
Blue and Gray (board game)

Blue and Gray is a strategy board game for two players invented by Henry Busch and Arthur Jaeger in 1903. They obtained a patent for the game, but may never have published it. Blue and Gray was featured in the book "A Gamut of Games" (1969) by Sid Sackson. It was also featured in "The Book of Classic Board Games" (1991) by Klutz Press under the name Cats and Dogs. In this book, the game was ranked among the top 15 board games of all time, including checkers, backgammon, Go, and mancala. The game is also known as Wild West, Thumps Game, and Captain and Soldiers. The name Blue and Gray "refers to the uniforms of the South and the North in the Civil War and in the original game the playing pieces of the contestants were of those colors."
Blue and Gray is a variant of draughts.
Equipment and setup.
Each player owns 18 pieces: 1 "captain" and 17 "guards". One army is colored blue; the other gray. The game is played on a 9×9 gridded with 80 intersection points. Pieces start on the points on the first two of each player's side. The captain is placed at the center of the first rank. The board is marked with grid paths for each player's captain to advance toward the center of the board.
Game rules.
Winning.
The winner is the first player to advance their captain along its marked grid into the specially marked center of the board. Each player will use their guards to try and block the advance of the enemy captain. If both captains are blocked and "neither player is able to break the impasse", the player whose captain has advanced farthest wins.