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Drop a die, swallow the neighbours that add up to six or less. Fill the board and count.
Tap an empty square to drop a die. If the dice touching it can be grouped so their pips total six or less, you must capture: tap two or more of them and press Capture. They leave the board and your new die shows their total. If no such group exists, a plain 1 lands there instead. When the 25th square fills, whoever owns more dice wins the match. Beat a rival and the next one searches deeper while your move clock shrinks; run out of time and the match is lost. Your score is the number of rivals beaten.
The first thing to unlearn is that capturing is always good. Every die you take off the board is replaced by one of yours showing their total — and a die showing 5 or 6 can never be eaten again, because no group containing it can stay under seven. So a big capture is a double move: it wins you material now and plants a permanent wall. A small capture, say two 1s making a 2, wins you the same one die of material but leaves a soft target your rival can feed on next turn.
That is the whole tension. Twos and threes are food; fives and sixes are furniture. Where you place a low die matters more than how many dice you own halfway through the board, because ownership at move twelve tells you almost nothing about ownership at move twenty-five.
Capture is compulsory, and that is the sharpest weapon in the game. If a square would force your rival into a capture they do not want, they have no way to decline it. Look for cells where the only available group is a bad one for them — taking two of their own big neighbours off the board, or committing them to a spot you were going to want. Setting these traps is more reliable than counting material.
Corners and edges have fewer neighbours, so dice there are structurally safer: a corner die has only two neighbours and can rarely be part of a group under seven once either of them grows. Late in the match, when the board is nearly full, count the empty cells and work out who is forced to move where. With an odd number of squares the parity is fixed from the start, and the last few placements are often decided long before you make them.