Slightly in the vein of Teeko, Dao is a much more modern and (compared to Teeko, anyway) more complicated take on the alignment genre. I’m not going to lie; I don’t love this game. I prefer Teeko for its elegance, but Dao could be said to have slightly deeper strategy. I chose it instead for its remarkable board: so small, yet with such strategy contained within. Just slightly bigger than a Tic-Tac-Toe board, it isn’t the smallest board I’ve ever seen (that honor goes to Taabel, I think), but for the complexity of the game it’s tiny.
Equipment
The game is played on a 4 x 4 square board with four distinct tokens per player. You can print one here if it’s too much trouble to draw one, and use whatever you have lying around the house as pieces.
Rules
At the beginning of the game, the pieces are set up along the long diagonals of the board as shown.
As shown. Like I said.
The goal of the game is very simple: to align your pieces in either a straight orthogonal line (diagonal lines don’t count, as the starting position might suggest) or a 2 x 2 square, or occupy all four corners of the board. Furthermore, if you block one of your opponent’s pieces in one of the corners so that it can’t move, you automatically lose the game (this is to prevent cheap tactics that would make the game unwinnable for either player). This is only if all three adjacent spaces are occupied by your own pieces; it’s okay if the piece is blocked so long as at least one of the pieces blocking its movement belongs to your opponent.
Pieces don’t move traditionally, however. They move by sliding, which is a rather unusual form of movement not seen in a whole lot of games. Sliding in Dao works like this: a piece can move in any direction diathogonally, but must move as many spaces as possible in that direction. Think a Chess queen on ice, that can’t stop until it hits something (either the edge of the board or another piece).
The blue piece in the corner can only move to those three spaces; it cannot stop moving until it collides with something. Note that if it chooses the diagonal path, blue will lose the game, as that is a cornering move
There is no capturing or jumping in the game, just sliding. My only advice to you: don’t forget about diagonal moves! It sounds silly, but I often overlook some great diagonal slides just because I’m biased towards orthogonal movement, I suppose.
Blue demonstrating one of the many winning positions
