Blast Radius

An abstract war game where pieces irradiate the spaces around them. Eliminate all opposing pieces.

• Designer: Mark Steere, 2024
• Blast Radius at BoardGameGeek
• Blast Radius at Mark Steere Games

Blast Radius is a two-player game played on a hexagonal board of any size, initially empty. The two players, Red and Blue, take turns placing their own checkers onto the board, one checker per turn, starting with Red. Sometimes friendly and/or enemy checkers are removed immediately following a placement.

A stack consists of one or more like-colored checkers. Each stack is surrounded by a REZ (radiation exclusion zone) with a radius equal to the stack height.

You can place your checker anywhere on the board, subject to the following restrictions:

1. You can't place a checker within a REZ, except on a friendly stack at ground zero.
2. You must form the smallest stack that you can. [If you can place a checker on an unoccupied cell, you must do so. Otherwise, you must place on your smallest stack.]

Upon forming a stack of height 2 or more, you must remove all stacks (enemy and friendly) within the newly formed REZ, concluding your turn.

If there are no enemy checkers on the board at the conclusion of your turn, you win (except at the conclusion of Red’s first turn).

Blast Radius is a very unusual game. It's about as far from [country x] Draughts as a game can be. Blast Radius was my attempt at a war game, though of course it's an abstract. I put the design through innumerable mutations over the course of a few months before finally arriving at something that worked.

• Current engine version: 20241126 (2024-11-26). On Abstract Play since 2024-11-27.

• A numeric radiation display is available.