Hierarchy - Strategy Board Game

Introduction

Hierarchy is a strategy board game for two players. In original form it is played in a board of 9x9 squares. The game rules are compact and easy to learn. Playing is however challenging: in a typical position branching factor is even larger than in chess.

The designer of the game is Jyrki Parkkinen, Finnish master of chess. The game was originally invented as early as in 1993, but first published version was done in spring 2003 as a programming assignment of the course Introduction to Knowledge Engineering in Helsinki University of Technology by Sami Virpioja and Ilari Lähteenmäki.

Most traditional strategy board games are games for two players, where the goal is to capture opponent's pieces from the board. In typical games, capturing is done in one of the three ways:

1. By taking place of the opponent's piece (e.g. Chess)
2. By hopping over opponent's piece (e.g. Halma, Chinese Checkers)
3. By surrounding the opponent's pieces (e.g. Go or Wei Qi)

In Hierarchy, a new two-phased capturing method is introduced. In first move the opponent's piece is marked for capturing, and if opponent is unable to stop capturing in his/her next turn, the piece is removed on the second move.

In traditional games such as chess, the strenght of the pieces is typically constant for each piece. Hierarchy has variation also in this: The real strenght of a piece depends not only on its location, but also on the all units surrounding it.

Rules

• In English
• Suomeksi

Implementations

So far there is only one computer implementation of the game. It is written in programming language Scheme and requires PLT DrScheme interpreter and library packages.

• Hierarkia - Scheme Implementation

The game idea may be freely used in any project. However, if you create or publish something related to the game, please contact Jyrki Parkkinen (e-mail: jyjp(at)cc.hut.fi). We are interested in any work, comments or ideas!