Conspirateurs

Conspirateurs, a French word meaning conspirators, is an abstract strategy board game played by two or four players that is said to date from eighteenth century France, possibly from the period after the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Play takes place on a large board marked with a seventeen by seventeen grid, and the game unfolds in two distinct phases. In the drop phase, players place their pieces one at a time onto a shared central area described as a secret meeting place. In the following move phase, those pieces must journey outward from the center toward thirty nine sanctuary spaces arranged around the board's perimeter, moving and jumping over other pieces in a manner similar to the jumping moves found in Halma and Chinese checkers, though Conspirateurs has no capturing of pieces at any point. Because there are deliberately not quite enough sanctuary spaces to hold every piece in play, the race to claim a safe spot before the sanctuaries fill up has been compared to a strategic version of the game of musical chairs, and the first player or side to get all of their pieces safely into sanctuaries wins.