Fitchneal usually confers the advantage to the player that moves first. A second player win is generally only possible if the first player doesn't have a strategy/clueless/new.

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This is possibly a good example of what I'm talking about. It _appears_ the first player has the advantage, at least to humans. But it could turn out that there's an overpowering but difficult deep strategy that really gives the second player an advantage, if only he had the wit to discover it.

This sort of stuff happens in wargaming all the time. Folks will play a wargame, and come to the conclusion "Game X is imbalanced in favor of side Y", and that will become the standard belief until someone comes around and shows a strategy the destroys side Y using the standard strategy. Then folks change to "Game X is imbalanced in favor of side Z" and we iterate.

Now, many games like chess have stabilized to the point where we're pretty confident in saying one side has the advantage - but this is a different sort of confidence than we would have about making claims for games like tic-tac-toe, Nim, or checkers, where we can prove what the results would be regardless of how the opponent plays.

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If I understand you, I think Fitchneal is probably a pretty good example of that. The object being to get the king off the board, if the first player moves appropriately, it is very very difficult for the second player to meet the winning conditions. Generally what winds up happening is a stalemate.

Aren't the morris games heavily weighted toward first player? I seem to remember sitting in on a discussion about strategy in morris games and that being discussed at some length.

Fox and Geese have varying weight, depending on how many foxes and how many geese. That isn't the same thing, tho.

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There's a whole field of mathematics that studies two-player, zero-sum, perfect-information, turn-based games (like chess, checkers, tic-tac-toe, etc. where both sides can see the whole board and there is no randomness). There's even an algebra of games: if X and Y are games, each with its own board, then X+Y is defined as the game with BOTH boards in which the first player can decide whether to make a move on the X board or the Y board. Based on this, one can define subtraction, multiplication, division, square roots, etc. as operations on games (which is the sort of abstract nonsense that mathematicians like me love).

Anyway, there are plenty of games in which the second player wins, if both play perfectly. I don't think anybody has completely analyzed chess, but the borderline between first-player-wins and second-player-wins is so delicate that it's quite possible that Black wins at chess.

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The parry-riposte is a huge part of modern fencing, but in historical European martial arts, it doesn't come up very often; instead, historical authors describe and advocate counterattacks that defend and offend with a single action (what Italians call "stessi tempo" and Germans call "meisterhauen")

Both Italian and German authors find these single-time counterattacks so effective, that they substantially build their martial systems around them, so that the focus as a fighter is on creating a situation in which any action the opponent makes will fall into one of several prepared counters. Italians spend a lot of time describing the effectiveness of such positions (the 16th and 17th century authors, at least, often use the term "constraining" to describe it), though the Germans conceptualize it rather differently ("crowding in on his every opening")...

Anyway, pretty well zugzwang-y.

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