Tic Tac Moo

The young farmers in Tic Tac Moo have their hands full driving the farm animals onto the meadow. On top of that, the animals are very status-conscious as to who is allowed to enter the grassland next to them, and if too many animals of one kind stand together, it can easily happen that some will go astray. Under these circumstances, how are you supposed to gather enough of them? In more detail, each player has a set of 24 animal tokens that are shuffled at the start of the game. The game board is an 8x8 grid with the corners cut off; the outer rows on all sides are neutral space, while the inner section has four 3x3 fields, two each in the color of one of the players. To start the game, players place two of their animal tokens face up on their farmhand spaces and a third animal token in their barn. They then take turns placing four starting animal tokens on the board, one in each of their colored fields. On a turn, a player must place both tokens held by farmhands onto empty spaces in the grid — whether in their color, the opponent's color, or neutral territory — and they must place them adjacent to tokens showing the same animal as the one in their barn. If their barn has a pig token, for example, then they must place both tokens next to pig tokens already on the board, whether orthogonally or diagonally. If while doing so they create a line of three or more of the same animal tokens, they remove all of these animal tokens from the board and keep them except for the token that they just placed. If a player manages to fill one of their colored 3x3 grids with two pairs of each of the four animals (and a third animal of some type), then they immediately win. Alternatively, a player can win immediately by capturing at least twelve animals.