Play › Guides › Zap or Capture?
The most important decision in the game — and the one beginners get backwards.
Contact is how you affect enemy pieces, and there are two ways to make it count: strip a piece with a zap, or remove it with a capture. They sound similar and do nearly opposite things. Mixing them up is the single most common reason a strong-looking position quietly evaporates. Get the order right and you generate material out of nothing; get it wrong and you spend your moves recording pawns.
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A capture is a hard measurement: the victim collapses immediately to its least valuable surviving possibility and lands in the tray as that type. Take a fresh, un-touched piece and it almost certainly dies as a Pawn, because Pawn is still on its list. You removed a piece from the board, yes — but you recorded it as the cheapest thing it could be, and you spent a whole move doing it.
A zap is a weak measurement. When your piece finishes a move it touches every enemy it could capture from its landing square, and each touched enemy loses its single most valuable clean possibility — King first, then Queen, Rook, Bishop, Knight, Pawn. Nothing leaves the board; the piece just gets hollowed out from above. Do it a few times and a scary maybe-Queen becomes a bare Knight-or-Pawn.
Put the two together and the winning pattern is obvious. Zaps remove expensive possibilities from the top; captures cash out the cheapest possibility from the bottom. So you zap a piece down first, peeling away King and Queen and Rook, and only then capture it — forcing it to die as something expensive because you already deleted its cheap escape routes. A piece you would have captured as a free pawn on move 10 can be captured as a confirmed Bishop on move 18, after enough contact has stripped everything beneath it. That difference, repeated across a game, is a material avalanche.
Here is the catch that makes zapping a skill rather than a button: the reach of your touch comes from the least valuable identity the mover still holds. A fresh six-way blur pokes one square like a pawn; only a piece that has collapsed toward Rook, Bishop, or Queen touches far. In other words, you have to arm your attackers by collapsing them first. A confirmed Knight or a revealed Bishop is artillery; an undefined blur is a popgun. This is why committing a piece to a definite type — giving up its mystery — is so often worth it.
When a single move touches several enemies, the zaps land as one volley. They resolve together, not one at a time, and a zap never gets to pick a favorite victim: everyone in the volley sheds together or shields together. If the combined volley would ripple beyond the pieces it struck — forcing a census cascade elsewhere — the whole volley fizzles. Positioning a move so its landing square touches two or three soft targets at once is a real tactical resource, as long as the volley resolves cleanly.
Zapping isn’t always right. Capture when:
Zaps convert your information advantage into an enemy weakness; captures convert an enemy weakness into material. Do them in that order. If you remember nothing else: never capture a fresh blur you could have zapped into something worth capturing.