Linos: The Game of Twelve Stones

James Ernest has challenged himself to make a game with minimal rules and pieces, with enough depth that it could still be an enduring (yet mysterious) pastime from a bygone era. The Conscript will be an epistolary novel, set in the Dew Point universe (After the Fog, Shipwrights of Marino). James has barely even started that book, but we thought we might hurry him along by posting some of his preliminary chapters here. Linos is one of the background mysteries of that novel, having once been a game so popular that no one bothered to document the rules. The title character, naval officer Galiard Gaspar Ewen, travels the world on many adventures, amassing a collection of game variations that lends just enough insight to take a wild guess at the mechanics of the original game. The Pieces: Linos uses a set of twelve rectangular pieces: six dark and six light. Each piece has the proportions 1 x 1 x 2. Players take turns drawing stones from the supply, and adding them to the stack. Each move scores points. Because there are advantages and disadvantages to going first, a complete match is two games, each player starting once, playing for the highest total score. —description from the publisher