About Emergo

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About Emergo

We I did not invent Emergo, we discovered it. It is for elimination games what Go is for territory games. Go players emphasize the self-explanatory character of the concept as one of the pillars of its greatness. Emergo players will eventually do the same. Emergo is not a Draughts variant and trying to see it as one will hamper one's understanding.
Emergo is the quintessential implementation of a mechanism of movement and capture called 'column checkers'. The name derives from the Latin 'Luctor et Emergo', the motto of the Dutch province of Zeeland, and meaning 'I wrestle and emerge'. You'll find this name to be very appropriate. Its origine is a really bad game called Bashne, invented some two centuries ago in Russia. The great Emanuel Lasker improved on it with his game Lasca. But Lasker made a classic mistake: he left a great idea where he found it. It has affected the game's reputation in a negative way.
To the lobbyists Lasca was 'obviously superior to Checkers' - they ignored its contamination. To the skeptics it was too erratic to be taken seriously - they ignored it altogether. As a result the potential of the concept has been grossly underestimated. Read all about it in .
Quintessential games lead a basic principle of placement and capture to its logical conclusion - one can only follow and see where it leads, whether illustrious like Go or modest like Checkers. Column checkers - for dire want of a better name - suffers from a 'weird Checkers' image. As it turns out, Emergo is so wide even Dameo could drown in it in terms of the number of possible positions. Yet it has only two thirds the material. Its inner logic is as flawless as one would expect. Its strategy is basically simple, but allows for great diversity in style and many levels of sophistication. Its tactics are fabulous, both in variety and depth. There's no danger of exhaustion any century soon. It's hard to see where we're heading in terms of programs over such a period, but making a reliable evaluating function for Emergo is extremely difficult because depending on the position, the value of a critical column may go either way. Players can evaluate that aspect beyond a programs horizon.
Emergo may be one of the most important developments in the domain of elimination games ever. However, the small player base for 3-dimensional games doesn't work in its favor.

Emergo can be played on the 41 dark squares of a 9x9 checkered board with dark corners, with 2x12 men. The game is a joint effort by Ed van Zon, who got me interested in Lasca's way of capture in the first place, and me. When I made the usual hexagonal translation, using exactly the same rules, I initially found the game incomparably more dramatic, and so did everybody at the games club 'Fanatic' at Twente University in Enschede, the Netherlands. Few cared for the square version after its introduction. Emergo became a hexagonal game overnight, and this hexversion has been played as 'Emergo' on a regular basis for many years at Fanatic (before the dungeon people came and took over).
Under these rules it is also featured in R. Wayne Schmittberger's New Rules for Classic Games (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York - ISBN 0-471-53621-0) and in Games Magazine (February 1986).
During that time it never showed any indication of a first move advantage in over-the-board games. But when we started to play e-mail games, a flaw emerged: clever play in the entering stage allows white to retain the right to move first in the next stage. The first player to move after the entering stage has the opportunity to unconditionally start a feeder, a combination that forces a weak piece of the opponent to capture numerous men, only to see them liberated as one huge piece against which the victim's scattered weak forces stand no chance. This was no different in 'over the board' play, but there such combinations never reach the painstaking finesse made possible in e-mail games. One simply cannot look that deep into the hexversion's combinatorial whirlpools, without losing track. But given an hour or so of carefully trying out the most promising lines, one will eventually find a straight knock out most of the time. Thus the game's most distinguishing feature, its stunning combinatorial possibilities, suddenly turned against it. There was one immediate result:

The square game reclaimed the name Emergo
As it turns out this game has been grossly undervalued. Though its tactical possibilities are not nearly as mindboggling as those found in HexEmergo, they nevertheless surpass those of Draughts. Yet they cannot as a rule be extended far enough to actually win proceeding from the first move after the entering stage, not even in e-mail games, because combinations cannot maintain their momentum nearly as long as in HexEmergo. In addition, the square game's strategy is to a much higher degree characterized by positional aspects. The result is a far better balance between strategy and tactics.