We've been playing this variant for some time now (we'll over 20 games) and have found it to provide greater depth, more tension and turn angst, and far more interesting play. The changes are as follows:

1) The game no longer ends when a player had placed all their dolmens (square blocks).

2) When an area is compleatly surrounded it is scored immediately and the scoring dolmens (square blocks) are returned to their players. Returned dolmens may then be placed in the normal fashion on future turns.

3) The game ends when any player has placed all of their stones (octagonal prisms), with each other player having one more turn after that point.

That's it.

I've watched you teach this game twice now without mentioning that what you were teaching was a variant, not the official rules.

Good to finally know.

Damn I'd forgotten that. Thanks. My bad.

FWVLIW the English rules, at least the translation I have in the box, are fairly ambiguous. It took Aaron Lawn pointint this out. He'd played one way, I'd played the other, so we played a few back-to-back games in both ways before coming down on the above side.