Play Morelli?

Just to update colleagues (I’m doing this in the General forum, not the Morelli one, because non-converts are precisely the people I’m trying to reach):

The Morelli World Championship 2016 went ahead with ten players in the end, and was won by stepanzo – which is not too surprising given his rating here, although I know there was one LG absentee in particular whose presence might have caused him concern.

Nearly all those who participated were players from this site, so a big thank you to them.  But one thing especially struck me in the lead-up to the tournament.  When I posted the likelihood of its being cancelled for lack of numbers, an LG regular replied that Morelli had never really shown up on his radar.  As it happens he then quickly familiarised himself with the rules, entered, and did rather well.  His initial response came as a major surprise to me, though, because I’d always assumed that pretty much everyone on the site knew about all the games here, understood the basic gestalt of them all, and had decided which ones they did or didn’t feel like playing.  Whereas in fact if the existence of Morelli had never really registered with my Finnish friend, there was a good chance that many others weren’t properly aware of it either.  After all, you can’t buy a physical set except from nestorgames (who I think have sold a grand total of about thirty in the last two years), and can only play online at LG, BoardSpace and Mindsports.

I’m writing this, therefore, in order to raise awareness of Morelli and encourage more people to try it.  I should say right away that it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.  Though the rules are quite simple, there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s a heavyweight game, especially at 13x13 (so maybe consider cutting your teeth on 9x9).  If you look at BoardGameGeek, you’ll find people most of whom have never played likening it to Othello, or Ming Mang, or Hnefatafl, but the truth is that in gameplay it scarcely resembles any of these.  As regards the kind of thinking it demands, it’s hard to come up with a more helpful point of comparison than Chess.  So if that word is a red rag to you, or you like a nice little diversion that’s over in twenty-five moves, or you’re allergic to brainwork of the kind characterised by some as “If-I-do-this-then-he-can-do-that” (the exact definition of combinatorial, actually, but let that pass), then you definitely should leave Morelli well alone.  But if none of that puts you off, then I challenge you to give it a go for ten games or so and see how you get on.

That’s quite enough from me, I think, but maybe some of those who already find it rewarding would care to chip in on its behalf…

I just recently started playing Morelli and I enjoy it.  The board looks amazing and the mechanisms are very unique.

It might seem at first glance that morelli's rules are a bag of disparate mechanisms (as opposed to the evident coherence of, say, catchup, slither or amazons). Yet, they make an organic whole where each of them calls for the other ones. Custodial capture by conversion needs centripete movement to make games progress. Centripete movement creates the delicious zugzwang thanks to the win condition.

While many of the regulars here, over their years of playing, have no doubt taken a look at nearly every game offered, I'm not so certain about less active or new users, who each have their own reasons for joining LG and playing here in the first place. Some may be interested in a game or two that they know well or aren't offered elsewhere, while others seek out new ways to play board games, while yet others might be interested in trying out a plethora of abstract strategy games, etc.

I'm not a board game expert and barely had heard of many of the games before coming to LG, having no idea about the rules, what level each of them are played at in general, or which parts of the world they are popular in. My main purpose of joining originally was to try out Connect6 and play correspondance-style Go against stronger opponents, but have since tried out a bunch of various games and so far enjoyed almost all of them greatly. At any rate, I'll have to agree that I was quite pleasantly surprised by the great depth Morelli has despite its seemingly mixed bag of rules, and will continue playing it from here on as well.