Hakenschlagen

Who will swerve and zig-zag the best and thus win the race?

Material

• Game board with 95 hollows
• cloth bag

Setup

All players set the game up together.

First place the fox figure on the space in the center of the gameboard; then put the trees on any spaces, provided they are not adjacent to one another.

Distribute the disks on the gameboard. Starting spaces and turning points always remain empty.

Put the marbles into the bag and the molehills next to the board.

Now each player chooses a hare figure and, in turn, positions it on its starting space. The youngest player begins.

With this, the spaces with dandelions (yellow), lettuce (green), carrot (orange), and trees have been fixed. They will not be changed during the game.

Example of a starting setup. On the left, where the hares sit: the starting spaces, on the right: the turning points.

Object of the game

The hares run to the opposite side of the playing area and back to the starting space. The fastest hare wins.

How to play

Players play in turn. On your turn, you reach into the bag, without looking and draw three marbles. The colors of the marbles correspond to the disks on the spaces or the fox or the molehills.

The beige-colored marbles stand for empty spaces; these are field spaces. Now you make your move; after that, you put the marbles back into the bag.

The order in which you use the marbles is up to you!

This is how the hare jumps

A hare always jumps in a straight line, always to the next space that matches the color of the marble you have chosen. Legitimate target spaces are those that are either empty or occupied by a colored disk.

You may jump over other hares and molehills, but not over trees and the fox.

If you are not able or willing to jump forward, you may move sideways or backwards instead. It is also possible that you must jump backwards, in case this is the only way for you to reach a certain color. Only if a color cannot be reached at all do you put the marble back into the bag unused.

A hare may also jump back and forth in a round and thus enter a space twice.

The fox

If you draw the red marble, you may put the fox on a different unoccupied space. If the fox is sitting adjacent to one or more hares, the players who own these hares may draw only 1 marble each out of the bag; they continue doing so until the fox moves on or the hare jumps away.

The fox may never be placed on starting spaces or turning points.

Molehills

The black marble lets you place molehills - and you are allowed to use them on the same turn (see fig. 4). Molehills can be placed on any field spaces, but not on starting spaces or turning points. You can jump over molehills and thus extend the jumping range of your hare. If there are no molehills left for placement, you move a molehill that is already on the board.

Joker

Two marbles of the same color count as a joker; they can substitute any other marble.

If you draw 2 field marbles, for example, you can

• move to the closest yellow, green, or orange space once, or
• move the fox once, or
• place a molehill once, or
• jump onto field spaces twice.

Examples of moves

The white hare begins the game. After jumping on a lettuce space and a dandelion space, he sits down on a field space for enough away from the fox.

The yellow hare first moves to a field space and uses his two dandelion marbles as a joker for a carrot.

The pink hare first places a molehill and then elegantly jumps over it. On his last step, he has to move to a carrot space. Since the closest space is occupied, he jumps over the yellow hare and even passes the fox.

The green hare makes a short and a long leap over two hares that belong to other players (1+2), relocates the fox, and, in doing so, aggravates the white and the yellow hares.

After jumping on a lettuce space and a field space, the player can no longer move to a carrot space; consequently, the player has to stop after the second jump and to put the marble back into the bag unused.

Sometime later in the game, the pink hare arrives at a turning point, turns around and jumps back in the direction of the final destination.

Start, turning point, and finish

The playing area has to be crossed twice the entire way. The hare figures always face in the direction they are running. The starting spaces are also the final destination spaces.

In the end, the player whose hare is the first to reach one of the five final destination spaces wins. Any leftover marbles in a player’s hand at this point have no use anymore.

Variant

Hakenschlagen can be customized by leaving out disks and/or trees in any way you want. Depending on the number and age of players, this can make the game easier or faster.