Wins
0
Best
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A hex board where you may only build where you can see. The stack you place is as tall as the number of your own pieces looking at that cell.
From any cell, look along the six straight directions of the hex grid. The first piece you meet in each direction is the one that cell can see; everything behind it is blocked. That is the whole rule the game is built on.
Tap a cell and the board marks which of your pieces are looking at it. The stack you place there is exactly as tall as that number, so a cell seen by three of your pieces gets a stack of three. A cell no piece of yours sees cannot be played at all.
If the cell already holds a piece — yours, the rival's, or the grey one in the middle — your new stack must be strictly taller than what is there, and it takes the cell over. That is the only way to capture.
Lose every piece and you see nothing, so you can never place again. Each level gives you fewer moves than the last; when they run out the cells are counted and you need more than the rival to continue. Your score is the number of levels you clear.
Height comes from spread, not from stacking. Two of your pieces on the same straight line only ever count as one, because the nearer one blocks the farther one. If you want a tall stack somewhere, you need pieces approaching it from different directions, and the cheapest way to get them is to place around the edge of your territory rather than inside it.
Blocking is as strong as building. A height-one piece dropped directly in front of a rival piece cuts that piece's line to everything beyond it in that direction, which can quietly remove one from the height the rival could have placed on several cells at once. When you are deciding between a big stack and a small blocking one, count how many of the rival's future placements each option shrinks.
The knockout rule shapes everything. With no pieces on the board you see nothing, so you can never place again and the game is simply over for you. That makes your last two or three pieces far more valuable than their count suggests, and it makes a cluster dangerous: a single well-placed capture can take the piece that was feeding sight to all the others. Keep at least one piece somewhere the rival cannot reach cheaply.
As the levels tighten, stop thinking in cells and start thinking in moves. Late on you may only get eight or ten placements for the whole game, so a cell that the rival can take back next turn is close to worthless. Prefer cells that are hard to overwrite — ones where your stack is already tall, or where the rival's sight is blocked — and prefer cells that raise the height you could place elsewhere afterwards.