Balance Pai Sho


Rules of Balance Pai Sho

 

This page is currently under construction. I'd be happy if someone could help me ^^

 

The philosophy of this variant is to have only a small set of rules, but to make the game complex and challenging. It shares some similarities to chess, mills and checkers, even though it differs in some fundamental points; in this variant you and your opponent share the same set of tiles which means that you have to work together to a certain extent, otherwise the game leads nowhere. The basic rules are taken from this page: http://paisho.blog.de/

 

The game's goal is to restore complete harmony or balance on the board. To do so, flower tiles are placed and moved around on the board to form single balances. A balances can be formed when two matching flower tiles are in the same area; there are 16 different areas, or gardens as they are called, on the board:

 

In each of these gardens one or more of the following balances can be formed:

 

a) Lotus with Rose,                              b) Orchid with Lily

 

Usually, a balance is only formed by exactly two flower tiles, however, there are certain exceptions:

1a) When a flower tile (here the Orchid) is placed on an intersecting square which belongs to two gardens, it can form one balance in each of these gardens. b) Similarly, if a tile is placed on an intersection which belongs to more then one garden, it can form one balance in each of the gardens it belongs to.

2) When a flower tile is placed on the Wheel of Life Tile, its ability to form balances are doubled. This means that it can usually balance two matching tiles in one garden, however, if a flower tile doubled by the Wheel Tile is placed on an intersecting square which belongs to more than one garden, it can form two balances in each of these gardens.

 

Before the game starts the complete set of tiles is placed in a bag. The set usually consists of eleven tiles:

1 Rose Tile

2 Lotus Tiles

3 Orchid Tiles

4 Lily Tiles

and 1 Wheel of Life Tile

In turns, each player now draws one tile from the bag until none remain.

 

First stage of the game: the player who owns the most tiles begins. In the first stage of the game, which is called "The Blossoming", each player in turns places one tile on the board. He can either place them on a free square or on a free intersection. Note that tiles which are placed on intersections cannot be moved later in the game! Furthermore: the Wheel of Life Tile cannot be placed on intersections!

 

Tips and Tricks: within this stage an inexperienced player could lose before even getting to the next stage, if almost every balance is already formed and his opponent manages to form the final one. So be careful, try to deduce what tiles your opponent has left and keep some tiles unbalanced!

 

Second stage of the game: now that every tile is placed on the board the players start moving tiles around to form balances. Again, tiles on intersections cannot be moved. Tiles on squares can only move horizontally or vertically, however you cannot move over any tiles which stand in the way. This means that tiles can also be blocked if they are surrounded. Furthermore, tiles which already form a balance cannot be moved, even if they would still form a balance after the move. However, if in one garden two similar tiles and one matching tile are placed, one of the similar tiles can be moved because this would not harm the balance.

For example:

In this scenario neither of the Lily tiles or the Orchid tiles could be moved because they exactly match each other. Yet one of the Lotus tiles in the top garden could be moved because there would still remain one Lotus tile to balance the Rose tile. However, once you move one of the Lotus tiles outside this garden, the remaining tiles are fixed and cannot be moved, unless a second Lotus tile is moved back in the top garden.