Rules for "Guerilla", abstract strategy game

[Mark Bassett]

Colin Mahoney wrote:
>
> My brother has the above game, from the UK around the end of the late
> 70s. It consists of a roughly hexagonal playing area, marked out in
> triangles, on which counters are placed on the vertices. Each "group"
> of counters could contain up to five, and movement was by hopping over
> adjacent counters, combat by proximity and outnumbering you opponent.
>
> Unfortuantely that's all we can remember, and the rules, as usual,
> have got lost. Does anyone know the game, and, if so, could someone
> post the rules - which were pretty short (assuming I remember
> correctly)
>
> Thanks in advance.

I think Guerilla is an excellent game, sort of an inside-out Go.
(By which I mean that it's about occupying territory rather than
surrounding it, and that groups are mobile entities not static ones.)
Not that I can claim to ever have been any good at it, but I do
have a copy of the rules - here's how it goes:

Guerilla is a combat between groups of pieces, where each group can
have from 1 to 5 pieces in it. In their turn each player

a) Grows each group of less than five pieces, by adding a new
piece on an adjacent vertex.

b) Starts a new group by placing a piece on an empty vertex.

c) Moves any groups that they want to move (see below for details)

d) Attacks any enemy pieces (also see below)

Note on growing: the new pieces added to the board must not be
adjacent to enemy ones, or to friendly pieces from another group.

How to move: a group moves by using as many single-piece "jumps"
as there are pieces in the group. A jump consists of moving a piece
over another piece of the same group to the intersection on the far
side. You may not jump to an intersection adjacent to another
friendly group.
The jumps can be divided among the members of the group anyway you
like, so a piece may jump more than once or not at all. If the group
ends up split as a result of moving, the smaller part "dies off" and
is removed from the board. (Owner's discretion in the event of a tie.)
You do not have to user a group's full quota of jumps if you don't
want to.
You have to finish moving an entire group before moving another one -
you can't partly move one group, move another, then come back to
moving the first group again.

How to attack: The "strength" of a piece is the number of adjacent
pieces in its own group. After all of one side's moves have been made,
any piece which is stronger than an adjacent enemy piece kills that
enemy piece, which is removed from the board. Each piece may only
kill once per turn. Killing is not optional, but you make your kills
in any order you wish. Pieces do not have to move in order to kill.

If the size of the groups involved in a particular kill differs by
more than one, the kill becomes a massacre (or "overkill"). Place
a red counter on the intersection that was occupied by the killed
piece. The point occupied by the counter can not be used for the
rest of the game.

(N.B. To reiterate an important point: the strength of a piece
is the number of pieces it is _adjacent to_ in its group, but
whether its kills become massacres depends on the size of the
_whole_ group.)

The game ends when both players agree to do so, then the score is
calculated as follows:
Each player counts one point for every intersection they occupy,
and one point for every empty intersection adjacent to one of their
pieces but not adjacent to an enemy piece.(Red counters do _not_ count
as empty intersections.)
The player with the higher score wins!

That's the gist of it, the full rulebook runs to 16 A5 pages but
that includes plenty of illustrations. If you want to e-mail me
your address, I can post you a photocopy.

Regards,

Mark Bassett