Surakarta / Roundabouts / Bas-Basan Sepur
In Abstract Games Magazine issue 13, they showed a board game I had forgotten about, which they called Surakarta.
I remembered it from Sid Sackson's big book of games, where it's called Roundabouts, but when I tried to play that version a few weeks back, the glaring colors just made my eyeballs throb. So we printed the back cover of that AGM issue (thanks) but there was one glaring yellow line that also hurt my eyes. Really? So I colored that over with purple crayon and we tried a few games.
A pet peeve: if diagonal moves are allowed, why are there are no diagonal lines drawn on the board? They can be fainter than the main lines, but there is no visual indication that diagonal moves are allowed. The rule for exactly how to enter a loop to make a capture were not clear at first -- do you have to at the edge space where the loop starts? No, you can skip any number of points to get to the start of the loop, any number of points between loops, and any number of points after leaving the loop to make the capture of your choice. Here is a page by Khoa Fam where the diagonal lines look just fine.
I found a few Android apps for this one.
Surakarta by Paolo Zaccharia
I like the second app better, since it has a very clear tutorial presentation, and highlights the available moves as you click each piece. Just now, I was a few moves away from winning my first game when my 5-minute timer ran out and it crapped out before I could even get a screenshot. So THAT option got turned off real quick. In the other app, what happens on almost every move is that I drag a white piece and it immediately gets captured and turns black, which is not a fun way to learn a game.
The Board Game Kaptain gives an interesting history where it appeared on the European market in the 1970s, claiming to be an ancient game from Indonesia, but there are some indications that the story was just marketing talk. However, I have also found south Asian players who have videos happily saying it's a classic game from Indonesia, any YouTube search should show some of these, some of which are hand drawn with admirable skill. Another fun grey area to figure out someday. Wikipedia has no real historical information.
The Board Game Kaptain does spend some time halfway through his video describing the problems with stalemates where overly defensive players just repeat moves to avoid capture, and he mentions some additional tournament rules to get around this. I agree with his assessment that it's best played for fun, just move pieces, enjoy the flamboyant captures, and don't ruin it by taking it too seriously.
He had two good tips at the 19 minute mark: the spaces where the red and green capture lanes intersect are the most important to hold onto, and if you move two pieces forward with a gap between, and the opponent gets their piece between your two, you're going to lose the exchange that follows.
IGGameCenter, the online multiplayer board site, has a Surakarta game as well. Here is a video of two guys playing a game on the IGGC site, and really thinking through the moves, so much so that at the 6 minute mark (out of 43 minutes total) you can see the fear of nobody wanting to be the first to be captured and every option looks bad. Wow, that IGGC site has a huge library of games from around the world, and I have never heard of about half of them.
Once again, there is a huge debate over the origin of the game. It supposedly first appeared in France in 1970 (show me the box) claiming to be an ancient game from Indonesia (sure, why not) but other reports say less than 6% of people in Indonesia have ever heard of it. I'm not going to get into this debate, it's such a string of hearsay, but here is an excellent thread on BoardGameGeek with some people earnestly trying to solve the mystery. The earliest edition I can find an image for is Ravensberger 1972 (Otto Maier Verlag) at BGG.
This page on EpicTravelers has a comparison of several "traditional" bas-basan games where the circles game is close to what we're calling Surakarta, and clearly derived from an earlier derivative of alqerque with 2 or 4 extra triangles. The fact that there is an Indonesian dictionary from 1939 that says "bas-basan is a game of some kind" is useless as provenance for Surakarta specifically.
One of the most interesting pages I found was this one on a site called Anak Bawang, written in Malay, which you should run Google translate on. He explains that it was popular around Jakarta in the 1980s but has been largely forgotten and more often than not goes by the name Bas-Besan Sepur. The big loops are reminiscent of railroads (probably more than a translation glitch). He does make that 1939 dictionary claim again, but as long as the dictionary has no picture, we can't know what game it was talking about. This is all consistent with the usual 1970s origin story, but I liked the conversational way this page was written.
The most academic source I could find was this detailed article on revitalizing traditional games at TheArtsJournal.org with a multiple page section on Bas-Basan Sepur starting on page 5. It looks like this is the original source of the "less than 6% of Indonesian children know this game," and confirming that Sepur basically refers to trains or tracks. It also has a nice clear picture of a game drawn up in the sand on page 7. It spends a lot of time trying to analyze and think of ways to modernize the game and make it marketable, ending with a shot of the box of the 2015 release called Amukti Palapa which had this nice Facebook page for a few years but is reported to be no longer operating.
I will end tonight's rant with this page from cyningstan.com, who is always reliable and sincere: On Old Board Games that Aren't Old.
Along those lines, I don't really buy the argument that no artifacts survive because it was meant to be drawn in the sand. If a game is popular or traditional or has some kind of cultural meaning, players will have heirloom gaming items (boards, stones, throwing sticks, etc) that are passed down for generations, and businesses will try to sell boards and pieces. They can't exist for centuries in a vacuum and leave no trace.
As usual, if I find more, or some other set of interesting links leading off in odd directions, I will write a follow-up article.
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