# What is mog®?

mog® is a roll-and-move boardgame for two players. The board is divided into rows and columns of cells and moves are made by rolling two dice. Players can get a win either by taking all of their opponent's pieces or by placing their own pieces on designated home-cells. The game is quick to set up and is easy to learn and to play. A typical game takes about 20 minutes. Points are scored for a win and successive games can be played in a set. The game is suitable for players 6 - 600 yrs.

# What makes mog® different?

mog® is designed with in-built features which make sure that at every stage of the game players have many alternative choices in playing their move. A dice throw can be played in up to eight ways, for any piece. Players can also choose whether to play for position or for capture, they can attack or defend, and they can change their strategy at any time. In many roll-and-move games the fall of dice will dictate the flow of play and there is only one outcome for any particular throw. This is not so in mog®; the player decides how to use their dice-throw and their opponent cannot predict or control the move they make.

In many games a player can build an advantage through luck and the outcome will be determined well before the game finishes. This cannot happen in mog®. Players must not only look for their own opportunities, but be aware of potential opportunities for their opponent. This factor makes a game of mog® a genuine clash of wills.

# What makes mog® special?

mog® is constructed from very simple elements combined in a unique way. These contribute to the complexity of the game play and the sophistication of the game’s mechanism. The unique features of mog® are recognised by patent. Other features are included to hold the mechanism together and to facilitate the play. These are all described in ‘the hard stuff’.

It is a feature of mog® that the rules governing play are few and simple, so playing the game does not require mastery of a contrived and obscure set of supplementary and conditional clauses. This makes the game accessible to a broad range of people and a wide age-group. Also, because mog® is a number-and-space game, it has an educational capability without being an ‘educational game’. You can read about this in ‘the skills of mog®’

# How many mog®s are there?

This is a good one. The standard form of mog® is played with fifteen pieces on a board with ten rows and ten columns. Dice will most likely be cubes (hexahedra), but could also be octahedra (with eight faces), or dodecahedra (with twelve faces), or some other proper shape. mog®s are actually constructed to express the properties of the dice rather than the dimensions of the board. The highest-order true die has 120 faces; in principle, we can make a mog® with

$120–1=119$

$×2=238$

rows and columns and, by extension, for any even dimension from six to two-hundred-and-thirty-eight, which is one-hundred-and-seventeen different mog®s. Pretty good, hey? You can read the details in ‘the hard stuff’.