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Vying Games : Breakthrough

Breakthrough was invented in 2000 by Dan Troyka. Originally, it was played on a 7x7 board, but was changed to qualify for the 2001 8x8 Game Design Competition. It won the competition, and has been played on an 8x8 board ever since. It would likely be a compelling game on boards of many different sizes.

How to Play

Breakthrough features simple mechanics and an equally simple goal: To win the game, be the first to move one of your pawns all the way to the far side of the board.

The two players, Black and White, take control of the black and white pawns, respectively. Each player starts the game with two rows of pawns, for 16 total. Black moves first.

Your pawns, black or white, will always be lined up at the bottom of the board at the beginning of the game. Therefore, you'll always be moving to the towards the top of the board. If you review a game, the black pawns are always displayed at the top of the board, regardless of who the players are.

The pawns behave similarly to Chess pawns with a couple major differences.

On your turn, you may move any pawn directly forward one square, or forward one square diagonally. If an enemy pawn is on an adjacent diagonal, it will be captured in the course of a diagonal move. If an enemy pawn is directly forward one square it cannot be captured and will block you from moving onto its square. You can, however, move around such a pawn by stepping forward diagonally. Lastly, capturing is not required, though, obviously, helpful.

Strategy

Because of the expanded mobility of Breakthrough pawns, it should be clear that one pawn cannot, by itself, stop another pawn from moving past it. So, your pawns will need to cooperate to form walls to block advancing pawns. All the while, you'll need to weaken your opponent's defenses with carefully planned attacks. In many ways, Breakthrough is a game of teamwork. Your pawns must work together if they're to achieve their objectives. And, yet, it only takes one pawn to break through for the victory.

About the Bots

For now there are only two, easier bots. We'll add a third, more difficult bot in the future.

The easy bot, CapellaBot, tends to get too caught up in capturing, occasionally forgetting to move forward to the goal. This makes CapellaBot a very good to play while learning the rules.

VegaBot will exploit mistakes and force you to stop his pawns, but is not very good at blocking or making smart trade offs.