Isola

Goal

Each player controls a pawn on a board of 7 × 7 squares. The player who, on their turn, can no longer move their pawn loses the game.

How it works

• Red goes first. A turn has two steps.
• Move: your pawn advances one square in any of the eight directions (like the king in chess), onto a free square. It cannot enter the opponent’s square or a removed square.
• Remove: you then remove any free square from the board, including the one you have just left. It disappears for the rest of the game.
• There is no capture and no jumping: only space matters.

Controls

• Tap a lit square (or drag your pawn) to move it, then tap the square to remove.
• Before removing, tap your pawn again to cancel its move.

About the AI

Iterative-deepening alpha-beta search with a null window and a transposition table using Zobrist keys. Each move combines a move and a removal; the AI favours removals next to the opposing pawn and the most mobile fallback squares. The evaluation counts the immediate mobility of both pawns, the squares reachable in two steps and, when the board is cut into islands, the size of each. The Master level searches for about four seconds and solves endgames all the way to the end.