Surakarta

The loops are the whole game

Surakarta is a quiet little board with one wild idea: the looping arcs at its corners. Ordinary moves are gentle. A piece slides one step to any empty neighbouring point, straight or diagonal, and nothing is taken. Capturing is where the loops come in. To take an enemy piece, one of yours travels along a grid line, swings through at least one corner arc, and lands on the target, removing it. The path has to be clear the whole way, but it can curl right around the edge of the board and strike from a direction that looks impossible until you trace the line. No other board game captures like this. Chess pieces charge, checkers jump, but only Surakarta pieces orbit.

Learn the two circuits

Each corner carries two arcs, a small one and a larger one, and together they wire the board into two capture circuits: an outer ring and an inner ring. Every piece is either standing on a circuit line or it isn't, and that single fact decides how dangerous it is and how safe. A piece on a circuit line can capture along it and be captured along it. A piece off the circuits is a bystander until it steps on. Here's a worked example of the kind of capture that wins games: your piece sits at the left end of the second row. It runs the row to the right, swings through the corner arc, and comes back down the second column, landing on an enemy piece there. From the defender's point of view, an attack from directly behind. Trace threats like this for both sides before every single move, because a danger you didn't see is almost always one running through a loop you weren't looking at.

Playing the arcs

Good play means using the loops on offence while denying them on defence, and a few habits carry most of the load.

• Put pieces on circuit lines when you're attacking, since only those lines feed the corner arcs and generate capture threats.
• Break enemy threats with a blocker. A capture path must be completely clear, so parking any piece along the route, even one of your own weakest, shuts the whole line down.
• Watch for double threats. A piece on the crossing point of two circuit lines can threaten along both at once, and defending two loops with one blocker is often impossible.
• Trade carefully. Every capture leaves your capturing piece sitting on a circuit line deep in enemy territory, and the reply capture is sometimes waiting one arc away.

The deeper rhythm of the game is tempo. Because ordinary moves are one slow step, a threat that forces your opponent to spend a move blocking is nearly as good as a capture: you develop while they defend.

In the opening, that translates into a simple plan. Both armies start as two packed rows of six, and pieces buried in the back rank are doing nothing, so spend your early moves stepping central pieces forward onto the circuit lines. Resist the urge to push the outermost pieces first: the true border lines carry no arcs, so a piece camped there neither threatens anything nor blocks much, and it usually ends up a spectator. The player whose pieces reach the working lines first tends to dictate the first exchange, and the first exchange sets the tone for everything after.

From the city of Surakarta

The game takes its name from Surakarta, also called Solo, a royal city on the island of Java in Indonesia, and it was played there long before it appeared in Western game collections. In its homeland it was a ground game: the board scratched into earth or drawn in sand, with stones, shells or seeds standing in as pieces. European writers described it in the twentieth century and boxed versions eventually followed, usually keeping the Javanese name. Game historians love it for a simple reason: capture methods in traditional board games fall into a handful of families, jumping, surrounding, overtaking, and Surakarta's orbital capture belongs to none of them. It seems to have been invented exactly once, in one place. Play a few rounds and you'll see why collectors of unusual games treat it as a small treasure. Capture all twelve enemy pieces to win, and expect the first few losses to come from loops you never saw coming. Everyone's do.