# Strangle: leave them nowhere to go.

> The Hexodic win built from containment — no captures or height race required.

Strangle is the Hexodic containment win: your opponent begins their turn with no legal Project — no legal Place while holding stones, or no legal Move with an empty reserve — and you win.

Canonical HTML: https://hexodic.com/rules/strangle
Site index for agents: https://hexodic.com/llms.txt

Strangle is one of Hexodic's three wins: a player wins by Strangle when their opponent begins a turn with no legal Project. Strangle outranks every other way a Hexodic game can end after a turn — the repetition loss, the threefold draw and the half-move-cap tiebreak. In Hexodic, having no legal Project is not a pass — it is a loss, and the containment that causes it is a strategy of its own.

Reviewed 2026-09-15 against the Hexodic rules engine.

## When a player is Strangled

The check runs as soon as a turn passes, for the player about to move. Strangle is checked before the repetition rule and before the [half-move cap](/rules/game-end): a turn that reaches the cap while leaving the opponent no legal Project is a Strangle win, not a tiebreak, and a turn that both repeats an earlier position and Strangles the opponent is a win for the player who made it. That player is Strangled when [no legal Project exists](/rules/project#no-legal-project):

- **With stones in reserve** — there is no empty, unlocked cell they may Place on. A turn where only the capture cooldown blocks every Place is a skipped Project, not a Strangle.
- **With an empty reserve** — none of their stones can Move: every neighbour of every stone is their own stone, or an enemy stone on an equal or higher tier.

## Containment

[Containment](/glossary#containment) is the Hexodic strategy term for building toward Strangle. With an empty reserve, a player's stones can only step to empty neighbours or down onto lower enemies, so boxing stones in with your own stones, the board edge and high ground removes their options one by one. Because a captured stone goes back to its owner's reserve and gives them a Place again, capturing an opponent's stones can work against a Strangle.

## Related

- [Network](/rules/network) and [Takeover](/rules/takeover) — the other two wins.
- [Glossary: Strangle and Containment](/glossary#strangle)
- [Hexodic FAQ](/faq)
- [All rules](/rules)

[Get the Hexodic app](/download) and see how few moves a boxed-in stone has.

## Where to go next

- [How a game ends](https://hexodic.com/rules/game-end) — The cap, the tiebreak, and the order the checks run in.
- [Strategy](https://hexodic.com/strategy) — The principles that follow from the rules, not from habit.
- [How it works](https://hexodic.com/how-it-works) — The whole turn, in plain language.

## Questions this page answers

- What is the Strangle win in Hexodic?
- What happens in Hexodic when you have no legal Project?