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You start out with 50 stones in two rows at the bottom. You can move any stone to an adjacent square, provided this square is adjacent to another stone. Diagonals count as adjacent. To win, you have to get one stone into the goal at the top. But some of the squares are pits, stones positioned there will vanish, leaving only a blue cross.
Unlike the solitaire game Dammit! this one was invented by Robert Roberds (BSX International) from scratch. Technically, there are a few similarities:
- It is one of the few games using high-resolution EGA graphics that takes the distortion into account. The pixels of this video mode are extremely oblong, a square, to be displayed properly, would have to have 4×3 pixels. Most authors simply ignored this.
- It required a mouse (and used both mouse buttons) at a time when mice were still fairly exotic devices in the PC world.
While the basic idea may sound good, Leong is not all that much fun to play. This is partly due to the fact that moving stones across the board can become a chore, since you have to move them one square at a time, but mainly that gameplay depends entirely on the pit patterns. Some are easy, some are plain annoying like the one in the screenshot above. There's a reason the cursor hovers over the "No".
