DVONN

DVONN

Close-up board and game pieces
Designer(s)	Kris Burm
Publisher(s)	Rio Grande Games Don & Co. SmartGames
Genre(s)	Board game Abstract strategy game
Players	2
Age range	8 and up
Setup time	Negligible
Playing time	30 minutes
Random chance	None
Skill(s) required	Strategy, tactics

DVONN is a two-player strategy board game in which the objective is to accumulate pieces in stacks. It was released in 2001 by Kris Burm as the fourth game of the GIPF Project. DVONN won the 2002 International Gamers Award and the Games magazine Game of the Year Award in 2003.

DVONN is played on a board with 49 spaces. The board has a hexagonal layout 5 hexes wide. One player has 23 black pieces to play, the other player has 23 white pieces. There are also 3 neutral red pieces, called DVONN pieces.

The object of the game is to control more pieces than your opponent at the end of the game.

The game starts with an empty board, and proceeds in two phases. During the first phase the players place their pieces on the board, starting with the three red DVONN pieces. Pieces can be placed on any unoccupied space. White starts, and the players alternate. So Black is the first to place a piece of his own color. The first phase ends when all pieces are placed on the board, filling it completely.

The second phase involves the building of stacks of pieces (a single piece is also considered a stack) by moving stacks onto other stacks. A stack is controlled by a player if his color is on top. A stack is immobile if it is surrounded by 6 neighboring stacks. The white player has the first move in this phase. Any mobile stack of height n (with n > 0) can be moved (in a straight line) in any one of the 6 directions by exactly n spaces by the player controlling it, if it lands on another stack. Jumping over empty spaces is allowed, as long as the tower does not land on an empty space. Single DVONN pieces can not be moved, but they can be once they are part of a stack. After each move all stacks which are not connected via a chain of neighboring stacks to any stack containing a DVONN piece are removed from the board.

A player who has no legal move must pass, and a player may only pass when no legal move is available. The game ends when both players have no legal moves. All stacks controlled by one player are collected into one tower. The winner is the player with the higher tower. The game ends in a draw in case both players own an equal number of stones in their tower. The maximum possible number of moves in the game is 97 (49 for placement and 48 in play, passes are not counted). In competition each player typically gets 15 minutes for the entire game in real-life tournaments, or 10 minutes for online tournaments.