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Nominally the synthesis of the first six games in the GIPF Project, LYNGK is at least the colorful culmination to the picture.
There was a time when it was genuinely difficult to find the gold at the end of the rainbow that is LYNGK. The games were out of print for a bit and while the others still seemed to have copies drifting around with various merchants, LYNGK was not the same way. When I decided to set about obtaining the final piece of the series, I had to get one from a seller in Germany. These days, of course, having found a new publisher, all of them are readily available. The reason for the production delay came from Kris Burm himself, in that he states in the LYNGK rulebook that the Project was originally intended to be six games (leaving out the unfortunately flawed TAMSK, one supposes), LYNGK is in his words "an epilogue" to the rest of them that supposedly synthesizes elements of the other six to create this culmination. It's also kind of the ultimate defiance of my series title here, since while there are black and (mottled) white (and ivory) pieces, the rest of them are all blazing color. Also, because it is supposed to be a synthesis of sorts, the rules are bit more complex.
This time, the board is an icositetragon (every geometry teacher in the world just felt a disturbance in the Force) or 24-sided figure. As with many of the other games, we begin by placing our pieces on the intersections of the wireframe, randomly like TZAAR (no suggested setup is provided this time; take the risk, people!) There are 9 pieces of each of the main colors that are supposed to represent five of the other games: ivory (TZAAR), blue (ZÈRTZ), red (DVONN), green (PÜNCT), and black (YINSH.) Then there are 3 mottled white pieces that are supposed to represent GIPF. All of them but 1 of each of the 5 main colors is placed on the board, with those 5 remainders placed to the side of it. In contrast to every other game in the series, those 5 pieces are the way that players decide who is which color(s) and, thus, who gets to play with/as them. At the beginning of their turn, each player may claim a single color as their own. Until that happens, all colors on the board are neutral and can be played by both players. Once each player has claimed two colors, the fifth one remains neutral for the game. The mottled white pieces are jokers that can act as any color.
Each turn, a player moves a piece or a stack. Said pieces end their move on top of the first other piece they come to, bypassing any empty spaces in a straight line. A single neutral piece can only ever end its move on a single other piece of a different color or a stack of the same height, as long as all the pieces are different colors. Stacks will never be more than 5 pieces. However,a piece of a claimed color or a stack with one of those pieces on top of it (i.e. controlled by one of the players) can move onto pieces or stacks of any height; again as long as all of the pieces in that new stack would be different colors. Once a player achieves a stack of 5 pieces of different colors, the stack is removed from the board and will count as one point at the end of the game. The jokers, of course, can count as any color. Plus, there's the LYNGK move, where a player can bounce from one of its own colors to do an extended move. For example, if you move a stack with black on top, as long as you can make a legal move to another black piece(s), you can keep moving. So, you could make three or four moves with the same piece/stack, changing direction each time in order to complete your move atop another piece/stack of different colors. It sounds more complicated than it is.The game ends when the last possible move is made and whoever has the most stacks of 5, wins. If tied, then you count the number of 4-stacks, 3-stacks, and so on still on the board until a winner is determined.
Now, any of you that have actually waded through this series will likely be able to identify certain rules or aspects that remind you of some of the previous 6 entries in the Project. That was, of course, Burm's intent. I've still never been quite certain how touched upon games like YINSH and PÜNCT (just to name two of my favorites) are in this ruleset nor have I been able to discern the influence of GIPF on the joker pieces. As it is, LYNGK strikes me as much more of a mashup of ZÈRTZ, DVONN, and TZAAR, which is totally fine, since it's an interesting game in its own right and I don't think it even needed to be labeled with the "epilogue" identifier. I'm as happy playing this as I am almost any of the others and it's fair to say that the mental challenge is no less than any of the rest of them. For example, there's definitely some utility in not claiming a color early, since you can then make LYNGK moves to fairly devastating effect as stipulated in the manual (where their example shows a link move with a stack of three leaping across two other pieces to end on a stack of two and score the 5-stack.) But there's also good reason to claim eariier, since it will open up some avenues for you and deny them to the opponent (e.g. if they suddenly can't use red pieces which are then prevalent in the 2- or 3-stacks sitting out there.) But remaining neutral also gives you more versatility in many situations, in that knowing what your opponent wants to accomplish and foiling it with a bunch of single piece moves is a viable strategy, on top of watching them try to set up a 5-stack and then simply declaring the last color that they need and hopping on top of the 4-stack that they've so helpfully provided to you.
With the decade that passed between TZAAR and LYNGK, I think it's a fair question to ask whether this slightly more complex offering feels like a GIPF Project game. It lacks the aesthetic simplicity of the rest of the series, confined as they were mostly to the black and white that tends to define abstract games in our modern perspective. It also has a longer play time, both suggested on the box and from my own experience, largely because you're thinking of not simply "my pieces and your pieces" but now multiple types of your own and your opponent's pieces. Before, each piece would move one way and do one thing. Now you potentially can make three or four moves in one turn, which creates a more dynamic situation than many of the others, but also can lead to the notorious analysis paralysis that was certainly a potential factor with the rest of the Project, but still relatively rare in my experience. You could try to make the argument that the visual change is akin to the rules change in that the other games felt "clean" and LYNGK occasionally doesn't. But I don't think that argument holds water, since the game is still relatively simple, even if it's not quite as simple as GIPF, which I've downtalked because I think it often feels too simple.
I think Kris Burm accomplished what he set out to do with both this game and the Project as a whole. I remember when I first discovered the series in 2003 and there being some talk about how, eventually, the idea was to create a "master game" that could incorporate at least some of the rules and pieces from the entire Project. I had zero vision of how that would be feasible and, in the end, it probably wasn't. LYNGK was Burm's attempt at incorporating some of the questions asked and lessons learned from the rest of them and, while it didn't quite pay off in the way I think he hoped, it ended up being a solid game in its own right, so all good in the end. And that is where we are: the end. The Project came to an end in 2017 (Yes, I know about MATRX GIPF. No, I'm not really interested in reboots.) and this series is coming to an end right here. I hope that it's been at least entertaining and/or informative for some of you. All of these games are pretty widely available right now and are usually in the US$30-$35 range, so a lot of bang for your modern buck, so to speak. Give them a moment, if you get a chance. I think they're something that will keep you occupied for some time, like any good project.
