A student of mine asked if the number was still there underneath the stone that captured it.

At first sight, this would give rise to 2 new possible variants:

If you move a stone upon another stone you pile it on that stone. When moving again that stone reappears on the original spot.

(second possibility is that it moves along with the capturing stone, but that creates no new game compared to the original rules; unless you can choose how many 'captured stones you take along')

Ingo has this been tried?

Wouldn't that reduce the game to chance? All you would have to do is go straight for the goal since you can't get captured.

A stone won't be captured, but it can be immobilized. Both by yourself and your opponent. I

I played both these variants years ago against my girlfried. We used to play with playing cards, rather than dice, so piling was natural and easy. It seemed to work as well as any EWN variant.

And the 'carry all' variant is a variant too as gives you the possibility of adding a score to the game rather than just a win/lose. e.g. You score the number of enemy pieces you are carrying. (Though, to be honest, a doubling cube would be my first choice for including a score to each frame.)

Oh no. Memories return:

In 2005 I had designed a piling variant of Ewn,

with bottle stoppers to be the pieces. I had collected

12 of them: 6 in green, 6 in blue; golden numbers

on them, and piling worked very well (and the games

played with them were also ok). I called the variant

Football-EinStein.

So I wrote to the mineral water company, whose bottle

stoppers I had used, and asked for a box of bottle stoppers.

They were very friendly, and one day I got a big box with

5,000 bottle stoppers. But then the shock:

These stoppers had never been on a bottle, and only when they

are pressed on the bottle (by a machine) they get their final

shape. It was impossible to build piles from these native

stoppers! You should have heard my wife: “And, what do you intend

to do with the five thousand stoppers?”

I did not have an idea, and it also did not come in the following years.

Finally, the stoppers went to the recycling service. Only 25 are

left, to remember me of that story.

Ingo.

Was fuer eine Geschichte! LOL

Heh, I'm imagining your wife yelling at you while you're trying to explain the situation :-)

> … I'm imagining your wife yelling at you while you're trying

> to explain the situation :-)

Yes, we had several discussions over the years.

She: “Do you really still need these stoppers?”

Me: “Not at the moment. But my seventh sense says this will be usefull one day.”

Each time my resistance became a bit less convincing.

And finally, in this summer, the box was given away.

Concerning the 25 pieces for memory, my original intention was “50”,

but Beate: “Why do you need 50 to have good memories…”

25 was our compromise.

If you have a large number of ANYTHING, ask a primary school teacher, they'll find a use for it!

My wife is a primary school teacher and we used to make jokes about things in 'Klassensatzstaerke'. (Hard to translate (for me), something like 'amount so that each pupil can get one'.) I was always claiming she could even make use of toxic waste barrels, if only they came in Klassensatzstaerke!