Rules

Content

• 60 hexagonal wooden tiles (ice floes)
   
• 60 stickers with 1, 2 or 3 fishes (10x3, 20x2, 30x1)
   
• 13 penguins in four different colours (4, 4, 3, 2)
   

What Pingvinas is about

The penguins are jumping from ice floe to ice floe hunting fish. Doing so they try to block the way of their opponents to secure the best fishing grounds for themselves. Who caught the most fishes at the end of the game wins.

Before the first game

Before the first game put the stickers onto the ice floes.

Preparation

At first the 60 ice floes are placed on the table in form of a honeycomb. Take care that there always is a finger's breadth free space between each of the ice floes.

The best way doing this is to start with a straight line of 7 or 8 ice floes and then add the lines above and below. The exact form of the developing playing field is not that important, but the floes with 1, 2 and 3 fishes should be spread about evenly.

Each player takes penguins of one colour
(depending on the number of players):

With 2 players 4 penguins each.
With 3 players 3 penguins each.
With 4 players 2 penguins each.

Course of the game

One after the other each player places one of his penguins onto a vacant ice floe with exactly one fish. If all penguins are standing on ice floes the hunt begins. Now a player's move is moving an own penguin and taking the ice floe that it stood on at the start of it's movement.

A penguin moves as far as it wants over vacant ice floes. It may freely chose the direction but cannot change that during it's move. Ice floes with a penguin on it (no matter if one of yours or one of your opponents) and empty spaces (ice floes taken away) must neither be stepped on nor crossed.

At the end of his turn the player takes the ice floe where the penguin stood at the start of it's movement.

Ice floes that can't be reached no more by any penguin are taken out of play.

End of the game

Who can't move any of his penguins no more takes all his penguins and the ice floes they are standing on. The other players go on until they, too, can't move no more. (If only one player can move, he may go on moving as long as possible).

Thereafter the players count the fish they collected. The player with most fishes is the winner.

The development of Pingvinas

Alvydas Jakeliunas was born in 1961 in Lithuania, studied physics there and works as an independent designer in the moment. The idea for Pingvinas came him by thinking about artifical intelligence.

Pingvinas isn't his first game; since his childhood he changed the rules of existing games and tried to develop his own. Alva, one of his earlier works is published on his webside www.geocities.com/alvaworld.

Over the internet he got in contact with Günter Cornett, associate of the Bambus Spieleverlag. At the beginning of the year 2003 Alvydas presented him an abstract two player game that already contained the basic idea of Pingvinas. Günter denied to publish this game at the Bambus Spieleverlag but made some proposals for improvement. An active email exchange developed that finally led to an excellent quick tactical game.

Pingvinas (lithuanien for penguin) is the first game by Alvydas Jakeliunas that is published in Germany.