Konane

Black lifts one of its own stones, then White lifts one of its own next to that hole. After that every move is a jump: click one of your stones, then click an empty square two along, hopping an enemy stone and taking it. You may carry on in the same direction in one move. Whoever cannot jump has lost. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.

The game is mostly decided before anyone jumps

Small boards can be solved outright rather than played — stones only ever leave the board, so positions never repeat and the whole game tree can be walked. On a 4 × 4 the answer is blunt: of the 24 legal openings, Black wins exactly 4. The other 20 are already lost the moment the stone comes off.

And there is barely any play to get wrong afterwards: 16 of the 24 openings leave Black with a single legal jump. The choice of which stone to lift was the game.

Which is why the traditional opening is not just ceremony

Konane is normally played with Black restricted to lifting a corner or a centre stone. That looks like decoration on a rule sheet. It is not — but what exactly it buys you needs stating carefully, because there are two claims here and only one of them survives both boards.

The claim that holds: playing traditionally never denies Black the win. On 4 × 4, 4 of the 12 traditional openings win; on 5 × 5, all 12 of them do. A player who follows the custom always has a winning opening available.

The claim that does not: "only traditional openings win". On 4 × 4 that is true — every one of the 4 winners is a centre lift and nothing outside the traditional squares wins at all. On 5 × 5 it collapses: 16 winning openings sit outside them. A rule of thumb that fits one board and fails the next is not a rule.

Nor is the custom a guarantee. On 4 × 4 the traditional set includes both corner lifts, and both of them lose — only 4 of the 12 traditional openings actually win, and all of those are centre lifts. "Take a corner" is traditional, not correct.

The 5 × 5 board reverses that too: there every traditional opening wins, corners included. Two boards, two different lessons — which is the argument for solving them rather than generalising from one.

And 6 × 6 is not solved here

The full-size boards people actually play are out of reach of this approach. A 6 × 6 has 60 legal openings, and the search ran to 30,000,000 positions without finishing. So nothing on this page claims anything about it. The solver reports that it ran out rather than returning a verdict — the difference between "I could not finish" and "Black loses" is the entire difference between a result and a guess, and the computer opponent above falls back to judging positions by how many moves each side has left rather than pretending to know.