Halma with 13-piece camps

This version keeps the full 16×16 board and the two-player race, but each player starts with 13 pieces instead of 19. The camps are the ones the four-player game uses in every corner: four rows of 4, 4, 3 and 2 squares, counted from the corner outwards. Here only two of them are in play, in opposite corners, so the two armies race along the long diagonal as in the standard game.

The moves and the goal are unchanged. On your turn you move one piece, either one step to an empty neighbouring square in any of the eight directions, or a chain of jumps over single pieces of either colour, stopping after any jump. Nothing is captured. You win by being the first to fill the opponent's 13-square starting camp with your own pieces, and a piece that has entered that camp may move within it but never leave it.

With six fewer pieces each, the board is emptier. There are fewer stepping stones, so long chains of jumps take more preparation, and a group of pieces that strays from the others is easier to strand. The camps are also smaller and more compact, so packing the last pieces into the goal takes fewer moves. Games are shorter than with 19 pieces, and the race rewards moving the army together.

Halma was invented in 1883 or 1884 by George Howard Monks, an American surgeon at Harvard Medical School, inspired by the English game Hoppity of 1854; its name is the Greek word for a jump. From the start it was played by two or four players on a board of 16×16 squares. In the two-player game each camp holds 19 squares in opposite corners. In the four-player game each of the four corners is a camp of 13 squares, and each player has as many pieces as their camp has squares.

Playing two against each other with the four-player camps is a simple way to shorten the game on the full board. It is a rearrangement of the published camps rather than a separately documented tradition, and no inventor or date is recorded for it.