point, where it is moved down until it reaches the first line, when the same manoeuvre is repeated and so forth.
  8. Counters can move or to a vacant point or to the sacred line. This means that only one counter can be placed on any point, except for the sacred line where more counters (even from both players at the same time) can be placed. If in the first move a 5 is thrown the only possible move is from one side of the sacred line to the other, since all the other points are occupied.
  9. Zugzwang: if possible a move has to be executed, even if a counter must be drawn from the sacred line. In case a move is not possible the player looses his turn.
  10. The player who first reaches the goal, i.e. has moved all his five counters onto the (left half of the) sacred line, wins the game.

There are several variants found online - for example that the starting position is that all the five pieces start from the opponent’s holy line. Or when a piece lands on a holy line, a player gets another throw.

Please note: no one really knows how to play the game, this is only a modern reconstruction.

Source: Pente grammai – the ancient Greek board game Five Lines

Posted in Board Game Geek

Kidd’s Five Lines: variant with hitting

Stephen Kidd proposed the rules for Five Lines which have an aggressive element to the game, similar to modern backgammon. He tried to create the rules which play well with the most cited saying about Five Lines “moving a piece away from the holy line”. These rules do resemble backgammon - one can hit an opponent piece, when it’s alone on a point (a blot), but two and more piece on the same point are safe. In this variant all pieces start off the board and enter the board during the game. There is nothing really special about Holy Line - except that players need to put all their pieces there to win.

Rules as originally stated by Stephen Kidd himself follow.

Rules

  1. Each player has five pieces and moves their pieces counter-clockwise around the board according to the roll of a single die. Each player starts at the bottom corner on the right-hand side (a full revolution back to that right-hand corner requires 11 steps).
  2. The goal is to land all pieces on the ‘holy line’ in the center, which can only be entered at each player’s left-hand side.
  3. Roll to see who goes first, pieces are kept off the playing space of the board.
  4. If a player has two or more pieces ‘yoked’ on a line the other player cannot land on that side of the line.
  5. If a player lands on the opponent’s single piece (i.e. azux or ‘blot’), the opponent has to remove that piece from the board and start over with it.

I personally find these rules the most attractive, apart from the fact, that circling around the board with the last piece might be a bit boring. This I tried to fix with the “Avoid circling around with the last piece” variation.

Please note: no one really knows how to play the game, this is only a modern reconstruction.

Source: Pente Grammai and the ‘Holy Line’

Posted in Board Game Geek

Suggestion

Two suggestions to above rules, which might make a game better:

First: use knucklebones (astragali) instead of 6D dice. Why it is better and how to make them, if you have no access to knucklebones is described in the separate place.

Second: start with all pieces already on board as is shown on the vases depictions. Yes, this means you can hit your opponent pieces immediately, but that does not break the gameplay and makes the game even more aggressive.

I have connected with Stephen Kidd about both suggestions, and he said that they are worth a try and are not against historical evidence.

Avoid circling around with the last piece rule variant

There is one problem in the Five Lines game, no matter which variation is used. In the endgame the last piece simply circles around the board until it hits the desired number and gets onto the Holy Line. While someone might like it, others do not, me including. This does not happen in many other racing games because players cannot move pass the last point and have to skip their moves if they don’t get the desired throw, or they may exit on a non-exact throw, so these cannot be an inspiration for the rule.

So what is the simplest way to fix the “circling around with the last piece” problem? In my opinion it’s this:

Allow a player to skip the move if it’s his last piece on board

Allowing skipping moves is not a good rule when there are several pieces on board - but when a person has a last piece, he can’t really choose how to move. So at least let him allow not to move. This way his chances of getting onto the Holy Line increase.

Other possibility would be to change the winning condition so that only 4 stones are required on the Holy Line to win. Or a more contrived solution - what if a player may decide move a piece to a holy line on a non-exact throw? While surely it can be used, but I don’t find this rule be elegant enough. So

What can be other fixes for the “circling around with the last piece” problem?

Posted in Board Game Geek

Use knucklebones instead of dice

Nice thing about backgammon style games is that two dice throws have unequal probabilities, which gives a strategic depth to a game. In Five Lines the one die throw gives no strategic depth - all numbers have an equal chance, so there is no way to strategically put pieces on board.

For unequal throw distribution I suggest:

Use knucklebones instead of dice

Knucklebones were historically used instead of 6D dice and actually predate them. So using knucklebones instead of dice can be historically accurate.

Nice feature of knucklebones is that there is an unequal distribution of throws. Four sides of knucklebones have roughly the 10%-40%-40%-10% distribution.

Knucklebones used in Roman Empire had sides with numbers 1-3-4-6 on them, skipping 2 and 5. For the Five Lines I suggest using a more natural 1-2-3-4 marking with 1 and 4 having 10% chance of occurring each. Notice that the opposite sides add up to 5, which is in line with Five Lines symbolism (5 lines, 5 pieces).

If you don’t happen to have knucklebones at home, there is a simple way to make something resembling knucklebones out of a usual die. Simply paint the 6 to 2 and 5 to 3, which gives 17%-33%-33%-17% distribution for 1-2-3-4, which is not the same as knucklebones, but comes close.

In my opinion originally the game was played with knucklebones. But then players introduced dice. This may be seemed as the technical improvement, but it made the game be much duller, players switched to more interesting games and Five Lines fell into the oblivion.

Posted in Board Game Geek

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https://locusludi.ch/pente-grammai/