There is a new game on PlayStrategy! We've added the simple but strategic 'Breakthrough'. Breakthrough was invented by Dan Troyka in 2000, and was originally on a 7x7 board, but the concept is adaptable to most board sizes and the game quickly won the 2001 8x8 Game Design Competition. We've added it as an 8x8 game but also on a 5x5 board as 'Mini Breakthrough'.

The concept is simple. The first player to get a piece to the end of the board wins! Pieces can move forward one square, either directly or diagonally. Capturing is only possible in the same way as Chess Pawns. The full rules can be found here.

The majority of PlayStrategy's bots can play Breakthrough (@PS-Random-Mover, @PS-Greedy-One-Move, @PS-Greedy-Two-Move) and as this is a game that is in the Fairy Stockfish engine, you can also play Stockfish, and run the computer analysis on the game afterwards. Note, we are currently debugging a problem with Mini Breakthrough and Stockfish, and so this is unavailable for the moment.

Whenever we add a new game, there is an Introductory tournament for it. These are coming up this weekend:

Sat 6th July 18:00 UTC+0 Breakthrough

Sun 7th July 11:00 UTC+0 Mini Breakthrough

Users who are familiar with PlayStrategy's back-catalogue of games will note that there was already a game called Breakthrough on this site! This is a Draughts variant with a similar concept. We've chosen to rename this variant to BRKTHRU to make the distinction clear between the newly added game and the Draughts variant.

The other piece of news is that July is the month that PlayStrategy celebrates it's birthday! It is nearly 3 years since we launched! We are pleased to share that in the last week or so the total number of games that have been played on the site has exceeded 250,000! More than half of which were played in the last 12 months - demonstrating our continual growth. Thanks to every user who has contributed by registering an account and playing a game on PlayStrategy!

As in previous years, there will be a birthday tournament to celebrate 3 years of PlayStrategy! The tournament is a medley and will run for 24 hours, on the whole of Friday 19th July. With Breakthrough and Mini Breakthrough, we are now up to 40 different games you can play on our platform, and all 40 will feature at some point in the tournament.

The birthday tournament is very much a drop in and out as you please tournament - we don't expect players to be able to play for the whole day! Can you beat last year's champion @oruro?