The history of Surakarta

A Javanese game with an undocumented past

Surakarta is named after the city of Surakarta — also called Solo — in Central Java, Indonesia, one of the two courts of the Javanese royal tradition. The game is Indonesian, and beyond that its early history is essentially unrecorded.

Claims that the game dates to the sixteenth century or earlier circulate widely, but they rest on tradition rather than on documents or archaeology. What can be said confidently is that it was played in Java as a folk game before it reached Europe, and that its board — with those looping corner arcs — is unlike anything in the European or Chinese traditions.

1970: published in France

Surakarta reached the West in 1970, when it was published in France under its Indonesian name. It was picked up by the games-collecting world and appeared in English-language collections — notably in Sid Sackson's writing, where it is called Roundabouts, a fair description of what the board does.

What made collectors sit up was the capture mechanism. Game historians have described Surakarta's loop capture as possibly unique — no other recorded traditional board game captures by sending a piece round a circuit. Most abstract games capture by adjacency, by jumping, by surrounding or by replacement along a straight line; Surakarta does none of these.

Why the loops make it a good game

The loop rule does three things at once, which is why a game with two rules stays interesting:

• Threats come from far away. Danger arrives from the other side of the board, along a line you were not watching. There is no such thing as a safe corner.
• Blocking is capture prevention. Because a capture path must be completely clear, one piece placed anywhere along a circuit can shut the whole threat down — including one of your own pieces.
• Material and mobility conflict. Pieces protect each other by blocking lines, so a crowded board is safe and an empty one is lethal. As pieces come off, the game gets sharper rather than calmer.

The result is a game that plays nothing like its appearance. A beginner sees a crowded board and assumes a slow manoeuvring game; in fact a single overlooked circuit can lose a piece on move four.

Surakarta in the computer age

Surakarta has become a regular fixture in computer game-playing competitions, including the Computer Olympiad, where programs compete at a range of abstract games. It is attractive for research because the rules are trivial to implement, the branching factor is moderate, and the capture structure produces positions that resist simple evaluation — a piece's safety depends on the entire circuit, not on its neighbours.

That same property is what makes it worth playing. Surakarta is one of the very few traditional games where the standard chess-player instinct — look at what is next to what — is actively misleading.

Common questions