Crosswind (2024)

Crosswind is a connection game for two players: Black and White. It is played on the intersections (points) of an initially empty square grid (board). The top and bottom edges of the board are colored black; the left and right edges are colored white. Black plays first, then turns alternate. On your turn, place a stone of your color on an empty point without forming any of these patterns: Naked diagonal: a pair of diagonally adjacent stones of the same color with no other like-colored stone adjacent to both. Knight bend: a 2×3 pattern with three empty points, two like-colored stones in opposite corners and a stone of the opposite color in another corner. Long switch: a 2×4 pattern with four empty points, two black stones in opposite corners and two white stones in opposite corners. Loose crosscut: a 3×3 pattern with five empty points, two black stones in opposite corners and two white stones in opposite corners. You win if there is a chain of orthogonally interconnected stones of your color touching the two opposite board edges of your color. To make the game fair, White will have the option, on their first turn only, to swap sides with Black instead of making a regular move. NotesCrosswind seems to have these two nice properties: impossibility of deadlocks and guaranteed availability of a legal placement on every turn. There are at least three cold patterns, which are formed by surrounding 2×2, 3×3 and 4×4 empty areas with stones so that only black stones touch the area vertically and only white stones touch the area horizontally, or vice versa. The pattern that continues the sequence is not cold. Since there is no passing, Black will be forced to play first in a cold pattern if and only if the parity of the board size is the same as the parity of the number of empty points in cold patterns. In other words, Crosswind is a White win on 2×2, 3×3 and 4×4 boards, but a Black win on a 5×5 board. Crosswind is a single-placement-only orthogonal connection game with no naked diagonals. The other games in this tiny class are Luis Bolaños' Linkaway and Mark Steere's Nakedfield. —description from the designer