Two courts of ten face each other on a 7 by 7 board. You are Ember at the bottom, your opponent is Umbra at the top.
Most pieces capture the way you would expect, by moving onto an enemy and removing it. But the move that wins games is the sway: trap enemy pieces between two of yours and they switch to your side instead of dying. Learn that one idea and you know the game.
Sandwich an enemy piece between two of yours and it changes colour. It does not die, it joins you, and it keeps fighting on your side for the rest of the game.
Here is the whole rule. The moment your piece lands, look outward from the square it landed on, one line at a time: left, right, up, down, and the four diagonals. In any of those lines, if you see enemy pieces sitting shoulder to shoulder and then one of your pieces at the far end, those enemy pieces are trapped. Every one of them turns into yours straight away.
Say your Runner lands on a square. The next two squares to its right hold enemy pieces, and the square after that holds your Lancer. Those two are boxed in between your Runner and your Lancer, so both of them switch to your colour. One move, two pieces gained.
Three things trip people up at first:
This is why swaying beats capturing. Taking a piece removes one enemy. Swaying it removes one enemy and gives you a piece, so the gap between you and your opponent moves twice as fast.
Peasants are the two pieces on your second rank. They step one square diagonally forward and never retreat. They cannot take by landing on a piece the way everything else does. Instead they jump: with an enemy diagonally ahead and the square directly beyond it empty, a Peasant leaps over and removes it.
A swayed Peasant turns around. Forward means whichever way its current owner faces, so a Peasant you steal marches straight back at the player who lost it.
The Goliath is the block sitting in front of your Monarch. It moves one square up, down, left or right, and it does not stop for anyone. Whatever occupies the square it steps into gets shoved one square further in the same direction.
Nothing captures a Goliath by landing on it. Lancers, Runners, Leapers and Peasants cannot touch it and cannot move through it. Only an enemy Goliath crushing it, or a Monarch leaping over it onto the empty square beyond, will remove one.
A Goliath can still be swayed. You cannot kill it, but you can steal it, and a stolen Goliath is the single biggest swing on the board.
Your Monarch is a poor fighter. It steps one square in any direction, but the only piece it can capture by landing on is a Peasant. It cannot take a Lancer, a Runner, a Leaper, or the enemy Monarch, so it simply may not move onto them.
You cannot make a move that leaves your Monarch on a square an enemy could capture next turn. Two threats are easy to miss: a Peasant threatens the square it jumps over rather than the one it lands on, and a Goliath threatens any Monarch it could shove against a wall or another piece.
Checking storage...
The Peasant reached the far rank. Choose what it becomes.