AbigailII: If you are correct, then one could kill two birds with one stone and correct Abalone's defect, which is that it is impossible to break through the opponent's wall. This means that Abalone is a lot of fun at first, and as soon as one gets better it becomes awfully dull.

Long ago we experimented a bit with alternate rules, and the best we came up with was to change the start position by inserting two of each player's spheres in the middle of the opponent's position. The reason for it is that it seemed still impossible to break through when one sphere up, but possible when two spheres up. I am not sure of that though.