Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Kanare Kato is an independent abstract game designer from Japan who distributes his games through his own company, Kanare Abstracts. His small box abstract games are simple to learn, yet pack a big, thinky punch. As a one-man operation without an international distributor, both Kanare and his games may be unknown to you. However, if you love abstracts, do I have some games for you to check out.
In his introduction to the game, Kanare credits the inspiration for Lines of Fixation to Claude Soucie’s game Lines of Action, a game that was first published in 1969. Lines of Action is played on a square 8×8 board, where your goal is to get all your pieces connected in an unbroken chain of adjacent spaces. (Horizontally, vertically, or diagonally)
Lines of Fixation is played on a hexagonal board, where each side has five spots created by the intersections of parallel lines that run straight from one corner side to the opposite corner side. Your pieces start in small stacks, and you’ll win by either creating an unbroken chain of stacks of your pieces, or by controlling two stacks of six pieces each.
To play, set the board up between you and your opponent. Take the 18 discs in your color and place a stacked pair on the middle three intersections of one side of the hexagonal playing field. Your opponent will do the same, with their three stacks directly opposite yours. You and your opponent will skip an edge on either side of the hex and place your remaining pairs of stacks along those edges. Your opponent will follow suit. Your starting board will then look like this:
Movement in Lines of Fixation is based on the size of your stack. Kanare refers to every piece on the board as a stack. A single piece is a stack of one; two pieces, one atop the other, is a stack of two. This means your first move will always be moving a stack of two.
Stacks move in a straight line. To move, you pick up the entire stack and drop one piece from the bottom of the stack at each intersection you pass over. This means the space your stack started from will always be empty at the end of your turn.
You only control stacks where your piece is sitting at the top. Stacks can—and will—be of mixed colors, but even if you have pieces in such a stack, you cannot move it unless your piece is on the top.
Where Lines of Fixation gets tricky is with capturing. If, on your turn, you move a stack and you drop a piece on a stack controlled by your opponent, you have captured that stack. (The stack remains on the board, but you now control it.)
If you control a stack that is at least three pieces tall and it can make a capture, you must do so on your next turn. (Your stack must be able to complete its movement, however. If the height of the stack means dropping all its pieces would extend past the edge of the board, the capture is not mandatory.)
Lines of Fixation sound like it should be a simple game. And while it is easy to teach, the gameplay is anything but. That capturing requirement has complicated all my games. After assembling my stacks in a jagged but connected series, my opponents have all pointed out a necessary capture move that pulls my pieces apart again.
To be fair, though, I’ve done the same to them.
My games have all run long for a small box game, close to 20-30 minutes. The push/pull of offensive vs defensive moves is ever-present: do I make a move that helps me or do I make a move that messes up my opponent’s plans?
I have felt frustrated playing Lines of Fixation—frustrated that I’m not able to see the board a move or two ahead, or by overlooking an obvious mistake. Far from being annoying, though, it’s a frustration that wants me to keep playing the game to get better at it.
Lines of Fixation is a game I’ll still be playing years from now. If you give it a try, you probably will be, too.
For more information about Kanare Kato’s games, check out his website: https://kanare-abstract.com/en.
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