Tips oust

Overview

Oust can be a tricky game to get used to at first. The goal is to capture all your opponent's pieces, but initially there's no clear way to do this, since you can't capture or grow your own groups without your opponent's help in a sense.

Here's a brief overview of some strategic ideas and then if you wish you can read further below in a dedicated section below:

• Try to place your stones in a way that gives you more free moves than your opponent. A free move is a move that either can't be captured by your opponent, or if captured gives them little to no gain in the game.
• Restrict the opponents available moves. You don't always have to capture every stone and group of your opponent right away. If your group is strictly larger than a nearby group it could capture 2 beside 1, 3 beside 2 or 1 and so on.
• You can sacrifice some stones in the beginning of the game to make the opponents stones inefficient, that is they don't use the space around them effectively.
• Having too many more groups than your opponent can lose you the game.
• Allowing your opponent to have too large a group can lose you the game. It can be difficult, if not impossible to capture a group of about 20 stones on size 7 for instance.
• Having only small groups next to opponents larger groups can put you at a large disadvantage.
• Look out for the N+2 rule in order to take advantage of tactics, i.e. if you have a group two sizes larger than the opponents nearby groups, there may be some tactics to take advantage of. See below for examples of tactics (trapping, lead in captures, attachments).
• Some shapes are more efficient to merge groups later, but can be vulnerable to chain capturing. Be aware of this tradeoff!

Further sections detailing the above to be created and updated soon.