Tonga is played by two players, black and white, on a 9x9 board.
Pieces are dominoes of two kinds: half black-half white dominoes, and half black-half white diagonal dominoes (that is, a black square diagonally attached to a white square by a corner). All pieces belong to a common pool. (You may use black and white checker pieces to simulate our special domino set.)
Game Play
Each player in turn places a piece on any vacant place. Black plays first.
Example (best viewed in courier or another monospace font):
. . . . . .
. B . . . .
. W . W . .
. . . . B .
. . . . . .
Two pieces were placed in the above example.
As the game goes on, islands of each color will become apparent. A black island is a group of solidly connected black squares, each being orthogonally adjacent to at least one neighbor black square. White islands are similar groups of white squares.
Example:
. . . . . .
. . W B . .
. B W W B .
. . . W B .
B W W . . .
. . B . . .
White has a four-square isle and a two-square isle. Black has four one-square isles and one two-square isle.
Game End
The game stops when there is no room for a new piece.
At this moment, each player totals the squares of his three biggest isles. The winner is the one with the highest total.
If both totals are equal, players compare a fourth isle to break the tie, and so on until the draw is broken. (If all the isles are exhausted, the game is declared a draw.)
Tonga © 2004 Grupo de los Lunes. Grupo de los Lunes is a sporadic group of players dedicated to play and to create abstract games. Tonga was designed and tested by Ariel Arbiser, Pablo Coll, Alejandro Donnantuoni, Marcos Donnantuoni, Rodolfo Kurchan, Oscar Lagioia, Pablo Milrud, Enrique Pavese, Gustavo Piñeiro, Jaime Poniachik, Ivan Skvarca & Pablo Suarez.
