Your turn — move a piece
A pure, elegant race across the board — the strategy at the heart of Chinese Checkers, distilled to a one-on-one duel. You and the AI each begin with six pieces huddled in opposite corners, and the goal is simply to be first to move all of yours into the corner the other one started from. There is no capturing; pieces never leave the board. Instead the magic is in the jump: hop over any piece, friend or foe, into the empty square beyond, and chain those hops together to vault a single piece clear across the board in one glorious turn. Building a ladder of well-placed pieces to leap along — for yourself, while denying the same to your rival — is the whole game. Easy to grasp, surprisingly tactical, and decided in a few brisk minutes.
The board is eight by eight. Your six orange pieces start clustered in one corner, and the AI's six blue pieces start in the corner diagonally opposite. You move first.
On your turn you make one move with one piece. Tap a piece of yours and every square it can reach lights up green; tap one of them to move there. A piece can move in two ways. The simple way is a single step: slide it to any of the eight squares touching it — sideways, straight or diagonal — as long as that square is empty.
The powerful way is the jump. If a piece sits right next to another piece, of either colour, and the square directly beyond that piece is empty, you may hop over it and land there. And jumps chain: from the square where you land, if another jump is available, you can take it too, and again, bounding a single piece halfway across the board in one turn. (You don't have to take every jump — you can stop the chain wherever you like, but the move ends once you settle.)
Nothing is ever captured — the piece you jump simply stays put. The board only gets more crowded, which is what makes those long jump chains possible.
You win the instant all six of your pieces occupy the AI's starting corner; the AI wins if it fills yours first. Beat it to extend your streak — the AI plays loosely at first and tightens up the longer your streak runs.
Lay stepping-stones, don't sprint. A lone piece can only step one square at a time, but a piece with friends spaced one gap apart can leap from one to the next in a single bound. Before charging forward, spend a move or two arranging a chain you can hop along — a good ladder is worth several plain steps.
Use the AI's pieces as springboards too. Jumps work over any piece, so an enemy checker sitting in your path is a gift: vault over it. As the board fills toward the middle, the densest clusters are where the longest chains live, so steer your run through the crowd, not around it.
Don't leave a straggler. Victory needs every last piece home, and the final one is always the slowest because the board has emptied of stepping-stones by then. Keep your group roughly together and bring up the rear early, rather than racing your leaders and abandoning a piece to crawl across alone.
Mind the doorway. Both finish corners are tight, and pieces already parked there can block the squares your last arrivals need. Fill the far cells of the target corner first and the near ones last, so you never wall yourself out of your own home.