A complete guide: how to move and jump your pieces, build long jump chains and be the first to relocate your whole squad into the opposite corner. Controls on muta.pro and tips for beginners.
Corners is a calm logic game with no captures. Your nine pieces stand in one corner of the board, and the mirror corner on the opponent's side is your "home". Your task: relocate all of your pieces into the opposite corner before your opponent does the same. Nobody is captured here — the winner is whoever lays out their route faster.
The game is played on a square board. Two opposite corners hold marked "home" zones of nine cells each. Your nine pieces are lined up in your corner, the opponent's pieces in theirs. The target zone is highlighted. Players move in turn; each player's turn has a timer, after which the turn passes to the opponent.
Click on one of your pieces — the board highlights the available moves: a simple step and any possible jumps.
You may shift a piece onto an adjacent empty cell vertically or horizontally. After a simple step your turn ends.
If a piece stands next to yours (your own or an opponent's) and the cell right behind it is empty, you may jump over it. The jumped piece stays in place — there are no captures.
After a jump you may keep jumping with the same piece, building a long chain across several pieces in a single turn. This is the main technique for advancing quickly.
You may stop a jump chain at any moment. Once the piece has landed where you want it, the turn passes to your opponent.
Move your pieces into the target corner so that none is left behind. A single stuck straggler can cost you the whole game.
The players panel shows a score like "X/9 in the corner" — how many of your pieces have already reached home. The game is won by whoever first fills all nine cells of the opposite corner with their own pieces. If you fail to move within the allotted time, the turn simply passes to the opponent, so plan your routes ahead.
Arrange your pieces so they form jump "ladders" — a single piece can fly across half the board.
Move the rear pieces together with the front ones: one piece forgotten in the corner will keep you from filling your home.
You can jump over the opponent's pieces too. Sometimes an enemy row is an excellent "bridge" to your goal.
Don't clog the entrance to the corner so that the last pieces have nowhere to land.
A simple step moves a piece one cell, while a well-built jump chain moves it a third of the board at once. That is why the outcome of a game is decided not by the number of moves, but by the length of the chains you manage to assemble. The key idea: a jump road does not appear on its own — you have to lay it out in advance from your own pieces, like rails ahead of a train.
A jump is possible when there is an empty cell behind an adjacent piece. So if you space your pieces one apart, a rear piece will fly along them across the whole row in a single turn. This is a "herringbone": a formation with even gaps along which a piece skips down the entire line.
"Herringbone": piece ● jumps over the supports ○, landing on the highlighted cells — the whole row in a single turn.
Don't move a piece that is itself serving as a springboard for a neighbour until the neighbour has passed. Remove the support too early and you collapse your own chain and lose tempo.
The longest chain usually runs through the centre of the board, where the pieces of both players meet. Keep one or two "jumpers" in reserve for such a moment.
The longest possible jump is good only if the landing doesn't trap the piece against the edge. Sometimes shorter means faster on the next move.
Corners is a race with no dice rolls, so everything comes down to tempo: how many "cells of advance" you squeeze out of each move. A jump over two pieces gives four times more tempo than a step. Hence the rule: as long as there is at least one chain available, a simple step is made only when forced — to lay down a missing support or to free a needed cell.
The second half of mastery is how you interact with the opponent's pieces, since both of you share one board. The opponent moves towards you, and their pieces inevitably end up in your path. This is not an obstacle but a resource: an enemy column in the centre is a ready springboard.
Your piece ● jumps over the opponent's pieces ○: your own bridge through the centre, with not a single support of your own spent.
After each of your moves, estimate how many cells closer to the goal you have shifted. Fewer than two — almost certainly there was a better option with a jump.
In the centre the flows of pieces cross. Whoever lays a chain here first gets the springboards; the latecomer runs into an enemy wall.
A single simple step to lay down a support pays off if it opens a chain of three or four jumps on the next move. That is an investment, not a loss of tempo.
A game is won not in the centre but at the entrance to the corner — and this is where beginners lose victories they already held in their hands. The home is nine cells, and they must be filled in the right order. Enter from the far end: first occupy the cells farthest from the entrance, and leave the near ones free as a passage. Take the entrance with your very first piece and you lock the gate in front of your own caravan.
The home is filled "from the depth": the far cells are occupied, while the highlighted entrance in the bottom-right corner is left free for the stragglers.
The second endgame trap is the tail. A single piece forgotten in the starting corner nullifies all the work: eight at home and the ninth still on the way is not a win. The tail must be counted from the middle of the game: don't race the vanguard so far that the rearguard is hopelessly left behind with no supports to jump over.
Picture the home as a car park with a single entrance: cars park from the far wall towards the gate. The same order applies to the pieces.
Cells already occupied in the home are springboards for the pieces still arriving. An even pattern inside the corner speeds up the finish.
"8/9" with no plan for the ninth is not an advantage but an alarm. Plan the last piece's road in advance.
Most defeats in Corners come not from a brilliant plan by the opponent, but from the same recurring errors of tempo and order. Let's go through them so you recognise the trap before you step into it.
The "clump" mistake: pieces bunched up with no empty cells behind them — the central piece ● has nowhere to land, the jumps are dead.
Three questions: is there a jump longer than a step, am I locking myself in, am I abandoning the tail. If it's "no" to all three — the move is most likely weak.
Mirroring the opponent's moves is a road to a draw of tempo and a loss to whoever finds a chain first. Look for your own route.
Noticed the opponent regularly jumping over your pieces? That means you are building springboards for them. Change your formation pattern.