Thirteen geese against one fox, and the fox is the favourite. That is the whole game in a sentence, and it is why Fox and Geese belongs to the family of hunt games rather than to the ordinary board games where both players start with the same pieces and the same job.
The board and the opening
The board is the cross: a seven by seven grid with the four corners cut away, leaving 33 points. Most people now meet it as the peg solitaire board. Moves run along the drawn lines only — up, down, left, right, and never diagonally, which matters more than it sounds. It means every point has at most four neighbours, and the tips of the arms have only two.
The fox sits in the middle. The geese fill the lower arm and the row across it, and they move first.
The one number this game needs, and where it comes from
The geese have a clean win condition: the fox cannot move. The fox does not. He eats geese, but eating them is not by itself a win, and every version of this game has to decide at what point the geese are beaten. Most simply pick a number.
We worked ours out instead. To pen the fox at some point, two things must be true at once:
- every point next to him is occupied, and
- for each of those, the square directly behind it is occupied or off the board — otherwise he jumps.
Run that over all 33 points and the cheapest cage costs four geese, and can be built at 12 of the 33 points — always out at the tips and edges of the arms, where there are fewer neighbours to block and more jumps that would land off the board. In the middle it costs eight.
So: with three geese there is nowhere on this board the fox can be trapped. The geese cannot win, whatever they do. Our rule follows from that and nothing else — the fox wins when fewer than four geese remain, which at thirteen geese means after ten are eaten.
It is deliberately a lower bound. It ends the game when a geese win has become impossible, never when it has merely become unlikely. Whether four geese can actually force the cage is a different and much harder question, and we have not answered it.
How to play the geese
- Advance as a wall, never as a line of stragglers. A goose with another goose directly behind it cannot be jumped — there is nowhere for the fox to land. One goose alone in the open is simply food.
- Drive him into an arm. The tips of the cross have two neighbours; the middle has four. Every step the fox takes outwards makes the cage cheaper.
- Do not count geese, count his moves. Losing four geese while shrinking the fox from four moves to two is a good trade.
- Fill from behind. The rear geese are the ones that make the front ones safe. Pushing everything forward at once is how the fox gets his double.
How to play the fox
- Stay in the middle while you can. Four ways out and four possible jumps beats two of each.
- Look for the goose that has nothing behind it. That is the whole game on your side.
- Break the wall before it forms. Once the geese are a solid block, there is nothing to jump and you are being walked backwards.
Thirteen, fifteen, seventeen
The count in this version is the earliest recorded one. Edward IV of England bought "two foxes and 26 geese" — two sets, at thirteen apiece. Later versions raise the geese to fifteen and then seventeen and simultaneously restrict how they may move, precisely because the extra numbers made it too easy.
That is the whole story of the hunt games in miniature: nobody could calculate the balance, so they tuned the counts over generations until it played well. There is more of it, including the tafl branch and the Nepalese one, in hunt games: where the two sides are not equal.
The rest of the family
- Bagh-Chal — four tigers against twenty goats, and the goats arrive one per turn
- Hnefatafl, Tablut and Brandubh — a king running for a corner against twice his number
- Alquerque — the symmetric game whose jump-capture the whole family borrowed
Play a friend online
Choose With a friend online under the board and press Open a table. You get a four-character code — send it over, they type it in, and you are playing. Then swap sides: it is a different game with the same equipment, which is the point of the entire family.
