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Usually considered the best of the Project, YINSH is probably the most eye-catching because it seems the least understandable.
I'm usually not that subject to marketing. I mean, I realize that everyone thinks that they're not swayed by obvious messages and that marketing and sales techniques only work on other people. I just tend to tune them out, most of the time. My ex-wife used to get annoyed with me when we were watching broadcast TV and she'd chuckle at something and say: "That was a funny commercial." I'd be like: "Whut?" because i'd be looking at the TV but completely oblivious to anything that wasn't what we were supposed to be watching. But those techniques do work and, these days, most of them are associated with visuals. It's those visuals that first sold YINSH to me. I saw that combination of rings and discs on the cover of the box in my local game store and immediately questioned how that could be a game. My next thought was: "I might want to play that game, whatever it is." It simply looked so elegant and so intriguing even if I couldn't tell what the rules were or how it was supposed to function. Did the rings capture the discs? Or vice-versa? Did they rebound off each other like a pinball machine's bumpers? It looked like something that would be played on an episode of Star Trek which doubtlesly had come over to the Federation stuffed in the top of a crate full of Romulan ale to keep the bottles from breaking.
It starts with yet another wireframe board, but this time as an octadecagon (18 sides), although 12 of said sides are only one "space" apart. Each player (black and white, as always (until we get to LYNGK!)) has 5 rings. There's a little bit of DVONN here, in that the setup phase involves placing all of your rings in positions on the board, but this setup contributes less to the overall strategy than the previous Project entry. The reason is that there's almost no limit on how you can move your rings until you begin moving them by placing markers. There are 51 markers, black on one side and white on the other. When you make a move, you place a marker of your color inside the ring you're going to move and then move it to another place on the board in a straight line. If you don't move over any markers, you can stop anywhere on that line that you like. But if you do move over any markers, you must switch them to the opposite color that they currently hold (black becomes white, white becomes black) and then stop at the first open space you come to. If you form a row of 5 or more of the same color, those markers are removed along with the ring that created that row. The first player to remove three rings wins the game.
Right away, some people are going to look at those markers and think of other games like Othello, itself a variation on Go. But those visual cues are pretty much where that comparison stops because YINSH is a much more active game than either of them. You never change the color of pieces in Go, although it is possible to lay traps. But you also only have the markers in Othello, whereas the rings in YINSH provide a whole other dimension. That dimension, of course, can be seen as similar to GIPF, since in that game you're also often creating advantage for your opponent while you're trying to create a greater one for yourself. And, similarly, in the course of making a move that gets you closer to victory, you're also gimping your own possibilities by removing one of your rings, just like taking pieces off the board in GIPF. But where you're merely surrending positional advantage in the latter game, here you're removing one of the tools by which you win. That, again, draws comparison with ZÉRTZ and DVONN, in that establishing a greater position often involves limiting your own abilities. It's a fine exercise in gaming restraint, of sorts. But there's an air of mysticism about this game that somehow seems absent from the others we've looked at.
Perhaps it's the change in mass or structure of the pieces? In all of the other games of the Project, our pieces are solid. They're something you can snap in place, like a stone on a Go board. A declaration of intent. But the rings are different. They lack that seeming weight because they're mostly air, like snow. The ring floats above the solid markers and changes their identity, eventually at the cost of its own existence. But, then, how spectral can it be when it looks like it's carved out of marble? There could be multiple metaphors there; about persuasion, self-sacrifice, unity in principle. It can be as spiritual as you'd like to get about an abstract game. Or it could just be a cool use of plastic and cardboard that entertains people for 30 minutes. Or both. But that's the visual fascination that is almost unique to this entry in the Project. There's an elegance to it that belies what was probably Kris Burm's mathematical process in determining how it was shaped. That's not, of course, to suggest that numbers can't be elegant because, of course, they can. But that, too, is in the eye of the beholder. That was, I think, part of his reasoning in keeping the Project (until LYNGK!) mostly black-and-white. Not only do those colors bespeak those similarly elegant classics like Go and Chess, but they also provide a stark contrast that shows the game's progress. Whereas the progress of many games is unintelligible at first glance, most of the Project can be assessed fairly quickly just by looking at the board, as long as you know what to look for.
But YINSH is slightly different in that respect, too, since the board's basic makeup constantly changes with the move of every ring and in a larger fashion than most of them. I think that may be why while most of the other games have brightly-colored boards and boxes (until LYNGK!), YINSH's remained a light gray. Was it because the visual complexity that makes it so attractive might have been rendered too complicated with color? There have been many comics over the years that functioned best as black-and-white, because colorization often not only washes out fine line work, but also distracts the eye. Was light gray the best way to emphasize the fine lines of YINSH's ephemeral rings? And there is still a splash of color present in the blue that edges all of the markers. A contrast for emphasis or something else to catch that eye that might not be intrigued by the stark difference of the pieces? I've always found a level of intrigue about this entry that is a step above the others and I'm never quite certain as to why. But, clearly, I'm not alone in that respect, as popular opinion around the Interwebs is that YINSH is the best of the lot. Could that be a gestalt based on the way that whole rows of markers change from the sum of all colors to the absence of any and back again?
Next time, we're on to another of my favorites in what might be, in contrast, the least visually approachable to anyone that doesn't like crosswords, PÜNCT.
