Streak
0
Best
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Every turn is two moves: a quiet slide on your own board, then the same slide on a board of the other colour, where you can shove one stone off.
Four small four by four boards sit in a square. The two with the blue edge are yours, the two grey ones belong to the rival, and every board is either light, marked with a circle, or dark, marked with a filled dot. All four boards start with four of your stones along one edge and four of the rival's along the other.
A turn is always two slides, and the two have to match. The first is the quiet one: pick a stone on one of your own boards and slide it one or two squares in any of the eight directions. Every square it passes through, and the square it lands on, has to be empty. Nothing is jumped and nothing is pushed.
The second slide uses the same direction and the same distance, but on a board of the other colour. This one is the attack. A single rival stone standing in the path is shoved along in front of you, and if it runs out of board it is removed from the game. You may never shove two stones at once, and you may never shove one of your own, so a crowded lane simply blocks the attack.
You win the game the moment the rival has no stones left on any one board. You do not have to clear all four, which is why a single board can become a race that decides everything. Each win adds one to your streak and the next rival searches one step deeper, so the run keeps getting harder and it ends the first time one of your own boards is emptied.
The two slides are one decision, not two. Beginners pick the attack they want and then hunt for a quiet slide that matches; that is backwards, because the quiet slide is the one with no alternatives once you have committed. Look at your two home boards first and ask which directions and distances are even available to you, then see which of those buy you something on the other colour. A beautiful shove you cannot legally pair with is not a move at all.
Blocking is as strong as pushing. You can never shove two stones at once, so a pair of stones standing in a line is immune to being pushed along that line, and a stone sitting with its back to the edge cannot be knocked off if a friend stands directly behind it. Two of your stones in a corner diagonal are close to untouchable. Spend a move on that shape early on the board you are weakest on, and the rival has to spend several to unpick it.
Count stones per board, not in total. You lose when a single board runs dry, so being down eleven to eight overall means nothing if your worst board still has three. The real danger number is two: with two stones left on a board, the rival needs two clean pushes, and those can come from a single well-chosen direction. As soon as any of your boards drops to two, treat every turn as a rescue and use the quiet slide to feed that board rather than to set up an attack.
Watch which colour you are feeding. Because the attack must land on the opposite colour from the quiet slide, every quiet slide you make on a light board is an announcement that your attack is coming on a dark one. If the rival's weak board is dark, slide quietly on light boards; if you have been sliding on one colour all game, the rival can guard only two boards and ignore the rest. Alternating the colour you start from is the cheapest way to keep both of the rival's boards under threat at once.