Kill The King is a board game for two players, played on a 9 by 9 grid, for maximum incompatability with chess/draughts. One player plays the King’s Guard (who start in a circle round the king), and the other plays the King Killers, who start in alternating squares all the way round the edge of the board. The king, meanwhile, does nothing but sit still in his spot at the centre of the board.
Players alternate goes, with the killers going first. The killers can move 1 space, the guards can move either 1 or 2. While both sets of pieces can move diagonally, the guards can’t move straight and then diagonally in the same go, just one or the other.
An opponent’s piece is defeated if you move your piece onto its square. The guards win if all the killers are killed, the killers win if the king is killed.
You can adjust the difficulty up or down between players by having the winning side start with one less piece in the rematch, or voluntarily start with less if you’re feeling sporting.
And that’s pretty much all the rules of the game.
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Notes:
1. I made this on 23rd December 2023
2. But these pictures were taken in September 2024
3. I stole the little pieces from Carcassonne
4. And largely stole the game itself from a half remembered description of some old norse board game I saw a description of at Sutton Hoo one time.
5. When I played it with my nieces and nephews last Christmas, we used chess pieces rather than Carcassonne pieces.
6. The killers used all 16 pawns, while the guards used a mixture of the remaining pieces as the guards.
7. (A king played the king)