Vlepa Apps
An abstract strategy game from the 1960s with two rules and no luck at all. You win by gathering all your pieces into one connected group — and capturing your opponent's pieces usually helps them, not you.
Lines of Action is played by two people on an ordinary 8×8 chequered board with twelve pieces each. There is no dice, no hidden information and no setup phase — everything is on the board from move one.
What makes it unusual is that the board itself decides how far you can move. A piece travels exactly as many squares as there are pieces standing on the line it moves along, yours and your opponent's alike. Every move you make therefore changes what is legal for both players, on several lines at once.
The second idea is the goal. You are not trying to destroy anything — you are trying to gather. The first player whose pieces form a single connected group wins, and since captures remove pieces from the board, taking your opponent's material makes their job easier. Most games are decided in fifteen to twenty-five moves.
Black takes the twelve squares along the top and bottom edges; White takes the twelve along the left and right edges. The four corners stay empty. Black moves first, and players alternate. Passing is not allowed — if you have a legal move you must make one.
Connect all of your own pieces into one group. Two pieces belong to the same group if they touch — horizontally, vertically or diagonally. Your opponent's pieces never break a connection; they simply occupy squares. The first player to achieve this wins immediately.
A piece moves in a straight line: along its row, its column, or either diagonal. The distance is not your choice. Count every piece standing anywhere on that entire line — both colours, including the piece that is moving — and the piece must travel exactly that many squares.
Only the landing square and the squares passed through matter. Nothing is captured in flight.
As soon as one player's pieces form a single connected group, that player wins. Two details follow from this and decide a surprising number of games:
There is no stalemate rule to memorise: a player with no legal move passes, and repetition by mutual agreement is a draw. In practice draws are rare.
If you remember one thing: a capture is a concession. Every piece you take is one fewer piece your opponent has to connect.
Capture with a reason. Good captures remove a piece that was holding your opponent's shape together, or that was about to complete their group. Captures made simply because they were available tend to lose.
Play towards the centre. A central square touches eight neighbours; a corner touches three. Groups built in the middle need fewer moves to close, and edge pieces are the ones you will still be dragging home at move twenty.
Read the line counts before you commit. Moving one piece changes the occupancy of the row, the column and both diagonals it leaves, and of the four it arrives on — for both players. Emptying a line makes every future move along it shorter, which can hand your opponent a move they did not have a second ago.
Count your groups, not your pieces. The useful question at every turn is not "am I ahead on material" but "how many separate clumps do I have, and which single move merges two of them".
Lines of Action was invented by Claude Soucie in the 1960s and reached a wide audience when Sid Sackson included it in A Gamut of Games (1969), the book that rescued a whole generation of paper-and-board designs from obscurity. The Spiel des Jahres jury put it on their recommendation list in 1988.
It also had a second life in computer science. Lines of Action was an event at the Computer Olympiad for years, and the engines written for it — Mona, YL, and later Mark Winands' MIA — are a small, well-documented chapter in game-tree search research. For a game with two rules, it turned out to be a genuinely hard search problem.
Everything above describes classic Lines of Action, and that is the game you should learn first. But the two rules are unusually tolerant of being pulled about — change the shape of the board and the game stays coherent, it just stops being familiar. Our app ships four such variants, and they can be combined freely.
Eight pieces each on the small board, twelve on the standard one, sixteen on the large. 6×6 is sharp and quick — groups form in a handful of moves. 10×10 gives everything room to breathe and rewards long plans.
Instead of lining up along the edges, the pieces are scattered, with 180° rotational symmetry so neither side is handed an advantage. There is no opening to remember: every game begins as a position you have to read from scratch.
A few squares are taken out of the board altogether. Nothing can land on them and nothing can jump over them, so they cut lines in two and quietly rewrite the distances around them. Two holes on 6×6, four on 8×8, six on 10×10 — always placed symmetrically, never on an edge or in the middle.
Twenty or thirty seconds per move. Counting lines is exactly the sort of thinking that falls apart under a clock, which is the point.
In the app these unlock as you work through the campaign — the small board at level 7, scrambled starts at 11, black holes at 14, the timer at 30 and the large board at 39 — after which you can switch any of them on in a normal game against the AI or against a second player on the same device. The last campaign level stacks nearly all of them at once: a scrambled 10×10 board, six black holes and twenty seconds a move.
We built a free Lines of Action app for iOS and Android — the fastest way to try the game without setting up a board and teaching someone the rules first.
Four AI strengths, a fifty-level campaign that teaches the motifs one at a time, online play against a friend, 6×6 and 10×10 boards alongside the standard 8×8, and full offline play in 32 languages.
Free with banner ads. A one-time purchase of about $1.90 removes them — the exact amount depends on your country and currency. Nothing else is paywalled.