Hexapawn is a deterministic two-player game invented by Martin Gardner. It is played on a rectangular board of variable size, for example on 3×3 board or on a chessboard. On a board of size n×m, each player begins with m pawns, one for each square in the row closest to them. The goal of each player is to advance one of their pawns to the opposite end of the board or to prevent the other player from moving.

Hexapawn is an unfair game; if both players play well, the first player to move will always lose.

Rules

As in chess, each pawn may be moved in two different ways: it may be moved one square forward, or it may capture a pawn one square diagonally ahead of it. A pawn may not be moved forward if there is a pawn in the next square. Unlike chess, the first move of a pawn may not advance it by two spaces. A player loses if they have no legal moves or the other player reaches the end of the board with a pawn.

External links

• Hexapawn (http://www.chessvariants.org/small.dir/hexapawn.html) - an article by Robert Price.
• Hexapawn (http://www.plover.com/cgi-bin/mjd/hexapawn) - play hexapawn online against an artificially intelligent opponent