The History of the Game of the Amazons
The Game of the Amazons is a modern abstract strategy game about carving up territory by permanently blocking off the board, one square at a time.
Invented in 1988
The Game of the Amazons was invented in 1988 by Walter Zamkauskas, an Argentine game designer, and first published in the Argentine puzzle magazine El Acertijo (published in Spanish).
Its queen-like moving pieces echo chess, but the arrow-shooting half of every turn - permanently burning a square after each move - is entirely its own idea, turning the game from a race into a slow strangulation of the opponent's available space.
A Favorite of Combinatorial Game Theory
Amazons has no draws, no captures, and a genuinely enormous game tree - by some estimates larger than Go's - which made it a natural subject for combinatorial game theory researchers, and a regular event at computer-game competitions and olympiads since the late 1990s.
Strong computer play turned out to be a serious challenge of its own: with dozens of legal piece-moves and, for each, dozens of legal arrow-shots, a single turn can have well over a thousand legal moves - far more than chess - which pushed Amazons-playing programs toward heavy move-ordering and endgame territory analysis rather than brute-force search alone.
This Version
PaperGames plays the standard rules on the standard 10x10 board with four amazons per side. Each turn is a simple three-tap sequence: tap an amazon, tap where it moves to, then tap where it shoots its arrow from there.