Emergo Tutor
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Emergo derives from the Latin 'Luctor et Emergo', the motto of he Dutch province of Zeeland, and meaning 'I wrestle and emerge'. You'll find this name to be very appropriate. Emergo originates in the game Lasca, invented by the legendary world champion Chess Emanuel Lasker. Lasker made a classic mistake: he left a great idea where he found it, which was: in the game of Checkers. Thus he hooked it up to three interrelated principles of this game: an initial position, a forward orientation and promotion. None of these are needed to implement the essence of his idea, and applying them makes Lasca an overcomplicated game. Lasca is played on a square board, and so was the first implementation of Emergo, which is played on the dark squares of a 9x9 checkered board with dark corners. The game was a joint effort by Ed van Zon, who got me interested in Lasca's way of capture in the first place, and me. When I made the usual 'hexagonal translation', using exactly the same rules, I found the game incomparably more dramatic, and so did everybody at the games club 'Fanatic' at Twente University in Enschede, the Netherlands. Few cared for the square version after its introduction. Emergo became a hexagonal game overnight. It has been played on a regular basis for many years at Fanatic, before the dungeon people came and took over.
Never in its 'over the board' history had there been any indication of a first move advantage. This changed when we started playing e-mail games. The reason was the game's entering procedure, the stage in which the men were entered one by one. The first player to move after the entering stage had the opportunity to unconditionally start a feeder, a combination that forces a weak piece of the opponent to capture numerous men, only to see them liberated as one huge piece against which the victim's scattered weak forces stand no chance. This was also the case in 'over the board' play, but there such combinations seldom reached the painstaking finesse made possible in e-mail games. One cannot look that deep into Emergo's combinatorial whirlpools with their long sequences of forced moves, without losing track. But one can, given an hour or so of carefully trying out the most promising lines, find a straight knock out with a plydepth of twenty or more. Given this and the fact that white could relatively easy defend his option to move first after the entering stage, I decided to revert to an initial position after all, eliminating the entering stage altogether. White is now free from the onset to start a feeder, but the initial position has till now revealed no means to turn this into an immediate advantage. Thus the game's feel of a combinatorial ride in a rollercoaster has been preserved, but the entrance has been narrowed to a specific position from which eventually opening theory may emerge.
The previous rules can still be found in a selfdisplaying Macintosh document that can be downloaded from our download area.
EMERGO © Christian Freeling.
JAVA Applet by Ed van Zon.
