/blog/culls-strategy-guideCULLS strategy guide
CULLS is the kind of game whose rules fit on a card and whose strategy fills a notebook. After a few hundred games — playtests, online matches, and many lopsided bot drubbings — a handful of patterns keep coming up. This guide is for the player who knows the rules and now wants to start winning more often.
1. Hold the centre
The middle of the hexagonal board is the most valuable real estate, and the reason is geometric: chips placed near the centre sit on more potential five-in-a-row lines than chips on the edges. A central chip can contribute to lines on all three axes; an edge chip only contributes to one or two.
Your opening pair should almost always sit in the central cluster. If your opponent skips the centre, take it. If they take it, contest it directly with your second chip rather than building somewhere else.
2. Balance threat and cull
Every chip you place has two jobs. It's offensive — a step toward your line of five — and defensive — a potential bracket-end against the opponent. Strong moves do both at once.
The most common beginner mistake is to focus exclusively on the cull, hunting for sandwich opportunities and letting the opponent build a quiet line of three or four. The second most common mistake is the opposite: extending your own line into a bracket the opponent can close. The mature CULLS player thinks about both jobs on every move.
3. Mind every axis
The CULLS board has three axes; flat connect-five players coming from a square grid often miss one of them entirely. Before placing into a tight space, scan all three directions for a closing bracket — and especially for an opponent placement that could close two brackets at once.
A good drill: every time the bot beats you with a cull, look back at the move and ask which axis the bracket fired on. After a dozen games you'll start seeing all three.
4. The half-bracket trap
The strongest cull setups are the ones the opponent doesn't see coming. A useful pattern is the half-bracket: place one of your end-chips early, then bait the opponent into a position where they place the second of two chips inside what will become your bracket. They've now done half the work for you, and you only need one more move to close it.
Half-brackets work because they're invisible. With only one end-chip on the board, the bracket pattern doesn't yet exist — the opponent has to imagine it.
5. Cull to open a row
Sometimes the cull isn't about removing material — it's about clearing your own line. If you have three of your chips in a row, blocked at one end by an opponent chip, look for a placement that culls that blocking chip. You may end the turn with the same five-in-a-row threat you started with, but now unblockable.
This works because win detection runs after culls resolve. A clever cull can clear the row that wins the game on the same move.
6. Tempo
CULLS turns alternate one chip at a time after the openings, so each move is a finite resource. A cull is great, but a cull that takes one of your chips away from your own threat is a cull that cost you tempo. The question on every move isn't just “can I cull?” — it's “is this the most valuable move available?”
Common high-tempo moves: closing a bracket while extending your own line; placing a chip that creates two simultaneous three-in-a-row threats your opponent can only block one of; placing a half-bracket end that also blocks an opponent line.
7. Recover from a cull
You will get culled. When it happens, don't panic and don't try to immediately re-cull in revenge. Take a breath, look at the new board, and ask the same question you ask every other turn: where is the most valuable move? Sometimes the answer is to rebuild quietly. Sometimes it's to immediately punish the chip the opponent had to spend to cull you.
Practice routine
- Play three games against the bot. After each game, replay the move log in your head and identify the single move you'd play differently.
- Play one game against a friend. Talk through every cull as it happens.
- Play one game where you commit to only defensive moves — no extending your own threats unless they also block an opponent threat. You'll lose, but you'll learn a lot about how the cull mechanic interacts with positional play.
If you haven't already, the How to Play page has animated walkthroughs of every mechanic this guide assumes you know.