Havannah Tutor
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Rules
Basic Tactics
Strategy
Games
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Havannah, of all my games, has the simplest rules. It has been played very extensively, not only at the games club Fanatic at Twente University, the Netherlands, but throughout the mathematics department, at the Go club and in fact all over the place. It has also been marketed by the german company Ravensburger in 1981 and even became 'game of the year'. But its commercial success remained moderate and it disappeared from the market a few years later.
I never disputed Ravensburger's marketing strategy: they're doing a great job for well over a hundred years. But I didn't quite agree either: the board was definitely too small and so were the stones. The point is that manufacturers, if at all, prefer tactical games with simple rules and a one-dimensional strategy. Take the countless five-in-a-row variants, or even Hexade, Havannah's tactical supporting act. There may be tactical problems in such games and they may not lack depth. But there's no strategical dilemma.
Havannah's image, taken from the box, was just that: a nice fifteen minutes game & don't make a meal of it. I should have offered them Hexade, but I hadn't invented it yet. Havannah is very much a strategical game. You can learn the rules in less than a minute, but it may take you more than a year to develop comfortable strategical concepts. Its tactics are beautiful and can be mastered up to perfection, but only in the context of its double-edged strategy.
In the late seventies, when the game had already been played for over a year on a daily basis in the mathematics department's canteen, using what would later be coined snake strategy, with the emphasis on speed, Roelof Moll, a local Chess player who had played only for a few weeks, came and started winning consistently by following his Chess instinct and taking the center. He didn't care for speed, he cared for safety. His reasoning was this: Havannah, of all games that can end in a draw, has the smallest margin (which is true). Therefore a consistently good defense must at some time turn into an attack. He was so very right! His contribution to Havannah, spider strategy was a breakthrough that finally showed us the strategic dilemma:
| safety versus speed. |
HAVANNAH © Christian Freeling.
JAVA Applet by Ed van Zon.
