Scaffold is a drawless connection game played on the intersections of a square grid using stones (as in Go). Black is trying to connect N-S edges of the board, White E-W with an orthogonally connected group.

Definitions

Group: Either a single stone (a group of one) or any number of stones of the same color connected through a continuous series of orthogonal adjacencies.

Play

First player places a single black stone on any grid intersection, after which the second player decides which color they will play (pie rule). Players then alternate taking turns.

On your turn, place a stone of your color on an empty point. Then, if possible, place a stone of your color on an empty point that is orthogonally adjacent to two groups of your color, and keep making such placements until no more are possible.

Acknowledgments

Every one of the regular posters on the BGG Abstract Game forum could rightfully consider themselves a co-author of this game if they wished. I'm like a kid who built something (hopefully cool!) out of LEGO -- but they made the bricks. Thank you all for your generosity and brilliance.

Luis Bolaños Mures helped clarify the presentation of the rules - Thanks.

This game shares some similarities with Quadrex by Bill Taylor, although it was arrived at independently.

Online Play

Scaffold is one of the many games that can be played for free at mindsports.nl. You can find it in the ArenA here:

https://mindsports.nl/index.php/arena/scaffold/

I'd like to express my gratitude to Christian Freeling and Ed van Zon for making this possible.

You can now also play Scaffold at Abstract Play thanks to BGG users Striton and ypaul. You can find it here:

https://play.abstractplay.com/

Creative Commons License

Scaffold by Andrew Lannan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Please let me know if you do anything fun with Scaffold!

—description from the designer

Games