How to play Yuego
Yuego is an abstract strategy game for two players, part of the same family as the classic mill game. The goal is easy to state and hard to master: leave your opponent with fewer than three pieces on the board, or with no legal move at all, and you win.
The board
The board has 16 points, arranged as two concentric squares connected by four lines that join the midpoint of each side. Each player has 6 pieces — white and black — which get placed and moved along the board's intersections, never inside the empty squares between the lines.
Phase 1: placement
The game starts with an empty board. Players take turns placing one piece at a time on any free intersection — there's no requirement to place them near your own pieces or in any particular order. This phase lasts until both players have placed all 6 of their pieces.
Whenever placing a piece completes a mill — three of your own pieces in a row along any of the board's marked lines — you capture one of your opponent's pieces, whichever one you choose: no piece is protected, not even ones that are already part of an opponent's own mill.
Phase 2: movement
Once all 12 pieces are on the board, the movement phase begins. From here on, on your turn you move one of your pieces to an adjacent empty intersection, following the board's lines. Just like during placement, completing a mill with that move earns you a capture of any opponent's piece.
One important rule worth knowing: if you move a piece out of a mill and then move it right back into that same spot (the "back and forth" move), the mill forms again and earns you another capture — it doesn't have to be a different mill each time.
Free flying
Once a player is down to just 3 pieces on the board, they're no longer restricted to adjacent squares: that piece can "fly" to any free intersection on the board, no matter the distance. It's the last real chance to turn around a game that's slipping away.
How to win
There are two ways to win a game of Yuego:
- By elimination: if your opponent is down to fewer than 3 pieces on the board, they can no longer form any new mill, and lose automatically.
- By blockade: if it's your opponent's turn and they have no legal move available (all their pieces are completely surrounded), they lose the game, even if they still have plenty of pieces left.
Draws
A game of Yuego can also end in a draw, in two specific situations: if 50 moves in a row go by with no captures at all, or if the exact same board position (same pieces, same player to move) repeats three times over the course of the game. Both rules exist so that a stuck game doesn't drag on forever.
Now, let's play
That's everything you need for your first game. You can start against the AI to get comfortable with the board at your own pace, play locally with someone on the same computer, or find a game online against another player.