Star 1983

Star is a two-player abstract strategy game designed by Ea Ea as the third out of four games by him extending or generalizing Hex. The four games in publication order: The Game of Y, Poly-Y, Star, and *Star. See further details of the developmental history at the designer's homepage.

The game board for Star is a hexagon with uneven side lengths made up of hexagonal spaces (e.g. alternating edge length of 6 and 7 hexes). On the board, the playing area is surrounded by a ring of "partial edge hexagons" used for final scoring. The two players (black and white) takes turns to place one stone (in their color) on any un-occupied hex space in the playing area. The goal of the game is to create "stars" - groups of connected stones belonging to one player that touches at least three partial edge hexagons. Each star has a score of the number of partial edge hexagons it touches minus two. The final score of a player is the sum of points for all the stars of that players color. The player with the highest score wins. The sum of the two players score is constant for any particular board.

From Wikipedia: Star is a two-player abstract strategy board game developed by Craige Schensted (now Ea Ea). It was first published in 1983 in Games magazine. It is a connection game, related to games such as Hex, Y, Havannah, and TwixT. Unlike these games, however, the result is based on a player having a higher final score rather than achieving a specific goal. He has since developed a slightly more complicated version called *Star with better balance between edge and center moves, writing "*Star is what those other games wanted to be."