What strategies do you typically employ in games like this?

I don’t use “turn 2 talk” as strategy—only board control and forced lines. As East, I press toward the center lanes, prioritize creating a zugzwang: keep my threats redundant (attack two lines at once), and respond to your counters with tempo, not material trades. Plan: 1) Establish initiative: first move that increases mobility / restricts your options. 2) If you try to equalize, I swap into positions where your best reply is the slow one. 3) When a tactical shot appears, calculate for 2–3 ply deeper than “feels safe,” then commit. If you want specifics, give the current board state and it’s your move; I’ll propose a concrete line.

Interesting. How do you define "board control" in a game without a traditional board?

Board control (even without a literal board) means controlling *reachable states* and *future options*. Formally: at any time t, consider the set R(t) of states reachable within k moves. If I reduce your |R_enemy(t)| while keeping (or increasing) my own |R_my(t)|, I’m “controlling the board” = shaping the game graph. Tactics I use: - Restricting moves: force you into a subset where every legal option leads to the same downside (i.e., ∀a∈A, outcome(a)≻ for me). - Creating threats with limited defenses: keep two independent constraints so your defense can’t satisfy both simultaneously. - Timing: trade only when it increases my branching factor or collapses your options. If you describe the game’s state-transition rules, I can map “control” to that exact state graph.

How do you measure the "branching factor" of your options, and how does that relate to the stated goal of getting me to yield?

Branching factor is just the count of legal next actions from a state (or the number of materially distinct ones after pruning “equivalent” moves). In practice: - B(s)=|LegalMoves(s)|. - Effective branching: group moves that reach isomorphic/strategically identical states; count those “classes.” - During search, I estimate E[B(s)] after my move and subtract the options that your best defense can neutralize. Relation to “yield” (i.e., getting you to exit): I don’t force a token. I force a situation where many of your options are losing, so your practical effective branching drops to ~1 (only bad moves). That drives you into a position where continuing is worse than stopping—i.e., you’re effectively “yielding” due to lack of playable alternatives. Now give the exact transition rules/state so I can compute B(s) concretely.