My favorite tabletop game of all time is Onitama, a martial arts-themed, chess-like game by Arcane Wonders. I was so inspired by its simplicity and elegance that I wanted to incorporate it in a story of mine, and this became the catalyst for a concept I called “the Lotus Gambit,” as well as a playable, real-life variant for the game.
PLAYING ONITAMA
In Onitama, players control four “student” pieces and one “master” piece on a 5×5 grid board. Players can win by either moving their master to the starting place of the opposing master (the “Way of the Stream”) or by capturing the opposing master with any of their pieces (the “Way of the Stone”). Like chess, you capture a piece by moving one of your pieces onto the same square.
However, unlike chess, your pieces don’t have set movements. Instead, there are five cards with different patterns on them, each of which is named for a different animal. When you use a card, you move one of your pieces according to its pattern, then pass that card to your opponent. Players always have two cards in front of them, giving them some flexibility in what moves they can make.
One of the things that makes the base game so fascinating is that there’s two levels to it–there’s the position of pieces on the board, then there’s the flow of cards between players. Will you use a valuable card to get a better position, even if it means giving it to your opponent? What card will you get next? Should you make your big move now, or wait for a more favorable card to sustain your advance?
Onitama is a game of deceptively simple decisions. It’s also about predicting your opponents moves. The latter part is what really sparked something in me.
CLOCKWORK AND DARK WOODS
In chess, the first few moves on both sides usually follow predetermined formulas. There are whole books on opening moves, and experienced players are intimately familiar with the optimal ones for different strategies. This means that the game essentially moves along like clockwork for a while–entirely predictable.
Eventually, however, the perfect patterns are disrupted by a player making a move that was not entirely expected. From there, it’s not certain what the player intends to do next, and this is where analysis, prediction, and intuition takes over. This is also where chess crosses over from being a perfect mathematical equation to a contest between minds, where illusions, feints, and doubts are equally as important as the objective reality on the board.
In the words of Mikhail Tal: “You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.”
Tal seems to be expressing that victory in chess is achieved by understanding how to exploit your opponent’s mind, rather than simply making better moves on the board.
Imagine if you could anticipate each one of your opponent’s moves and their reactions to yours. If you could do that, then the game would be won from the start. But how could you know every single move, unless you knew that person’s mind inside and out?
FOLDING A PAPER LOTUS
This is something I’ve spoken about before, but I’m fascinated by the idea that no piece of origami can be folded perfectly. The closer you look, going all the way down to the microscopic, the more deviations you find from the ideal, “perfect” form. The closer you magnify those little flaws, the bigger they become in your perspective, until you start to see how each one is unique. And I’m enamored with the idea that, if you knew how, you could learn something about the person who folded that piece from those flaws, just like you can tell something about a person by the way they talk, or eat.
You could argue that deviations from perfection are what make us distinct personalities. The cracks in our souls manifest themselves in everything we do, and you only need someone with the right mind and eye to interpret those cracks, like a geologist studying a seismograph. Fortune-tellers and confidence men are experts at doing cold readings and picking up on someone’s emotional state, but what if you could go deeper, and gain insight into the core of a person’s being just by observing the folds they made in a piece of paper?
If you could go that deep, you’d be able to see the fundamental traits of that person’s personality and identity. And if quantifying a person’s identity is just a matter of measuring their deviations from perfection, then you could use that knowledge to create a model that would allow you predict what they would do in a given situation.
This is the central idea of “The Lotus Gambit.”
THE GAMBIT
In chess, one possible tactic is a gambit, in which a player sacrifices a piece in order to gain some kind of advantage. It’s up to the other player to accept or decline the gambit, depending on whether they think they can exploit the situation to their advantage instead. In my conception, the Lotus Gambit goes like this:
One person challenges another to a game of Onitama with the following stipulation: the gambit-maker will wear a blindfold the entire time and move their pieces without seeing their opponent’s moves. If they win, they get whatever they desire from their opponent. If they lose, their opponent can take whatever they want from the gambit-maker. Here, the “gambit” is taking place outside of the actual game and is used to lure the opponent into accepting terms that they would otherwise not accept.
From there, the gambit-maker asks their opponent to fold a paper lotus. When they are finished, the gambit-maker examines it, blindfolds themselves, and the game begins. If they win, the “gambit” is successful.
Now, you might ask “If the opponent knows the gambit-maker is going to be anticipate their every move, couldn’t they try to make moves that are the opposite of what they would normally do, or attempt to anticipate their opponent’s anticipations?”
Well, that might be a little more complicated, but in theory, a skilled gambit-maker would be able to anticipate that reaction as well (based on their knowledge of their opponent) and play accordingly. And if the opponent anticipated that anticipation of their anticipations…well, you can see how meta-games develop within meta-games, becoming infinitely recursive.
THE Seeker – A VARIANT ONITAMA GAME
Now, obviously you can’t execute the Lotus Gambit in real life (unless you really can anticipate someone perfectly), so how can you apply its principles to a real game of Onitama? Well, I created a variant of the game that allows you to get close to the spirit of it. The variant, called “Seeker,” is played like this:
One side has all of its normal pieces, but its “master” can’t move from their starting spot. The other side only has its “master,” but that master’s movements are invisible to the opponent. Instead, the player with the invisible master puts their master on a separate board hidden from their opponent and uses it to keep track of the master’s position.
From there, the game is played normally, with players choosing cards, passing them along, and attempting to capture each other’s masters. If the invisible master captures a student piece, that piece is removed from the board as normal. The player with the full set of pieces is the “seeker,” while the player with the invisible master is the “hidden.”
The seeker’s key to victory is anticipating the hidden’s movements by figuring out what kind of player they are and what kind of risks they will take. They need to pay careful attention to the cards used by the hidden to narrow down their position, but as the game goes on, the sheer number of possibilities can be overwhelming. Eventually, intuition begins to play a large role, and this is where the spirit of the Lotus Gambit comes into play: making moves based on your assessment on your opponent’s character.
Meanwhile, the hidden needs to choose their moves carefully to avoid being caught, while feinting their opponent into thinking they’re somewhere they’re not. The hidden thrives on playing mind games and exploiting their opponent’s assessments of them, which are expressed in their movements. They are everywhere and nowhere in their opponent’s mind, and that uncertainty allows them to exploit their opponent’s fears: “Have they made the expected move, or are they doing the opposite to throw me off? Are they expecting me to anticipate the unlikelier move?”
If the seeker isn’t careful, the game can quickly spiral out of control in their mind, all while the hidden capitalizes on the confusion.
Conclusion
In my mind, the Lotus Gambit (and the Onitama variant) aren’t about beating someone at a game through superior skill, but rather test one’s ability to understand their opponent. As many martial artists can tell you, sparring matches between experienced practitioners are as much mental as they are physical.
To take this a step further, consider what the Lotus Gambit means when it comes to being an invincible martial artist (or chess player): if you know your opponent and can anticipate and counter each of their moves before they even make them, the contest is over before it began. If your opponent recognizes this before or during the match, what can they do? They can’t defeat you, so all they can do is surrender.
In this way, someone who is invincible doesn’t have to fight (or play) anymore. They’ve transcended the contest or game, and when someone does challenge them without recognizing the truth of the situation, the invincible person isn’t really beating them–their opponent has provided them with all the correct moves to defeat them. And so the “game” collapses as the line between opponents dissolves.