Dave Dyer has implemented Crossfire at Boardspace.net.


It’s a beautiful board, breathing ancienty (wholly unjustified but gladly accepted) and it comes with an AI to play against on different levels. Of course live play against another human player is also possible.

Dave writes:
"Crossfire is a minimalist stacking game by Christian Freeling.  It’s played on a “snowflake” shaped board with hex connectivity. It’s a game so simple and elegant, it doesn’t need a separate rules page."

I’ve thanked Dave for that and asked him to mention Sid Sackson’s Focus as the source of this simplicity and elegance.

At the same time I should mention that Crossfire has by some been discarded as a “Focus clone”. Apart from the question whether a translation of a game to a different grid automatically makes it a clone, I disagree.

The ‘twist’ that characterizes the game – replacing the artificial ceiling of a stackheight of 5 by a natural ceiling defined by a cell’s number of neighbors – is of major strategical and tactical relevance. Aiming large stacks at low capacity cells is an estabished part of both strategy and tactics and provides fixed ‘focuspoints’ for both, that are totally absent in Focus.