The classic Russian board game: each player starts in one corner and must bring every piece to the opposite corner, one step at a time or in long chains of jumps. You learn it in a minute and win by thinking ahead: build “roads” to jump along, slow your opponent down and never leave a piece behind.
Goal: Be the first to move all your pieces into your opponent's home, the opposite corner of the board.
The game is played on an 8×8 board. White starts in the bottom-left corner, Black in the top-right corner. At the start each player's pieces fill their own “home”, a group of squares in the corner: normally a 3×3 square, that is 9 pieces.
One player's home is the other player's destination. White moves first.
On your turn you move one piece, in one of two ways.
Step: the piece moves to an adjacent empty square, horizontally or vertically (in the diagonal variant also diagonally), forwards or backwards.
Jump: if a piece of either colour stands next to yours and the square right behind it, on the same line, is empty, your piece jumps over it and lands on that square. Nothing is captured. From there you may keep jumping, changing direction if you like, and stop wherever you want: a whole chain of jumps counts as a single move. A step cannot be combined with a jump.
You win by being the first to fill every square of your opponent's home with your own pieces. A single enemy piece still sitting in its home stops you from completing it until it moves away.
Both players must have made the same number of moves, so the game always ends on a move by Black. If White fills the home first, Black still has one move: if Black also completes the home, the game is a draw, otherwise White wins. If Black completes first, Black wins at once.
To stop anyone from blocking the game by keeping pieces at home, after 40 moves (30 in the diagonal variant) all your pieces must have left your home. If one or more remain after your 40th move, you lose the game. You also lose if, after your 40th move, you put a piece back into your home. With more than 9 pieces the limits grow in proportion (for example 71 moves with 16 pieces).
After each player's 80th move (the limit grows in proportion with more than 9 pieces), if nobody has finished, the pieces already inside the opponent's home are counted: the player with more wins, and equal numbers mean a draw.
If the same position occurs for the third time the game is drawn, unless someone still has pieces in their own home (the 40-move rule will settle that). A player with no legal move simply passes; if neither player can move, the pieces already home are counted as at move 80.
Pieces: 9 (3×3 square, classic), 10 (1-2-3-4 triangle, as in Halma), 12 (4×3 rectangle) or 16 (4×4 square).
Moves: classic (horizontal and vertical only) or diagonal (diagonals allowed too; the limit for leaving home drops to 30 moves).
Leave-home rule: the 40-move rule can be switched off.
Anti-mirror rule (tournament): by copying each of White's moves symmetrically through the centre of the board, Black can always secure at least a draw. With this rule Black may not copy more than 10 of White's first 12 moves: on Black's 11th and 12th moves the “mirror” move is simply not offered when it would break the limit.
Leave home early with long jumps and build “roads”: pieces standing in a line with one empty square between them, which other pieces can hop over one after another. Keep your group compact and do not leave stragglers: your slowest piece decides the game. Block your opponent's roads and, near the end, count how many moves each of you still needs. Remember that Black always has the last move.