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The most detached of the GIPF series, ZÈRTZ hearkens back to some basic gaming concepts and might be reaching deeper than anyone realizes.
When I was a kid in the 1970s, there were a couple parents in the neighborhood that used to try to encourage us to play with marbles. I never really got the point of it. Draw a circle in the dirt and "shoot" marbles at each other to knock them out? How long can you do that before you get bored? Nevertheless, I had a bag of them and really didn't have a concept of how to play the game and neither did any of my friends. So, it seems kind of incongruous that one of my favorite of the GIPF Project games is ZÈRTZ, which has a bag full of marbles. Except that unlike the glass drippings of my youth, these spheres actually look like marble, the stone. The difference, too, in gameplay is that ZÈRTZ can be one of the quickest-playing of the Project, so that even if you thought you were going to get bored, you probably wouldn't have time to do so.
There are a number of things that set the second game in the series apart from the others, the most notable being that there is no "board", per se. Your board is a collection of 37 rings that diminish through the course of the game as a direct result of the moves of the two players. The basic game is played like this: You set up your 37 rings in a hexagonal pattern. Then, each player has two options in making a move: 1. You take one of the marbles (6 white, 8 gray, 10 black) and place it anywhere on the "board." Then, you remove one of the rings as long as you can move it without disturbing any of the other rings (i.e. from an edge.) 2. You jump one marble with another to capture the marble that was jumped. If such a move is possible, you MUST take it. Like checkers, if capturing one marble puts you in a position to capture another, you can continue until there are no more moves to make. If you isolate rings that contain marbles from the larger board (by removing rings with the second part of your move option #1), you can capture those, as well. If you ever have captured 4 white, 5 gray, or six black or 3 of each color, you win the game.
As you might expect, the lack of a board makes ZÈRTZ a bit more detached than the other Project games, since there aren't really positions to establish unless you can force your opponent into a jump, which they're required to take. Of course, when you do that, it also means that they're collecting one part of the groups that they need in order to win the game, so there's a fair amount of sacrifice involved, as well, even if it doesn't involve directly sacrificing "your" pieces. You can also place marbles anywhere on the board and then pull a ring from anywhere on the edge of the board, so it does cross into those Go concepts, where you can play a piece in any space on the board, even if it's not where the "action" currently is between you and your opponent competing over a specific area. What adds to the complexity is that each player can be playing an entirely different game from the other, in that not only can one be competing for board position while the other is interested in captures, but those captures can be entirely different things. Since you can win with more than one color, it is possible that switching strategies, midstream, is a thing that can both be done and not immediately seen by one's opponent, not least because it's a totally open choice as to which color you place on the board. But it's all pretty abstract for both players, which may explain why this is one of the less popular picks of the series and/or one that takes a lot of plays to "git gud" at, whereas others have more obvious starting points.
In that respect, the Go comparisons again become obvious. Unlike chess, where every game begins with the same starting positions, Go can develop solely at the whims of the players and ZÈRTZ is the same way. The choice of which marbles to play, where to play them, and which rings to remove are wide open from the beginning. Only later do you run into situations where you're essentially forced to make a play (a capture) or find that your choice of rings is becoming more restricted than the opening requirement, which is simply to remove one that doesn't disturb other rings in the process. As with GIPF, the game goes up a level when you move from the "basic" game (37 rings) to the standard game (49) but not in the same manner. Where GIPF added a victory/loss condition, ZÈRTZ just adds more depth to what it was already doing. The reason it's one of my favorites of the series is probably because, first, I'm a Go fan, so finding an approximation of it in a different manner is interesting to me. But it's so freewheeling that it could almost be called an abstract "sandbox" game, in which both players can attempt to make the game what they want it to be which, in the broad sense, might have been Kris Burm's intent with the entire series, since you conceivably can mesh concepts of each game and create a polyglot transformation of all of them into something wholly different. In that respect, this one stands apart (isolation!) from most of the others in terms of physical constraints but I think the vision is still there.
Next time, we're on to the first of the "disc" games and one that many consider to be top-of-class, DVONN.
