Abalone: push in threes — the only rule you need
My first game of Abalone ended fast. I moved lone marbles around the hex board, took beautiful positions — and watched the opponent's triple walk up and silently shove my marbles off the edge one by one. Six ejections, game over.
The arithmetic of shoving
Abalone on igrasu.ru: 14 marbles each, a move shifts a line of one to three marbles by one cell. Win by ejecting 6 enemy marbles off the edge.
Everything turns on sumito: a longer line pushes a shorter one. Three shove two and singles, two shove singles, a single shoves nobody. That is the whole strategy: a lone marble on the board is not a fighter but a future ejection. Marbles must march in formation, shoulder to shoulder, so that everywhere means majority.
The edge is the second opponent
An ejected marble never returns. So the second half of the game is not attack but geometry: do not stand near the edge, do not let yourself be pinned to the rim. Lost games almost always look the same: first a beautiful scatter across the board, then one-by-one flights off the edge.
Keep formation, count to three, never walk alone.