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SKU:40003980
TZAAR is the seventh game released in the GIPF series. It's is a game for 2 players about making choices. Both players have 30 pieces divided into three types. The aim is either to make the opponent run out of one of the three types of pieces or to put them in a position in which they cannot capture anymore. In the initial phase of the game, the players put the pieces on the board one at a time in any order. After this, the players take turns emptying the board. On their turns, the players must make 2 moves: first capturing an opponent's piece, and then either capturing another piece or strengthening their own pieces by stacking them. If you stack your own pieces too often, you will probably leave your opponent with too many pieces on the board. On the other hand, if you capture too often, you may end up with pieces that are not strong enough at the end of the game. What to do? It is up to you to decide!
Easy to learn
Games Magazine's 2009 Game of the Year
Fun strategy game with interesting decisions on every turn
For 2 Players. 30-60 minute playing time. Ages 14+
While this is not the first in the justifiably famous GIPF Project series by the brilliant abstract board game designer Kris Burm, it was nevertheless where I started. If, like me, you prefer the artful purity and unsullied intensity of purely abstract, un-themed games, this is a great place to start. (Note to the unconverted: pure abstracts are the highest order board gaming can ascend to, achieving the level of fine art in ways that themed games (especially RPGs) can not approach. Although themed games are at the moment far more “marketable” in the estimation of most game publishers, because they involve so many disparate neurological modalities - language/narrative, geometric/mathematical, social/relational, etc. - they tend to have a comic book appearance when compared to the high art of the abstracts. If you don’t believe me, and are philosophically inclined, read a bit of Kant’s third critique on aesthetic judgment, and there you will find a very cogent argument for what I am talking about ... “purposeiveness without purpose,” “abstraction without being conceptual.” While I don’t disparage the pleasures of playing themed games or RPGs, I am suggesting that this is of an entirely higher order. But I digress....)This game has extremely crisp mechanics, easily learned but hard to master, lending it to endless re-playing enjoyment. It also has an aspect common to all of the GIPF Project’s seven games: an extended nearly structureless opening phase, which can last for quite some time, as actionable patterns onto which tactics and strategies may deploy themselves slowly emerge. I take great pleasure in this quality of all the GIPF games. It introduces a nearly meditative sort of watchfulness which gives me the rare opportunity to observe how my brain moves through sequences of pattern recognition, a process I could actually call, at its deeper manifestations, “enlightening.”So what about chess, then, the supposed king of the abstract games? Well, first of all, it’s not exactly theme-free, with its courtly metaphors for the pieces’ names (and even their respective movements). Also, while technically abstract, chess has so many different movements and rules and move permutations that its higher, synthetic elegance is reserved primarily for those on the master player level (from which, sadly, I am leagues away... ?). Moreover, the density of the chess pieces’ movements’ interwoveness can give rise in some people to a peculiarly obsessive discomfort the German novelist Stefan Zweig describes and calls “chess sickness” in his 1941 novella “Chess.” The more stripped down minimalism of the GIPF project mechanics somehow sidestep this oddity. And there is another difference not at first readily apparent: chess with its classically Cartesian rectilinear grid ( ranks and files in checker pattern) is very familiar to us, as we generally employ some form of Cartesian orientation in our day to day perambulation of our daily lives. This and all the GIPF games employ the hexagonal grid (growing in popularity in many other gaming formats at the moment). The 30 degree rotational segments this creates are just disorienting enough to bump the experience a bit above the familiar, introducing both surprises and aesthetic delights rarely found in Descartes’ Flatland.My recommendation? Buy them all, recommend them to your local game sellers and spread the message: pure abstracts are awesome, truly an art form for the 21st Century!
