Four-field kono

Four-field kono, also called nei-pat-ko-no, is a two-player abstract strategy game from Korea. It is played on the sixteen points of a board of four lines by four, and each player starts with eight pieces filling his own half of the board. Pieces move a single step along a marked line to an empty adjacent point, and diagonal moves are not allowed. A piece captures by jumping over an adjacent friendly piece and landing on the enemy piece immediately beyond, so that all three pieces lie in a straight line with the enemy at the end. Only one capture can be made at a time, with no multiple jumps. Because the board begins full, the first move must be a capture. A player wins by capturing all the opposing pieces, which in practice means leaving the opponent with one piece, or by leaving the opponent with pieces but no legal move. The ethnographer Stewart Culin first described the game in English in 1895, and its exact age is unknown.