Kamisado

Kamisado is an abstract strategy board game for two players, played on an eight by eight board of multicoloured squares. Each player controls eight octagonal dragon towers, one for every colour on the board, with gold dragons mounted on one set and black dragons on the other. Burley Games published it in 2008, and designer Peter Burley has said the idea began with a pattern of small coloured tiles he noticed on a washroom floor in the 1970s and later dreamed about. Play turns on one rule: you must move the tower whose colour matches the square where your opponent last finished. Towers advance any distance forward or diagonally forward without jumping, and the first player to reach the opponent home row wins the round. Games can be a single round or a match to 3, 7 or 15 points, in which each won round adds a sumo ring that lets a tower push an opposing tower back one space. The Mind Sports Olympiad held the first Kamisado world championship in 2011, and the first player is known to win with optimal play.