Dmytro's Poleis: a simple playable modern reconstruction of Petteia
Backup page for:If you try playing Petteia using usual rules (board 8x8, 8 pieces for each player, rook movement, custodian capture, no jumps) you may find out that it’s not very exciting. As many others I tried to figure out, what could be the missing rules, that would make the game interesting.
And I think I have found a decent way to play Petteia while still keeping it simple and not creating too many additional assumptions. My aim was to make a modern playable interpretation of Petteia which will still fit into the Petteia/Poleis and Latrunculi descriptions.
First I present the rules and later on I will share my motivation and explanation.
Proposed rules
In short - these rules are simiar to ordinary Petteia rules with two main differences: 1) the game starts with a phase where players put their pieces on board and 2) there is a restriction of a piece movement which gives preference to attacking moves
- The game is played on a board 8x8 squares
- Each player has 16 pieces
- Players decide in random who moves first and then move in turn
- In the first phase of the game players put their pieces on any place on board in turn without any captures
- When all 32 pieces are on board, first phase is finished and the second phase starts
- In the second phase a turn consists in a move of one of the pieces and possibly a capture of one or more enemy pieces
- A player can’t pass his turn. If a player can’t make a legal move, he loses
- Ordinary pieces (ordinarii) move as rooks in chess - any distance orthogonally to an empty space
- Pieces can’t jump one over another
- Square can be occupied by only one piece
- “Attack” is a move which ends on a square orthogonally adjacent to an enemy piece
- If ordinary piece’s move is not an attack, this piece is turned over
- Turned pieces (vagi) move similarly to an ordinary piece, with a restriction that its move should always result in an attack. If turned piece can’t attack, it can’t move
- Capture is custodian - a piece is captured if it is surrounded by two opposing sides by enemy pieces orthogonally
- A piece can voluntarily move between two enemy pieces with no harm
- It is possible to capture several pieces by a single move
- If a turned piece (vagus) takes part in a capture, it is turned back (becomes ordinarius)
- A player who is left with a single piece on board loses
- Inability to make a move is also a loss
- In case there is a draw situation on board, player with more pieces wins. If they have the same number of pieces, player with more ordinarii wins. If they have the same number of ordinarii - then it’s a draw
Motivation
Two of the main problems in ordinary Petteia rules I found were:
- Impenetrable row of pieces, which would make it impossible to make a single capture.
- After some pieces are captured board becomes too big and pieces are too sparsely situated so that a piece can easily avoid capture.
This makes Petteia prone to draws and this results from a great advantage of defense over attack.
In order to fix this situation and after trying several approaches I have decided to differentiate an attacking move from a non-attacking move. Attacking move is the one which ends on an orthogonally adjacent field to an enemy piece. If a piece does not attack by its move, it is turned over. A turned piece cannot make other moves, except attacking ones. If a turned piece takes part in a capture, it is turned back to normal. What’s the logic behind it and how does it help?
The logic is the following: pieces are brave Greek soldiers. If a soldier does not attack, but moves with no purpose on the battlefield or even escapes from an attack, he can be called a deserter. A deserter is now under much stricter control and is forced to attack. To regain reputation a deserter should exterminate an enemy.
In practice, it means that an ordinary piece can make a non-attacking move only once. Defense no longer has such a great advantage and players are forced to play aggressively. Several test games showed that these rules are quite playable. Draw is still possible, but it will occur much less often as in usual rules.
The proposed rules fit into old descriptions. For example the Isidor’s passage (“Calculi partim ordine moventur partim vage. Ideo alios ordinarios alios vagos appellant. At vero, qui moveri omnino non possunt incitos dicunt”) divides pieces into “ordinarii” and “vagi”. In my description “ordinarii” are the ordinary pieces and “vagi” - the turned ones. The word “vagus” can mean “fugitive”, which makes sense in my rules. The “inciti” - the hopeless pieces are those “vagi” which can’t attack, thus having no available moves. The saying “citizen without a state may be compared to an isolated piece in a game of Petteia” may also refer to such “inciti”.
Turning over the piece also does not contradict the archaeological evidence and was used in rules reconstruction by Ulrich Schaedler.
By no means I claim that Greeks really played like this. However, there should have been some missing rules, something not too obvious, because otherwise these rules would be used in other custodian-capture-games, but simple enough, that ancient authors did not pay attention to them much. I believe my rules fit into this category.
Probably it would make more sense to call this a “Latrunculi”. I didn’t do so since Latrunculi now is usually associated with a Dux piece, which I did not use. And according to Ulrich Schaedler the correct name of the game should be “Poleis” and not “Petteia” - the later being the generic name of the game with stones. Hence, the name of the reconstruction.
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