Wins
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Best
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A West African board game where every jump takes two: the piece you leap over, and one more of your choice.
Each side has twelve pieces in hand and the five by six board starts empty. On your turn you may drop one piece from your hand onto any empty square, step one of your pieces up, down, left or right into an empty square, or jump an adjacent rival piece and land on the empty square directly beyond it.
A jump captures the piece you leaped over, and then you take one more rival piece of your own choosing from anywhere on the board. That second capture is the whole game: one jump is worth two pieces, so leaving your own pieces side by side is what loses.
You clear the level when the rival has nothing left, neither on the board nor in hand. If the move limit runs out first, whoever still has more pieces in total takes the level.
Each level gives the rival a deeper search and gives you a shorter move limit, so the run always ends. Your score is the number of levels you clear.
Keep your pieces a knight's distance apart, never side by side. Two of your pieces in a row is an invitation: the rival jumps one and then simply takes the other as the free second capture. Most losses here are not clever combinations, they are two pieces that drifted next to each other three moves ago.
Holding pieces in hand is safer than it looks. A piece in your hand cannot be captured, and dropping one is a full move that costs nothing in position, so there is no hurry to empty your hand. Against a rival who is ahead on material, dropping slowly and forcing them to come to you is usually better than racing to fill the board.
When you do jump, think about the free capture before you think about the jump. Do not take the nearest piece out of habit. Take the piece that is about to threaten you, or the one that anchors a group, or — late in the level, when the rival's hand is empty — whichever piece leaves them with the fewest legal moves at all.
The move limit is a real weapon when you are ahead. If you have more pieces in total, a quiet shuffle that creates no targets wins the level just as surely as a capture does, and shorter limits at higher levels make that easier, not harder. Count your total against theirs before every risky jump.