With its L-shaped wooden blocks, Coral may look like a dexterity stacking game, and certainly there's a degree of stacking involved, but it's actually an abstract strategy game. Coral is designed by Tangi Tabuteau and published by 2Tomatoes. Art is by Tatiana Boyko.
There's a solitaire option but the object of the competitive 2-4 player game is to end with more of your coral (ie: sections of your blocks) visible than any of the other players when viewed from above. You probably won't be playing the entire game with a top-down aerial view, so you'll need to think beyond what you can immediately see or you'll need to stand up frequently during play - or most likely a bit of both.
Depending on player count, you'll start off with most of your blocks and one or more blocks of another player's coral. The game starts with a single cube ('stone') on the table and initially players must place a coral piece so that it covers at least one exposed face of that cube. When the cube is completely obscured, players each place out their coral pawn anywhere on the collective structure, except that it cannot be on your own coral. Play then proceeds with players either placing out a block so that at least one edge is adjacent to the section where their pawn is standing, or instead moving their pawn any number of spaces orthogonally, provided that you must never move on or through your own coral. Players' pawns can block each other's movement, so there's a heap of strategy in the way you deploy your pawn.
Some players may initially find it counterintuitive that height is ignored for both adjacency and reckoning orthogonal movement, but it doesn't take long for your brain to accept what amounts to treating a three-dimensional structure as if it was only in two dimensions. Other than in the event of ties, height is ignored too when working out the winner. Intuitively players think in terms of building up in order to cover each other's blocks but building outwards on the flat can sometimes be a higher-scoring option...
And having said that Coral is a strategy rather than dexterity game, there is yet a dexterity element. If you are playing with strict competitive rules then if a block you place topples over, you lose that piece and your turn (if it was an opponent's block you were placing, they get to take and place the toppled block). You have the option tho' of playing with 'friendly' rules that ignore this dexterity penalty.
Coral is easy to learn and it plays quickly: most of our plays at Board's Eye View ran to around 15-20 minutes. It's a game that children can play, but, with its satisfyingly chunky wooden blocks, it's a challenging abstract strategy game with enough depth to keep adults coming back for more.