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Tigers & Goats

Tigers & Goats

Nepal's asymmetric board classic. Four tigers hunt twenty goats — eat five before the goats wall you in.

How to play

You play the four tigers, one on each corner of a five-by-five Alquerque board. The computer plays the goats, dropping them onto empty points one per turn until all twenty are down, after which they start walking.

Tap a tiger to select it, then tap a highlighted point. A green dot is a plain step along one of the drawn lines. A red dot is a jump: a goat is directly next to your tiger and the point immediately beyond it is empty, so landing there eats that goat. Note that diagonal lines exist only at the points where they are actually drawn — the corners and edge midpoints of each little square have fewer connections than the centre.

Capture five goats and you win. The goats can never capture you; they win by surrounding every tiger so that no tiger has a step or a jump available, or simply by outlasting your budget of sixty moves. The counter at the top shows how many you have left.

Each win adds one to your streak. A single loss resets it to zero, so the leaderboard rewards consistency, not one lucky hunt.

Tips & strategy

The single most useful habit is to stop thinking of your four tigers as four separate hunters. A lone tiger in open space threatens nothing, because the goats simply refuse to step next to it. Two tigers covering overlapping lines are what create a fork: a goat that blocks one jump opens the other. Almost every capture you get after the opening comes from a goat having no safe square left, not from the goats blundering.

Do not chase the first goat you see. During the placement phase the goats arrive one per turn, and early on they are scattered and easy to threaten but also easy to replace — the computer simply drops a new one somewhere safer. Captures made late, once all twenty are down and the goats have to move, hurt far more, because every goat removed then permanently loosens the wall.

Watch the corners, and specifically watch your own. A tiger in a corner has only three neighbours and three landing squares, so six well-placed goats can seal it forever. If your move budget is comfortable, spend a move walking a cornered tiger back toward the middle before the wall closes; a tiger with eight lines is worth more than a captured goat you took two moves too early.

Remember which points have diagonals. The centre and the four points around it are the richest squares on the board, and jumps through them are the ones goats most often forget to block. Conversely, a jump you are counting on along an edge may simply not exist, because that point has no diagonal drawn — check the lines before you commit, since a wasted move is one sixtieth of your entire hunt.