Dot over Dot

Description (paste into the main body)

Dot Over Dot is the paper-and-pencil game you may know as Dots, Точки, or Kropki — and in Thai as จุดล้อมเมือง. Two players take turns placing dots on the grid. Draw an unbroken ring of your own dots around your opponent's, and every dot you trapped becomes your score.

It takes about thirty seconds to learn. Then it starts biting.

The rules, in full

• Players alternate, one dot per turn, on the grid intersections.
• Your dots form a chain when they touch horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. Diagonals are why four dots in a diamond capture a lone enemy dot exactly.
• Close a chain around at least one enemy dot and you capture the lot. Your own dots caught inside score nothing.
• The board edge is not a wall. Anything that can still reach the outside is safe.
• Captured dots stay on the board, but they are inert — a dead dot can never wall anyone in again.

Two rules that make it a real game

The house. A ring around empty ground scores nothing, and it does not close the ground off. Both players may keep playing inside it. But an enemy dot played into your house cannot reach the edge — so it dies the moment the turn passes, and it scores for the player who built the wall, not the one who played last. An empty ring is a trap, not a wasted move.

Liberation. Dots you lost are not lost forever. Enclose the region that captured them and they come back to life, and your opponent's points are refunded. The player who just moved always captures first, which is what lets a counter-ring played inside enemy territory survive.

Features

• Play the computer, a friend on the same device, or watch two AIs fight.
• Online play over a direct peer-to-peer connection — share a room code or use automatic matchmaking. Up to 10 spectators per room, with chat, reconnection if someone drops, and a mutual vote to end a match early.
• An AI that actually searches. Not a scripted opponent: alpha-beta search with a position evaluation borrowed from Go — living groups and their liberties, atari, and an influence map of who is nearer to each empty point. Six characters, each with their own strength, from gentle to genuinely hard.
• Four board sizes (13×13 to 25×25) and two arenas: a clean classic board, and ruled notebook paper with a red margin you cannot play past.
• Replays and post-game stats — every game is saved. Step through it move by move, and see how many capture chances you spotted and how many you walked past.
• Thai and English, switchable at any time.
• Made to be comfortable: one screen with no scrolling on any device, pinch to zoom and drag to pan, dark mode, a colour-blind palette, and an optional two-tap placement mode for anyone who finds precise tapping awkward.
• One HTML file. No install, no account, no ads. Download it and it works offline, forever.

Controls

Tap or click an intersection to place a dot. Drag to pan, pinch or scroll to zoom. That's it.

Strategy, if you want it

The vocabulary comes straight from Go, because the ideas transfer: chase a group toward your own waiting stones (ladder), and if the ladder doesn't work, cast a net ahead of it instead. Threaten two captures at once and your opponent can only answer one.

Credits

Sound effects from Kenney Interface Sounds (CC0). Online play uses PeerJS. Typefaces: Mitr, Prompt, and Mali.

Suggested itch.io settings

Classification

Game

Kind of project

HTML (playable in browser)

Genre

Strategy · Puzzle

Tags

Input

Mouse, Touchscreen

Accessibility

Colour-blind friendly, One button

Average session

A few minutes

Multiplayer

Local multiplayer, Online multiplayer (2 players)

Field	Value
board-game, strategy, abstract, two-player, local-multiplayer, online-multiplayer, singleplayer, ai, go, thai

A note on the online mode

If you want to be upfront about it — some players will hit it, and saying so first is better than a bad rating:

Online play connects the two browsers directly to each other, with no game server in between. On most home and mobile networks this just works. On some restrictive corporate or campus networks the direct connection cannot be established, and the room will not connect.