Why Alkkagi Looks Simple But Isn't
All you need for Alkkagi is a Go board and a handful of stones. The rule takes ten seconds to explain: flick your stone into your opponent's and knock it off the board. Try it with your fingers, though, and it rarely goes the way you planned. Hit too hard and your own stone rolls out right along with theirs; hit too soft and you barely nudge anything. I played it as a kid on a Go board in the classroom during breaks, and a few rounds are enough to show it takes more thought than it looks. To this day, Omok and Alkkagi are the games my friends and I play most on Omokboard.
Omokboard's Alkkagi runs real physics underneath. Friction, collisions, and bounce are all calculated, so marbles slide and ricochet the way real ones would. That means the "feel" you build actually transfers. Playing a few rounds is the fastest way to get good.
Objective & Basic Rules
The goal is simple: knock every one of your opponent's marbles off the board and you win.
- Red and Blue each start with five marbles and take turns launching one at a time.
- A marble is eliminated the instant its center crosses the board's edge. Color doesn't matter; your own marble goes out the same way.
- That's why swinging for maximum power is close to self-sabotage. Dragging your own marble out along with your target is one of the most common beginner mistakes.
Getting a Feel for the Controls
Click or tap one of your marbles, then drag opposite the direction you want to shoot, and an aim line appears as you pull. It works exactly like a slingshot: the farther you pull, the harder it launches, and it always fires the opposite way from your drag. That reversed direction trips up almost everyone at first, sending shots off in the wrong direction, but it clicks after a handful of tries.
There's a limit to "the farther you pull, the harder it goes," though. Pulling about a tenth of the board's width already gives you full power. Past that, the aim line keeps getting longer but the power stays the same. So think of a long pull as a way to set the direction precisely, not to add force. The aim line doesn't break even if you drag past the edge of the board, so use the extra screen space when you want a finer aim.
Power Control Is the Real Skill
Nearly every beginner falls apart on power control. It's tempting to assume harder is always better, but in practice it's closer to the opposite.
A short pull is plenty for a nearby target. Overdo it and yes, your target goes flying, but the recoil often sends your own marble out right along with it. Marbles sitting near the edge already fall with the lightest tap, so putting real force behind those shots is just wasted power.
Push further and you start thinking about where your own marble lands after the shot, not just where the target goes. Focus only on the attack and you'll often end up parked somewhere dangerous, like right on the edge or exposed for your opponent's next turn. Strong players plan their landing spot at the same time as the attack.
Head-On or at an Angle?
A head-on hit sends the target straight back, hard. It's the right call against a marble already sitting near the edge.
A glancing hit sends the target rolling sideways instead. That's how you deal with a marble parked dead center, where a straight push doesn't help. Angle it toward whichever edge is closest instead of trying to force it across the whole board. Nudging a target toward its nearest edge almost always costs less power than trying to blast it out from the middle.
One more thing to watch: if one of your own marbles sits in the firing line, it gets pushed along with everything else. Before you commit to an angle, check the path for your own pieces, not just the target.
How Far Does a Marble Slide?
Friction was the part of Alkkagi that gave me the most trouble to build. In the first version, a marble lost only 1.6% of its speed per frame, so a hard flick sent it sliding more than twice the width of the board. Now it loses 4% per frame, and even the hardest shot stops just short of crossing the whole board.
That friction leads to a practical tip. A marble keeps slowing down as it rolls, so the farther away your target is, the less force reaches it. Run the numbers and even a full-power shot, if your marble rolls about half the board's width before it connects, usually leaves a target from the middle of the board stopping short of the edge. That's why clearing nearby marbles first tends to beat reaching for distant ones.
Strategy by Skill Level
Just starting out? Focus on power control alone for now. Getting a feel for "just enough force" matters more than precise angles early on. Clearing the easy marbles near the edge one at a time is enough to win more than half your games.
Getting comfortable? Start paying attention to where your own marbles end up. Keeping them clustered near the center makes them hard to target and gives you more angles to attack from next turn. If your opponent's marbles are scattered near the edges, that's their mistake, so don't let it go to waste.
Want to go further? Look for chain reactions, where hitting one marble at the right angle sends two or three out in a single shot. It's a bit of a gamble with a higher miss rate, so weigh it against just clearing one marble safely, which is usually still the better bet.
How Omokboard's Alkkagi AI Shoots
- Easy picks one of its marbles and one of yours at random, wobbles its aim by about 25 degrees either way, and sets its power at random between 40% and 100%. It sends plenty of shots somewhere odd.
- Normal and Hard go through every pairing of their marbles and yours, estimate whether a head-on hit would knock the target off the board (or, if not, how close to the edge it would end up), and pick the best pairing. They always shoot at full power. Normal mixes a little error into its judgment and aim (about 3 degrees), while Hard shoots with no error at all.
At every level, the AI doesn't work out where its own marble will stop, or whether another marble or an obstacle sits in its path. That's why, in Extreme mode, even the Hard AI sometimes whiffs into a pillar.
Extreme Alkkagi: What Changes With Obstacles
Once classic mode feels comfortable, try Extreme mode. You can pick it from the mode-select screen before a match starts. It adds three fixed obstacles lined up down the middle of the board.
The biggest change is that you can't shoot straight through the middle anymore. Attacks that used to cut across the board head-on just get blocked, so the patterns that worked in classic mode stop working here. Instead, you're looking for bank shots: hitting an obstacle to redirect your marble, the same way you'd play a cushion in billiards. A marble that hits an obstacle reflects off at an angle, so it helps to picture that reflection before you commit to the shot.
The obstacles behave like marbles when you hit them, making a sound and bouncing your marble away, but they're permanently fixed and never leave the board themselves. Bank shots feel awkward for the first few rounds, but the sense of "hit it here, it bounces there" comes together fast once you've played a bit.
Common Mistakes
- Overhitting and taking yourself out with it. You commit extra force to make sure the target goes out, and the recoil sends your own marble with it. The single most common mistake.
- Missing your own marble in the firing line. Locked in on the opponent's marble, you don't notice one of yours sitting in the path and knock it out too.
- Forcing a low-percentage shot. Going for a marble buried deep in the center and missing outright burns the whole turn. A safe, certain hit beats a flashy miss.
FAQ
- What happens if my own marble goes out? It's eliminated the moment its center crosses the edge, regardless of color. That's exactly why power control matters so much.
- Can one shot knock out several marbles? Yes. Chained collisions can send two or three marbles out from a single launch.
- Does it fly the way I drag? No. Like a slingshot, it launches in the opposite direction from your drag.
- What is Extreme mode? A variant you can pick on the mode-select screen before a match. Three fixed obstacles sit at the center of the board, blocking straight shots, so you'll need bank shots off the obstacles instead.
- Does AI difficulty make a big difference? Yes. Easy picks its target and power almost at random, while Normal and Hard work through every pairing and fire at full power at whichever marble is easiest to knock out. At no level does the AI calculate where its own marble stops or how collisions chain. Start on Easy to get a feel for power control first.