Gravel

This abstract game is playable on a square-grid surface of any finite size. In their turn a player may place and remove a total of friendly and enemy pieces (respectively) that is equal to or less than “X”, an integer > 1 and agreed upon at the start of the game. The idea of “control” over a space relying only on occupation of its flanks and rear (which permits capture in it, no matter how strong it is) is inspired by games like Ki (Corey Clark, 2010) and Control (Takuro Kawasaki, 2024) though those games forbid placement in an enemy controlled space. Placements and removals in the game must be balanced, especially early on, and there is a crucial difference in placement between pieces that are already on the grid versus those that are coming from the pieces not yet placed. A player loses the game through attrition (losing more than half of their starting pieces). —description from the publisher