Sigil Strategy 101 – Stone Advantage, Dashing & Surrounding

(By Andreas Voellmer)

In these posts I’ll be giving a big-picture overview of how I approach strategic decision-making in Sigil.  The basic rules of the game are simple enough, but if you haven’t developed heuristics for which parts of the board to focus on, the decision trees that spring up in the midgame can be overwhelming.  

Hopefully these posts can provide some tools to cut a path through that jungle!  I’ll assume you already know the rules (if not, check out the tutorial at sigilbattle.com) and have played a few games. 

We’ll start by reviewing some of the basics, and progress to more advanced topics in the Sigillic Arts as we go.

Stone Advantage & Dashing

The goal of Sigil is to gain a 3-stone advantage over your opponent, and every decision has to be weighed in terms of how it affects the stone counts. 

If you have a stone advantage, you’re closer to winning the game, and you also have more resources to burn in a pinch. 

One way to use excess stones is by dashing– sacrificing two stones to make an extra move.  Under normal circumstances, this is a terrible idea, because it puts you down a stone!  You should virtually never dash in the early game, or just to fill a spell faster. 

The best time to dash is when you’re able to recoup the lost stone somehow through the extra move– perhaps you’re able to cast a spell for a stone advantage, or crush a surrounded enemy stone. 

“Dashing to crush” is a common play pattern that will leave the stone counts at parity.  But there are some circumstances where you can gain a long-term positional advantage by dashing, even though it puts you down a stone in the short term.  Perhaps the most common scenario like this is when you can surround a large group of enemy stones.

Surrounding Enemy Stones

At its heart, Sigil is about fighting your opponent for territory, and trying to surround enemy stones. 

Many fine-grained tactics involve patterns of stone placement to push enemy stones into positions where they can later be surrounded. 

Ideally, you’d like to keep your own stones on the “outside” and your opponent’s stones on the “inside”– if you can close off the perimeter around a group of enemy stones, you’ll probably win, because you can move into the group and crush a stone each turn. 

Even if the surrounded player tries to push your perimeter back, they’re only enlarging their surrounded group, and you’ll still be able to crush one each turn.

In this position, blue is done for– red will move into the blue group, crushing a stone and gaining a one-stone advantage each turn.  Even if blue tries to push back the red stones, they’re only making a larger surrounded group, and red can still crush a stone each turn.

In this position, though, blue has a way out.  Although their group is technically surrounded right now, blue can create an opening by pushing into one of the red stones in Flourish, and shoving it into one of the adjacent “void nodes” that aren’t part of any spell.

In the first scenario, red is guaranteed to win, so it doesn’t matter if they had to dash while getting there. 

In the second scenario, though, blue is still doing fine, so dashing wouldn’t have been worth the sacrifice.  To borrow some terminology from Go, the first blue group is “dead” and the second is “alive”.  An important skill in Sigil is being able to quickly distinguish dead groups of stones from live ones.

There’s a lot more to be said about the tactics of pushing/crushing enemy stones, but to summarize, the basic goal is to form a perimeter around the enemy and avoid getting trapped in such a perimeter yourself.

In the next installment we’ll learn more about Board Positioning & Backfilling Spells.

Strategy Tips:

• Assess your plans by measuring whether they will give you a stone advantage.  That’s always the goal.

• Surrounding a large group of enemy stones will give you a stone advantage by crushing on every future turn, which is a surefire path to victory.