Description

Seesaw is a Draughts-inspired elimination game, played on a hexhex board of size 4 or 5. Each player needs, in their own color, a large number of stackable tokens and tiles.

Rules

Overview:
In Seesaw the players command opposing armies of soldiers that can promote. Your army starts out as a single soldier in the bottom corner. This soldier stands on a tile of your color. This tile is your initial promotion area, and it will evolve as you deploy more soldiers. Every time a soldier promotes it grows - first into a 2-stack, then a 3-stack, and so on.

The central idea of Seesaw is the 2-fold significance of stack-size:
(i) Odd-sized stacks move forwards and even-sized stacks move backwards, and
(ii) on any given turn, a stack can take as many steps as it likes from 1 up to its size.

This results in soldiers seesawing up and down the board as their strength increases to the point where the game is forced to conclude in one side completely eliminating the other.

How to play:
On your turn, you must either move a stack, or place a new stack.

1. Placing a new stack:
A newly placed stack will always be of size 1. You may only place a stack on an empty cell next to a cell with a tile of your color. These cells are promotion cells, and each time you place a new stack you first place a tile of your color on that cell. A cell with a tile on it is not considered empty, but tiles never count toward stacks-size.

2. Moving a stack:
You only ever move one stack per turn, but that stack may be able to move several steps or capture several enemy stacks, depending on its size.
The number of steps a stack may take is the number of pieces in it, i.e. its size. A stack may never step onto a cell containing a stack of its color.

2.1 Noncapturing moves: On turns where you do not have to capture an enemy (see below) all the steps a stack takes is either constrained to the 3 upward directions ("forwards") or to the 3 downward directions ("backwards"), depending on the parity of the size of the stack. Up and down have their standard meanings for games where players sit on opposite sides of a board, like in Draughts and Chess.

2.2 Capturing moves: If one or more of your stacks can reach an enemy by lifting the restraint on direction, you must capture such a reachable enemy by replacement. If that stack did not spend all its steps reaching the captured enemy, you can, before you end your turn, spend the left-over steps by making a noncapturing move. However, if yet an enemy is in range immediately after you have captured (counting only the steps left over), you must capture again.

3. Promoting: Your odd-sized stacks promote when they end up on a promotion cell belonging to your opponent at the end of your turn. Your even-sized stacks promote when they end up on a promotion cell belonging to you at the end of your turn. When a stack promotes, you add 1 piece to it.

The object of Seesaw is to capture all your opponent's soldiers. More precisely: If, at the end of your turn, your opponent has no stacks on the board, you have won the game.