How do tigers get five captures?
Every capture needs the same pattern: your tiger, a goat on an adjacent point, and an empty point directly beyond that goat, all three sitting on one line the board actually draws.
So the tiger player's real job is not chasing goats. It is keeping empty points behind them. Early on the board is mostly empty and captures appear on their own. By the tenth goat you have to engineer them, and by the fifteenth you have to engineer them without walking into a dead end.
Opening moves
Leave the corners. A corner tiger has the fewest lines out of anywhere on the board, and the goat player's whole late game consists of pushing you back into one. Getting out early costs nothing while the board is empty.
Head for the diagonal points, and the centre if the goats have not already taken it. Those points give you up to eight directions, which means eight possible capture lines rather than four. A tiger with reach forces the goat player to defend in more directions at once.
Do not rush the first capture. There is no prize for capturing early, and a tiger that lunges at goat number two often ends up isolated in a region the goats then wall off.
Reading a goat formation
Look for goats with an empty point behind them. That is the entire skill.
Well-played goats stand in supported lines, so the point behind each one is occupied by the next goat along. Those chains are not attackable head-on. What you are hunting for is the end of a chain, a goat that has just moved out of position, or a gap that opens when the goat player is forced to move during the movement phase.
That last one is worth waiting for. Once all twenty goats are placed, the goat player must move a goat every single turn, and a tight formation with no spare room has to break itself. Sometimes the strongest tiger move is a quiet repositioning that hands the goats the obligation to move first.
Protecting your own mobility
Count your legal moves every turn — all four tigers together. If that number is falling, you are losing, regardless of how many goats you have taken.
Two rules follow from that. Keep your tigers spread out; two tigers in the same pocket block each other, and tigers cannot jump each other. And be very suspicious of a capture that lands you deeper into goat territory — the goat player may have offered it precisely to put you there.
Capturing is not compulsory in this game. That rule exists for exactly this situation: sometimes the correct move is to decline the goat and keep your options.
The endgame when you are behind
If the goats have built cleanly and you are on two or three captures with the board closing, direct attacks will not work. What still can work is pressure on the goat player's move obligation.
Position your tigers so that the goat player's legal moves all damage their own formation, and hold. Every goat move opens something. Your job is to be standing next to whatever opens, with an empty point behind it.
Keep an eye on repetition too. In the movement phase, a position repeated three times with the same side to move is a draw in this app — which, from a losing tiger position, is a result worth having.
Five mistakes that lose tiger games
- Staying in the corner. The corner is the easiest point on the board to be sealed into. Leave it in the first few moves.
- Taking every capture offered. Free goats are sometimes bait. Check where the jump lands you before you take it.
- Clustering your tigers. Tigers cannot jump each other, so two tigers in one pocket are each other's problem.
- Counting captures instead of moves. Four captures and three legal moves is a losing position. Mobility is the real score.
- Rushing the fifth goat. The last capture is the hardest one in the game because the board is at its most crowded. Set it up rather than lunging at it.
Now read what the other player is doing: winning as the goats. Most tiger losses are goat plans the tiger player did not recognise in time.