Four ancient games you need to see

So there's this beautiful little game collection called Ludos - a box with 4 traditional 2-player games from the Americas is currently up on Kickstarter, and I’d like to shed some more light on them today 😊.

First up is 🌽 Puluc from Guatemala - actually dating all the way back to the Mayan civilization! Puluc reminds me of the classic game Ludo. You roll values (although using double sided corn kernels instead of dice) to determine how much you can move. This adds a dash of randomness shifting a bit of the strategy to luck, but you do decide which of your soldiers you move. Basically you are trying to land on rival pieces, then walk forward with them to your opponent’s starting space to sacrifice them. Of course they can get captured in turn and start marching towards you - which you could capture again with a new soldier, making the stack bigger and bigger. Puluc also reminds me of Yut, a traditional Korean horse racing game which we saw in Ludos: Asia. Korea is pretty far from Central America, so it's interesting to see such similar mechanics evolve in different regions of the world.

That also goes for the classic mechanic, ‘jumping over pieces to capture them’. The remaining 3 games - Komikan, Awithlaknannai and Konane - interestingly all use this same mechanism. I find it fascinating how different cultures came to entertain themselves with similar mechanisms, yet they all had their own twists.

From this batch 🦙 Komikan is interesting because it is asymmetrical, one player controlling just a puma while the other tries to move a whole herd of alpacas into the safety of a cave. Oh and the puma can capture the alpacas but it doesn't work the other way around!

Still, I'd probably highlight 🌸 Konane as the best one, where you are both using your flowers to capture rival flowers. As the game starts you barely have any valid moves, but with the first few captures the game opens up. You can chain together captures if the pieces line up in the correct way, and you really have to watch for these opportunities (and not let your opponent do it.) Whoever makes the final valid move wins the game!

If you like abstracts, check out the Kickstarter campaign! ☺️