Summary

Meridians is an abstract strategy game for two players. It has a territorial nature, but the goal is to annihilate the opponent's stones.

Meridians is named after the meridian system, a concept in traditional Chinese medicine conceptually similar to the circulatory system.

Kanare Kano designed Meridians in March of 2021.

Components

A centerless hexagonal board tessellated with triangles. The regular size board has six intersections along two sides and seven intersections along the other four sides.

A sufficient number of stones of two colors.

Definitions

Group: Like-colored stones adjacent to each other. Singletons are considered groups of size 1.

Path: An uninterrupted straight line of at least one empty intersection connecting two different but similar-colored groups.

Dead Group: A group which has no path connecting it to another group.

Gameplay

Note: The following steps describe the rules of the BGA implementation more accurately than the rules PDF. They are, for all intents and purposes, equivalent.

The player controlling the light colored stones moves first, with turns alternating afterwards.

On each player's first turn, the active player must place a stone of their color onto any empty intersection.

During each subsequent turn:

1. The active player must place a stone of their color onto any empty intersection that is on a straight line from an existing friendly stone, such that there are no different colored stones between them. Passing is not allowed.

2. The active player removes all of their dead groups from the board.

3. If the active player has no stones on the board, they lose.