Breakthru (board game)

Breakthru is a two-player abstract strategy board game designed by Alex Randolph and published by 3M in 1965 as part of its bookshelf game series; the game later passed into Avalon Hill's catalogue and is no longer in production. Play takes place on an eleven-by-eleven grid and is deliberately asymmetric: the gold player commands a flagship and twelve escort pieces trying to break through to the far side of the board, while the silver player controls twenty ships arranged as a defensive cordon meant to stop them. Gold wins by getting any piece to the board's edge, while silver wins by capturing the gold flagship first. Mechanically the game borrows its displacement-style capture, moving directly onto an occupied square to remove the piece there, from the medieval Norse and Celtic family of tafl games such as hnefatafl, rather than the chess-like sliding capture used in many other abstract strategy games.