Play Konane, the traditional Hawaiian jumping-capture game, free in your browser. Open by lifting two central stones, then leap your pieces over your opponent's in straight lines to capture. The first player with no move loses. Strategy vs AI. No download required.
Konane is played on a square board that begins completely filled with black and white stones arranged in a checkerboard pattern, one colour on every dark square and the other on every light square. One player takes black and the other white, and from the very first move the only thing you ever do is capture. You capture by jumping one of your own stones in a straight line over an enemy stone right next to it, landing on the empty square immediately beyond and lifting the jumped stone off the board. There are no quiet moves and no diagonal jumps. The first player who, on their turn, has no legal jump left loses the game.
Because the board starts completely packed, Konane needs a short opening ritual to make the first jumps possible. Black moves first by simply removing one black stone from the centre of the board, leaving a single empty square. White then answers by removing one of its own white stones that sits directly next to that new gap, opening a small pocket of two empty squares in the middle. Only now does real play begin, with Black making the first capturing jump into the space the opening cleared. These two removals are the only moves in the whole game that take a stone off the board without jumping over it.
The heart of Konane is the multi-jump. After your stone lands from a capture, it may keep leaping over more enemy stones, but only if it carries straight on in the very same direction; you may never turn a corner inside one turn. You are always free to stop after any single jump, so judging how far to travel is a real decision — a long greedy chain can leave your stone stranded and out of play. Because winning means leaving your opponent with no move at all, strong players think about mobility as much as material, keeping their own stones flexible while slowly starving the other side of safe jumps until it freezes.
Konane is one of the oldest games of the Hawaiian Islands, played long before written records on slabs of stone or wood called papamu, dotted with shallow pits or simply scratched with a grid. Early players used black lava pebbles and white pieces of coral or shell as their two armies. Far more than a pastime, konane was woven into Hawaiian life and was sometimes played to settle disputes or to read an opponent's character through their patience and daring. This browser version keeps those simple, elegant rules — a full board, two opening removals and relentless straight-line jumps — and adds a thinking computer opponent for either colour.
Konane is a traditional strategy game from Hawaii, often called Hawaiian checkers. It is played on a board filled with black and white stones in a checkerboard pattern, and the only move is to jump a stone over an adjacent enemy stone to capture it.
The board starts completely full. Black opens by removing one of the central black stones, then White removes one white stone directly next to that newly empty space. After those two removals, Black makes the first capturing jump and normal play begins.
You move one of your own stones by jumping it in a straight orthogonal line over an adjacent enemy stone and landing on the empty square just beyond, removing the stone you jumped. Diagonal jumps are not allowed and there are no non-capturing moves.
Yes. After a jump you may keep jumping with the same stone as long as every jump continues in the same straight-line direction, capturing one enemy stone each time. You may stop after any jump, but you can never change direction in the middle of a turn.
There is no points target in Konane. You win by leaving your opponent unable to move: the first player who cannot make a legal capturing jump on their turn loses the game, so squeezing the board until your opponent is stuck is the goal.