Black Hole

Black Hole was invented some years ago as a result of the game designer's fascination with strange cosmic phenomena.

Black Hole is a strategy game, not hard to learn, but extremely hard to play well. It should appeal to anyone who enjoys spatial games and puzzles like the Rubik's Cube or strategic games like Chess.

The aim of the game is simple, capture as many stars as possible by creating black holes while preventing your opponents from doing the same. The game plays much like the pen and paper game boxes. Each turn the player draws one "star" token from the supplied cloth bag (Affectionately known as the "nebula" and places it into an empty region of "space" on the the board.

Once a certain threshold number of adjacent stars is reached the whole zone collapses into a black hole and the player who played the star captures all of the stars in the collapsed zone before playing another star. With more than two players the game becomes mind-bogglingly difficult to think more than one move ahead making the tactics almost impossible to work out.

The game ships with two play modes, a basic mode in which all stars score the same and a more complicated advanced game where players compete to not only capture the most stars but the highest scoring ones as well. The advanced game also introduces gravity charges that allow players to remove a black hole from the board if stuck.

All in all a great little time waster that will continue to be played for years to come.