Through the desert

A few days ago, I happened to play a game called "Through the Desert", designed by Reiner Knizia. Certainly, you may wonder why I'm talking about this game on a Go blog: I'm talking about this concrete boardgame because it has some Go reminiscence within.

The purpose of the game is to surround as much territory (sounds familiar?) as possible with your camels but, on the meanwhile, you have to make long chains of them in the different colours because the one with the longest chains will recieve lots of points. Once you start to play it is very easy to realise the three different phases openning-middlegame-yose. Funnily enough, both of the us where Go players and ended up looking for sente moves: "Hey! I took that oasis in sente!!" and "Let's see how can I reduce your desert moyo..." came up from time to time.

I must say, though, that the similarities are limited to the area scoring system as there are many big differences. Let's say: camels can't die if surrounded, the longest chain of each colour gets 10 extra points, there are trees which give you 5 extra points... And, what scares me the most, the game is up to 5 players. The only time I've played there were only a couple of us and, at the end of the openning phase, we felt that the board was already full.

Just in case you want to know more about this game, you'll find more information HERE.