Raven Keep Leaps

Raven Keep Leaps is a quiet, offline board duel built around one uncommon idea: you may hop over your own pieces for free, as often as the shape of your host allows.

Every piece has three ways to travel. It can step one square in any of the eight directions. It can canter, hopping over an adjacent friendly piece onto the empty square beyond, taking nothing and disturbing nothing. Or it can jump, hopping over an adjacent enemy piece and removing it. Canters chain. Jumps chain. And a knight can do something no ordinary man can: canter first, then carry straight on into a jump in the very same turn. That is the knight charge, and a good one crosses half the field and clears two squares on the way.

You do not win by sweeping the board. You win by incursion: stand two of your pieces inside the two squares of the enemy keep at the same moment and the match ends on the spot. Material still counts, because a host cut down to a single piece loses, and a host with no legal move loses. But every plan you make is really a question about roads. Which of your own men are stepping stones, and which of theirs are gates?

THE FIELD
Twelve ranks by eight files, with the four corners cut away and a two-square keep notched into the middle of each end rank. Each side fields ten men and four knights in a fixed, symmetric opening array, drawn in full in the field manual.

CONTROL YOU CAN SEE
Tap a piece and every route it can take lights up, drawn as a bowed dotted trail: cream for a canter over one of your own, ember for a capturing jump. When a chain can go further, the game stops and asks. Continue, or stop here. Nothing resolves itself behind your back, and a part-built route can always be undone before it is committed.

FIVE TABS
Play. The board, with a live count of who is standing inside which keep.
Stats. Wins by incursion against wins by attrition, longest ride, best haul, average match length.
Levels. Three opponents, a choice of who opens, and the compulsory-jump rule on or off.
How. An illustrated field manual for the canter, the jump and the knight charge.
Awards. Thirteen honours to chase, from a four-hop ride to a win against the hard opponent.

THREE OPPONENTS
Easy plays any legal move it happens to see. Normal looks a turn ahead and weighs ground, material and the size of the reply you could throw back. Hard searches two turns deep and will gladly offer you a piece if that opens a road to your keep.

BUILT TO BE LEFT ALONE
Completely offline. No internet permission of any kind, no accounts, no ads, no tracking, no in-app purchases. There is no sound at all: feedback is drawn on the board and, where the device supports it, felt as a light haptic tap. Your record and your settings live on your device and nowhere else. Portrait only, and it opens in about a second.

Sit down with it for two minutes or for forty. The rules fit on a single screen. The roads across the board do not.