Streak
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Best
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An old French hunt game on a tiny 11-point board: three hounds that may never step backwards try to corner a single quick hare. You play the hounds and the hare in turn, and every win in a row makes the computer slip less often.
Tap one of your pieces, then tap a ringed point to move it one step along a line. When you are the hare, the hare is already selected, so a single tap moves it. The hounds always move first, and you and the computer then take turns.
The board has 11 points: a 3×3 block in the middle with one extra point at the left end and one at the right end. The three hounds start on the left end and the two left corners; the hare starts on the right end. A hound steps one point to the right, up or down along a line, but never to the left. The hare steps one point in any direction. Nobody is ever captured.
The hounds win the moment the hare has nowhere to move. The hare wins if it gets to the left of every hound, because hounds can never come back for it. The hare also wins if the hounds make 10 up-or-down moves in a row; the counter above the board shows how many they have made, and any move to the right resets it to zero. A side that cannot move at all loses.
Your first game is with the hounds, the next with the hare, and so on, alternating while you keep winning. A win adds one to your streak; a loss ends the run. Every game ends: the hounds can only move right ten times in total, and the stalling rule limits everything else.
With perfect play the hounds always win — a computer search of every position shows they can trap the hare within 12 of their own moves from the start. So as the hounds, the game is about not wasting that advantage. Advance as a connected wall rather than racing one hound ahead: a hound that runs forward on its own leaves a gap behind it that the hare can slip through, and that hound can never come back to close it.
The centre point is joined to eight others, more than any other point, and whoever holds it controls the board. As the hounds, try to put a hound on the centre early and keep the other two on the top and bottom rows beside or behind it. Watch the vertical-move counter: up-and-down moves are how you wait for the hare to commit, but ten in a row loses, so plan a step to the right before you reach eight or nine.
As the hare you are fighting a side that wins with best play, so your job is to give the hounds chances to go wrong. Stay near the middle where you have the most exits, and shuffle between points that force the hounds to answer with vertical moves — every forced up-or-down move brings the stalling count closer to ten. The instant a hound steps right and leaves a hole on the left, dash through it: once you are left of all three, the game is yours.
The computer slips less after each win in your streak, so the hare games get harder as the run grows. Early on it makes a random move fairly often; by a streak of about 20 it slips less than once a game. Use the hound games to bank wins cleanly, and treat every hare game as a hunt for the one mistake you need.