1. Introduction

Most well-studied combinatorial games can be classified into a few broad classes.

TAKING AND BREAKING: Games played with piles of chips, in which the basic move is to take some chips and/or split some piles. They include Nim, Kayles, Dawson's Chess, other octal and hexadecimal games. Higher-dimensional variants include Maundy Cake, Cutcake, Eatcake, and Chomp.

CUTTING AND COLORING: Games played on (colored) graphs, in which the basic move is to cut out a small piece of the graph of the appropriate color, possibly changing other nearby pieces. They include Hackenbush, Col, Snort, Domineering, and Dots and Boxes.

SLIDING AND JUMPING: Games played with tokens on a grid-like board, in which the basic move is to move a token to a nearby spot, possibly by jumping over opponent's pieces, which may then be (re)moved. Examples include Ski- Jumps, Toads and Frogs, Checkers, and Konane.

At the Workshop, John Conway and Richard Guy suggested that studying entirely new classes of games, fundamentally different from all of these, might lead to a more thorough understanding of combinatorial game theory, and proposed a class of games loosely based on the African games Mancala and Wari, which they called “sowing games”. These games are played with a row of pots, each containing some number of seeds.