Color Flood Duel strategy
Three questions judge every color choice, plus one counterexample that punishes greedy play. Every idea here works directly on the playable duel board, where each move shows the cells you gained and the reply AhaBot chose.
Immediate gain
Count the cells a color would add to your region right now. This is your baseline: the floor of every choice. Comparing these counts is the Numbers skill in action — but it is only the first question, not the decision.
Opponent reply
After you grow, AhaBot takes the best reply available to it. Ask what your color leaves behind: a choice that hands the bot a large same-color block next to its border can lose more than it gained. Subtract the bot’s likely gain from yours before calling a move good.
Frontier
Your region can only grow through its border — the edge where your cells touch cells you do not own. A move that gains few cells today but pulls your frontier next to several different colors keeps future turns rich. A move that gains more today but strands your border against a single shared color leaves tomorrow’s turns thin.
A counterexample to greed
Imagine blue would add 6 cells now, and every one of them sits in a corner AhaBot is about to reach. Green adds only 3, but stretches your frontier along a band of four different colors. The greedy blue move nets you 6 and then watches the bot absorb the same corner for free; the patient green move converts slowly across several turns and wins the endgame. More cells now is not more cells at the end.
Try it on the board
Play a Starter duel, and after each of your moves read the gain panel: how many cells you took, and what the reply cost you. When a big-gain move loses ground on the next turn, you have met the counterexample in person.
Reading the numbers in the game
Every color button shows two live values: +N is exactly how many cells you gain this move, and Reply +M is the most AhaBot can gain right after. After you pick, the game repeats the real numbers back — the same values the engine computed, never a guess. Cells always carry a number and a shape, so nothing depends on color vision alone.