No other board game captures like this. Your pieces race down a line, whip around the curved loops at the board's corners, and strike from directions their victims never saw coming.
The goal
Capture all twelve enemy pieces — or leave your opponent with no legal move.
How to play
- Step quietly. Click a piece, then a highlighted point: one step in any of the eight directions. Quiet steps never capture; they position you on the loop lines.
- Read the loops. The gold loops connect the 2nd and 5th lines, the blue loops the 3rd and 4th. A piece on a loop line can strike along that line's entire circuit, provided the path is clear.
- Strike around the corner. Select a piece and every enemy it can reach through the loops lights up. Click one, and your piece races the whole route — around one loop or several — and lands on its victim.
Controls
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Gold dashed ring | A piece that can act. Click to select, click again to deselect. |
| Green dot | A quiet move: one step to an adjacent free point. |
| Red ring | A loop capture. Click the marked enemy and your piece runs the full path. |
| Golden trail | Every capture animates around the curves, so you see how it got there. |
In the side panel you choose your opponent — the computer or a friend online — set the difficulty, play as White or Black, undo your last move, follow the move list and toggle the sound.
Play 2 player Surakarta online with a friend
Pick With a friend online, press Open a table and you get a four-character code. Send it to whoever you want to play — they open this same page, type the code and press Join. No account, no download, no waiting room, and a chat window in the corner.
The board runs on the server, so neither side can be shown a capture the rules do not allow. That matters more here than in most games: the loop capture is hard to see coming even when you know the rule, and half the pleasure is watching a piece your opponent thought was safe get taken from behind. The travelling animation plays on both screens at once, along the same path.
Whoever opened the table plays White and moves first.
Rules
- A 6 by 6 grid of points with eight curved loops at the corners: four small and four large, forming two separate circuits.
- Each player has 12 pieces on their two back rows. White moves first.
- A plain move is one step in any direction to an adjacent empty point, and never captures.
- A capture travels along a row or column, around at least one loop, and removes the first enemy piece in its way.
- The path must be clear. Your own piece, or a line end without a loop, blocks it.
- Capturing is optional, never forced.
Strategy
- Think in circuits, not lines. The gold and blue circuits are two separate racetracks. Before every move, ask which circuits your piece stands on and who else is on them.
- Check the landing, not just the target. A capture drops your piece deep in enemy country, on a loop line. Count the enemies sharing that point's circuits before you strike.
- Clear your own runway. Your pieces block your own loop paths. Whoever has open lines attacks first.
- Threats beat strikes. Since captures are optional, the strongest move is often a quiet step that sets up two captures at once.
Play it away from the screen
The loops are almost impossible to draw by hand, which is what the printable Surakarta board is for: all eight of them in their right places, the two circuits in their own colours, twenty-four men to cut out and the rules on a third sheet.
Want the deeper game?
The full Surakarta guide walks a capture around the loops step by step, explains the two circuits and why the corners can never be taken, and covers thinking in circuits rather than lines.
About the game
Surakarta takes its name from the royal court city in central Java, Indonesia, a heartland of gamelan music and batik. Its capture mechanism is, as far as anyone knows, unique in the world of traditional board games — which also made it a favourite testbed for game-playing programs, contested at the ICGA Computer Olympiad.
