Alquerque
Huffing (historic)
The medieval penalty instead of compulsory capture. Historic, and unrated.
What is different here
If you already play {other}, these are the rules you have to unlearn.
- Capture is not compulsory. You may make a quiet move while a capture is available.
- If you do, your opponent may huff: remove the piece that failed to capture, before making their own move. The huff does not use up their turn.
- Unrated, because it is played for historical interest rather than as a competitive code.
Bell/Murray reconstruction of the Libro de los juegos (1283) game. Capture is not mandatory; a piece that failed to capture may be huffed (removed) by the opponent before their move.
Shared by every {game} code
The board
Twenty-five points in a five-by-five grid. Lines join every point to its orthogonal neighbours, and diagonals run through every second point, so the corners, the centre and the midpoints of the edges have eight neighbours while the rest have four.
Each player has twelve pieces. They fill the two rows nearest them plus the two points of the middle row on their right, leaving only the centre empty.
Moving and capturing
A piece moves one step along a line to an adjacent empty point. In the standard game it may move forwards or sideways but not backwards.
It captures by jumping an adjacent enemy piece and landing on the empty point directly beyond, along the same line. A jump that lands where another jump is available continues with the same piece, in any direction the lines allow.
Capture is compulsory in the standard, backward-moves and promotion variants. As in draughts, a piece may not be jumped twice in one sequence.
Winning
You win by capturing all your opponent's pieces, or by leaving them unable to move. Threefold repetition and fifty moves without a capture are draws.
Because pieces cannot move backwards in the standard game, positions lock up quickly and being blocked is a real danger throughout, not just at the end.
Notation
Points are named like chess squares, a1 to e5. A move is written from-to, and a capture uses x, chaining through every point the piece lands on: b2xd4xd2. A huff, in the historic variant, is written as huff followed by the point.