The game of Dragon Stones is an old one in Creation, dating back at least as far as the First Age. Like Chess in our world, gameboards are found made of all materials - marble, onyx, painted on sackcloth or crudely scratched into clay tablets or even into the dirt beside a campfire. Pieces of two colours are needed to play. Fine pieces are often made of jade, but peasants will play with stones of two different colours, or else with scraps of wood, shells or other markers.

Three Question Dragon Stones, which Jao and Worship of Many Worms played, is a popular variant of this game amongst those who either seek information or else have little material wealth to gamble away. Three rounds of the game are played and the end of each the winner may ask the loser any question, which the loser must answer truthfully. The loser may then choose to quit or may ask to play again. At the end of three rounds the game is over.

For Jao's contest with Worship of Many Worms in 'The Ghost and the Hunters', I had a board handy and Rob (Jao's player) and I settled things in the manly way by actually playing three rounds of the game. This kind of metagame "trick" won't appeal to everyone but we had fun with it, which is all that counts really.

In "real life" this game is known as Pente. It is played on a Go board, or any other lined grid as the size of the gridded area is basically immaterial. To play it you will need a decent supply of markers of two colours, one for each player.

Players take turns to lay one marker on the board. As in Go, markers are placed on the intersections of lines, rather than in the squares.

The object of the game is to successfully create a straight line of markers 5 long. This line may either be horizontal or vertical (along the lines marked on teh board) or diagonal. The first player to create such a line wins.

Alternatively, you may win by removing five pairs of your opponent's markers from the board.

Any time that a player places a marker so as to trap a pair of his opponent's markers between two of his own markers (so that you have a straight line of A, B, B, A) may remove the opponent's pair. If multiple pairs are trapped by a play, they are all removed. Note that it is only pairs that are vulnerable. Singlets, triplets and rows of four are not vulnerable. However, if markers in larger rows are also involved in pairs then they can still be removed as a part of those pairs.

I am too lazy to provide images for this, sorry. But it's really much more obvious than it sounds. If you have a Go board handy give it a try!

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