Watermelon chess

Watermelon chess is a two-player abstract strategy game from China, where it is known as xi gua qi and also called the surround game or globe. It is played on a network of curved lines in the spirit of Go, with players taking turns placing or moving a piece and capturing an opponent's pieces by surrounding them so they have no open point left to move to. The game belongs to the broad family of alignment and territory-capture abstract games long played in China, and like many such folk games it carries no single recorded invention date, only its living local name and continuing local play.