Commission for the Regulation of the Field · Founded MDCCCXCI

The Ninth Square Ordinances I–VIII, revised for the rollover · 14 November 1999

Every game worth the trouble of governing is, at bottom, a quarrel with a hole. Ours is more honest than most: we have put the hole in the middle of the field and given it a numeral it will never use.1 Eight players stand upon nine squares. The ninth square is not a square that happens to be empty; it is emptiness given a jurisdiction, a residence, and—since the Ordinances of 1904—a seat at the adjudication table.2

The Commission has never named the game. This is not modesty. A name completes a thing, and a thing completed has nothing left to do but be discussed. What follows are the rules; the name is printed on the plate below, which cannot be assembled in full, for reasons the plate itself makes plain.3

Ordinances of the Field

  1. Of the Field. The field is nine squares in a square. Eight numbered players occupy eight of them. The remaining square is the Vacancy, and it is a participant in good standing.
  2. Of Motion. A player may move only into the Vacancy, and only from a square that shares an edge with it. Therefore no player ever moves by their own permission; every action taken in this game is a courtesy extended by nothing at all.4
  3. Of Trespass. No player may pass over, through, or around another. The field is not a metaphor for society; the field is worse than that, and the resemblance is coincidental.
  4. Of the Object. The match concludes when the eight stand in their ordained sequence and the Vacancy has returned to the ninth square, whence it departed. The Vacancy is thus the only participant obliged to complete a circuit of the entire field before anyone may go home.5
  5. Of the Unattainable Hemisphere. Of all arrangements the field can display, precisely half can never be reached from any other half. A player who believes their position merely difficult may in fact be standing in a country with no roads to ours. Ordinance V forbids despair in such cases; it does not forbid it in others.6
  6. Of Economy. No arrangement lawfully reachable requires more than thirty-one moves to resolve. The Commission publishes this figure annually and each year receives correspondence disputing it from persons who have taken sixty.7
  7. Of the Official. The official does not adjudicate motion, which is self-evident, but tempo. An official may halt a match on the grounds that the players have begun to enjoy the middle and have stopped intending the end.
  8. Of the Rollover. The Commission has been advised that certain counting machines will, at midnight of the coming turn, mistake the century for its infancy. Our field carries no date and the Vacancy carries no numeral. It is therefore the sole element of this sport certified fully compliant, having nothing whatsoever that could be misread.8

Plate IX — The Field, in Play

Moves this match: 0 · Best on this machine: —
Arrow keys or a tap will do. The Vacancy invites you.

The plate bears the ordained sequence in the hand of our compositor. You will observe, upon resolving the field, that one ninth of the inscription is missing and always was. It rests on the tile that is not there. The Commission considers this the most persuasive argument the sport has ever made on its own behalf.9

An official mid-gesture. Ordinance VII holds that the gesture governs tempo, never motion; motion needs no one.
Plate A. An official, mid-adjudication. Tempo is the only thing here that can be called wrongly.
Open country, two riders. Ordinance V calls this the Unattainable Hemisphere: reachable to the eye, closed to the field.
Plate B. Country of the sort described in Ordinance V. Visible from here; not reachable from here.

Notes

  1. Ferrhaut, On the Ethics of the Empty Square (Ghent, 1911), p. 44: “A hole with an address is no longer an accident. It is an institution, and must be invited to dinner.” ↩
  2. The Vacancy has abstained from every vote taken since 1904 and has never been recorded as absent. ↩
  3. The Commission's Third Circular (1957) proposed the name Ninesquare and was defeated by a single ballot, cast, by tradition, from the empty chair. ↩
  4. Ordinance II is the whole philosophy of the sport compressed into one sentence, and the Commission asks that it not be embroidered onto anything. ↩
  5. Kovanda-Lys, The Circuit of the Absent Participant (Trieste, 1938), calculates the Vacancy's minimum honest itinerary at eight edges and calls it “a pilgrimage undertaken by a thing with no feet.” ↩
  6. Parity is the technical term. The Commission has resisted it for eighty years on the grounds that it makes an exile sound like arithmetic. ↩
  7. Correspondence on Ordinance VI is answered, but never first. ↩
  8. Minutes of the Extraordinary Session, 2 October 1999: the motion to certify the Vacancy was carried unanimously; the motion to certify everything else was tabled until January. ↩
  9. Two syllables. That is the entire withheld portion, and the Commission has resolved that a name completed is a name exhausted. Those who insist may consult the compositor's proof, which was never destroyed and has been left, as our press does with all discarded matter, lying open where anyone patient enough to look behind the plate may read it. ↩
By Order of the Commission

Ordinances drafted & defended by Wilhelmina Aschenbrenner-Poe
Adjudication tables compiled by Ottokar Ruiz-Vandermolen
Field diagrams and the hand upon Plate IX: Perpetua Lindqvist
Latin, and the resistance to it, by Fr. Anselm Bakewell
Rollover compliance audited by Dezső Farkas-Hume
Composed and pressed at the Ravensgate Works by Nell Aoyagi-Trench
Standing abstention: the Ninth Square

Photo credits: Photo by Lesli Whitecotton on Unsplash · Photo by Francisco Deane on Unsplash.