Surmount (2024)

Surmount is an attempt to improve on an already very good game, Mark Steere's Oust. Whereas in Oust much of the board is made illegal to play on, especially as the game progresses, every empty cell is a legal placement in Surmount. Anyone familiar with Oust will wonder how you can allow unchecked growth in a game where larger groups capture smaller ones. Surmount deals with this by allowing a player to easily grow from 1 cell to be equal to a large enemy group in one turn, surmounting it by replacing one of its stones. In general Surmount makes better use of space than Oust and can be played competitively at a much smaller size. Corey L. Clark designed surmount in the last few days of 2024. A game of Surmount cannot end in a draw.

Setup: Surmount is played on any hex hex boar of side length 4 or greater. 4 and 5 are the standard sizes. Each player has an unlimited number of stones in their color.

Gameplay: Starting with Black, turns alternate. Place a stone anywhere on the board it either is in an empty spot or replaces an enemy stone in a smaller group than the one being created, in which case you remove the entire enemy group. If your placement makes a group of your stones that is at least 2 large and contacts one or more enemy groups, you may make multiple additional moves to grow to be the exact size of any one of these groups, provided you do not make the group contact any additional groups or either color in this process. Finally once you have made a group equal to the size of any these enemy groups, you may replace any stone in the enemy group you grew to be equal to, removing the entirety of that group.

If you have no legal move on your turn, you must pass, passing is otherwise strictly forbidden.

Objective: The objective of Surmount is to be the last player with stones remaining on the board.

—description from the designer

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