The
Cordon

What the game is

The Cordon is the second game on the bureau's tactical desk — strategy games, not case files — and it seats two classic hunt games, both played rule-for-rule, because centuries of playtesting beat anything a bureau could invent. The hunt is Fox and Geese on the traditional cross board. The shift is the classic trap game on a hex field. In both, you are the watch and the runner is the quarry — fast, sharp, and heading for the dark.

The hunt — the old game, whole

The board is a cross. Every point connects to its neighbours along the streets, and the cross-hatched points carry diagonal alleys too — exactly the alternating lines of the traditional board. Your constables are the geese: on your turn one of them steps a single point along a line, forward or sideways, never backwards. That discipline is the whole game — every step is a commitment, so the line must advance together: rank by rank, no gaps, nobody left a point ahead alone.

The runner is the fox. It steps one point along any line, in any direction — or it jumps: over an adjacent constable, along a line, to the empty point beyond. The jumped constable is off the board. And the runner may keep jumping in the same turn while captures remain, cutting a chain through every gap you left. Jumping is never compulsory — a sharp runner declines bait — and one loose constable rarely costs one constable; it costs three.

The watch wins by pinning the runner: no step, no jump, nowhere left — which in practice means herding it into an arm of the cross, where the lines run out. The runner wins by thinning the watch below fighting strength, by freezing the line so no constable has a legal move, or by simply outlasting the shift's move budget while you shuffle. Caution is safe; caution never made an arrest.

The three crosses

The Yard (Junior Constable) is the small cross — 21 points and ten constables. Fewer squares means less room for the runner and a faster squeeze; it teaches the no-backwards discipline and the jump rule in ten minutes, usually the hard way. The Crossroads (Night Sergeant) is the traditional board of the classic — 33 points, seventeen constables, the runner in the centre — the game as it has been played for centuries. The Rookery (Watch Commander) grows the cross to 45 points and twenty-four constables: more ground to cover, more flock to keep in step, longer arms for the runner to double back through, and the same sharp teeth.

The shift — the trap game on the hex Lanes

The second table is the classic trap-the-runner game on the traditional field: 121 hexagonal cells, eleven by eleven. Hexes are the whole point — six exits from every cell, no corners to argue about, which is exactly what makes the runner slippery and a wall worth building properly. Some constables are already posted when the night is dealt: sixteen at Junior Constable, twelve at Night Sergeant, eight at Watch Commander. Each turn you post one more constable on any empty cell; the runner then takes one step toward the edge. Seal all six cells around it and the cordon holds. Let it stand on the tinted rim and it is gone.

Rank raises the runner, and shortens the wagon. The Junior Constable's runner is the classic greedy fox of the trap game — always the shortest road out — and the wagon is bottomless, with the bureau's par shown so you can measure yourself. The Night Sergeant's runner counts its roads: wall one side and it swings for the broad side early, stretching your line across the board; the wagon carries the bureau's own certified line plus four spare posts. The Watch Commander's runner reads your best answer before it steps — it assumes the most damaging post you could make on its road and picks the step that survives it, refusing corridors while width remains — and the wagon carries the bureau's line plus a single spare. Run the wagon dry with the runner still standing and the night is lost.

Every dealt night is certified winnable inside its wagon. Because the runner is deterministic — same board, same step, always — the bureau plays each layout before dealing it: the generator finds an actual winning sequence of posts against that rank's runner, then spends extra effort shortening it so the par is honest, and the wagon is sized from that line. The promise on the sheet is therefore real at every rank: if the runner breaks the cordon or the wagon runs dry, a post went to the wrong cell — take the night back with Undo and find the cell it should have been. Nights carry numbers (CD-N4XK2 and friends) and the same number always deals the same night.

Reading the board like a watch commander

• In the hunt: walk the wall, don't send scouts. A lone constable ahead of the line is not pressure, it is lunch — and the chain-jump means the constables behind them are lunch too. Advance the whole rank a step at a time and the runner has nothing to bite.
• Watch the diagonals twice as hard. Half the points carry alleys and half don't. A line that looks solid on the streets can be wide open along a cross-hatched alley — check every marked point beside your line before you commit a step you can never take back.
• Herd toward an arm, then shorten it. The runner cannot be pinned in open ground while it has lines to spare. Push it up an arm of the cross where the board itself closes two sides, and spend your wall on the rest.
• Count the clock like a third player. The hunt's move budget punishes shuffling. If a move neither advances the wall nor covers a threat, it was the runner's move, not yours.
• In the shift: cut the road, don't chase the runner. The runner always takes its shortest way out — so the winning post is rarely next to it. Post where its road squeezes between old posts, and one cell buys you three.
• Build the wall before you build the cage. First sever every road to the rim — the moment no path reaches the edge, the runner is running on hope. Then, and only then, tighten the pocket a cell at a time, and never leave a crack behind you.

The runner across the desk — and why it plays fair

Two runners, two temperaments. The hunt's fox plays sharp: it takes what you hang — in chains, when your gaps line up — sets forks so that covering one constable uncovers another, and refuses any point where a single constable step would pin it. The classic is famously fox-friendly against a careless flock, and this fox does it justice. The shift's runner is the opposite kind of dangerous: utterly predictable — always the shortest road to the edge, the same step on the same board every time — and still hard to stop, because prediction is not the same as prevention. Out-thinking a machine you can read perfectly is the whole pleasure of the trap game.

The tactical desk's standing rule: the computer never cheats. There is no hidden information in either game, and both runners read exactly the public board you do — nothing more.

The tactical desk and the case files

Everything else in this bureau is a case file: a puzzle generated fair, proved to have exactly one answer, and solvable by logic alone. The tactical desk is the other kind of evening — games you can win or lose, where the promise is a fair opponent and complete public rules rather than a provable answer. The Cordon's two hunts each add their own pedigree: the hunt is proved by centuries of players, and every shift night is proved by the bureau itself — dealt only after a winning line has actually been found against the runner that will play it. The bureau supplies the boards, the pieces and honest opponents; the rest is the oldest playtest there is.

Questions from the tactical desk