Dao is an attractive game to play, although it is solvable in a few seconds on a computer. The game is so small that the complete game graph can be kept in internal memory. At the same time, the number of nodes in the game graph of dao is large enough to allow interesting analyses. In the game spectrum, dao resides between on the one hand trivial games such as tic-tac-toe and do-guti and on the other hand games, such as connect-four and awari that are solved but of which the game graph cannot be kept in memory. In this paper we provide many detailed properties of dao and its solution. Our conclusion is that a game like dao can be used as a benchmark of search enhancements. As an illustration we provide an example concerning the size of transposition tables in a-ß search.