Konane is a hawai'ian board game played with white and black stones on a rectangular board. A konane board often has impressions or wells like a mancala board for the stones, although there is only ever one stone in a square at one time. The size of the board varies.
To set up a konane board for play, first the board is tiled completely with stones, alternating colors. Then one stone of each color is removed from the board, one by each player, so that the two removed stones are adjacent and one is either the center stone or a corner stone.
Play proceeds as follows: A legal move is to jump one stone of your color either horizontally or vertically but never diagonally over an opponent's stone, removing the jumped stone from the board. In ancient konane, multiple jumps are allowed; in some modern versions multiple jumps are disallowed. The winner is the last player able to make a jump.
Konane strategy involves securing the edges and corners and the creation of positions similar to
.....
.XOX.
.....
This is of advantage to the player with O, because that player has a jump to make where as the player with X does not.
Konane is a good game to study with the tools of combinatorial game theory because the game usually decomposes after a certain point into disconnected regions that no longer affect one another. Konane positions exhibit a number of interesting values, including star, a position where each player has only the move to a zero (empty) game, as in:
....
.XO.
....
Or up, as in the following position in modern Konane:
......
.XO.X.
......