Oddball

This post was imported from Playing with Games, an old gaming blog that I co-wrote with Megan. The authorship and formatting might be mixed up. If you spot any issues, please let me know.

Oddball is a game that Parker and I created when we were visiting my mother on Gabriola Island, BC. It is inspired by the game Paletto.

Equipment:

A seven by seven square grid
Fourty-nine stones in seven different colours with seven stones of each colour

Goal: To collect all of one colour or a majority of the stones in four or more colours.

Setup: Distribute the stones over the grid randomly. Once the board is full, play begins.

Play: Players alternate taking turns. On your turn, you remove one or more similarly coloured stones from the boundary of the board subject to the following restrictions:

A stone can only be removed if two or more spaces orthogonally adjacent to it are empty.
You may not take a stone if removing it separates the board into multiple groups of orthogonally adjacent stones.

Note: a stone on the boundary of the board is defined to have an additional empty adjacent neighbour for each edge that it lies on. Note: you may not pass.

As you remove stones from the board, you keep the stones for scoring at the end of the game. If, on your turn, you obtain all seven pieces of a single colour, you win. If no one wins by capturing all the stones of a particular colour, play proceeds until the board is empty. At this time scores are tallied. You score a point for a colour if you have captured the majority of the stones in that colour. The player with the highest score wins.

Note: Oddball can be played on any square grid with odd side length.

Published: Aug 15, 2012 @ 00:00.
Last Modified: May 8, 2026 @ 19:26.

Oddball

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