Beautiful and simple setup. What's the strategy?

The game is a prettier version of the game Gobblet, it turns out. (https://www.boardspace.net/gobblet/english/gobblet_rules.pdf) Each player has three stacks of nesting cylinders (12 pieces total) and the board is 4×4. In alternating turns each player may choose one of:

1. Take the TOP piece of an off-board stack (i.e. the largest) and place it on a blank space.
2. As #1, but place it over (any, regardless of colour) SMALLER piece already on the board.
3. Move any showing piece of that player's colour to a blank space on the board.
4. As #3, but place it over a smaller piece.

The goal is to get four in a row of your own colour: horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. If you touch any piece in play that you can play (on the board, not in your stacks), you *must* play it. If lifting up a piece reveals a line of four of the opposing colour, and your move doesn't stop that line of four from completing, you lose. (In other words there's a memory component to the game.)

It's fast (a long game is 15 minutes) and it's simple to learn. It may be a perfect "we've got a few spare minutes, let's play!" game.

I like the simplicity of the rules.

It's suited to fairly young children, yet has depth that kept two adults playing a few times on the first trial.

Or maybe a grandparent and grandchild. In our hopefully soon post pandemic world.

I'll be playing it with a 13 year old boy sometime this weekend. I'll let you know.

Hi ZDL, how are you? Sounds like you have been busy. We have been doing a little rearranging here. Seems like we do it every spring. Makes the house feel enough different that we enjoy the effort. Hope you have some time to enjoy the rest of the week.

I'm less busy at work now (back to five day weeks) so much more busy over weekends finally. :D

I'm looking forward to warmer weather just not hot weather. That being said I cant wait to to see our flowers blooming all over our yard. Spring begins here tomorrow.