Bailiwick

A surveyor’s map of seven wards around a keep, each worth three, four or five at the reckoning — dealt onto the ring by the seed, so every feoff has its own geography. Place one cube a turn in any ward; when both stores stand empty, every ward scores its worth to its strict majority, a ward that comes out LEVEL answers to whoever raised the first cube in it, and two adjacent held wards chain for one extra each. The writ — once a game, in place of a placement — strikes one enemy cube out of any ward, and a writ that takes the last cube out forgets who came first.

How it feels

• A map that changes every feoff
• Walking into a ward first and daring them to pay double
• Spending the writ on the ward that mattered

What the design is for

• 01

  A level ward answers to whoever came first

  A ward goes to its strict majority; a ward that comes out LEVEL goes to the steward who raised the first cube in it; a ward nobody entered scores nobody. So matching a rival cube for cube buys nothing — to take a ward they opened, you have to spend MORE on it than they did, and spending more somewhere is spending less everywhere else.

• 02

  The rule that unsolved this game

  That tie rule is a repair, and the repair is the interesting part. A tied ward used to score nobody, and the second steward had a strategy that never lost: copy the first. Same ward, same writ, every ward level, nobody holding anything — and a level reckoning went by rule against whoever spoke first. Measured, the copy took 100 feoffs of 100 against every rung of the ladder. It now takes 0 of 200 against every rung, and the probe re-runs it every time it runs.

• 03

  The chain

  Two ADJACENT held wards — around the ring, the Churchyard touching the Mill — pay one extra EACH, so a held pair is worth two points between them on top of both worths, and three in a row are worth four. A ward beside a ward you hold is worth more than its printed worth, so the map reads as routes, not islands.

• 04

  The writ

  Once a game, in place of a placement: strike ONE enemy cube from any ward. A whole turn for one cube — and now that being first matters, a writ that takes the LAST cube out of a ward erases the arrival too, which is the only way an opened ward is ever open again. The reading rungs spend it in 184 of 200 feoffs; the rung below them cannot see what the turn would have bought and holds it.

• 05

  A map dealt, not drawn

  The worths — three, three, four, four, five, five, five — are dealt onto the ring by the seed, and so is the ward the keep’s GATE opens onto. The first draft pinned them, and two-thirds of some pairings drew: mirror maps breed mirror stewards.

• 06

  The chair, and the gate

  A board that can always answer favours the answerer: measured between two stewards who think exactly alike, the second seat took better than three feoffs in four. So the speaker is paid two points for speaking first — a whole extra CUBE overcorrected to every feoff of two hundred, which is why the compensation is priced in points. Level on points, then on wards, the feoff goes to whoever holds the gate; level with a gate nobody ever entered, it stands divided.