This paper proposes work-stealing strategies for an idle worker (thief) to select a victim worker. These strategies avoid small tasks being stolen to reduce the total task-division cost. We implemented these strategies on a work-stealing framework called Tascell. First, we propose new types of priority- and weight-based steal strategies. Programmers can let each worker estimate and declare, as a real number, the amount of remaining work required to complete its current task so that declared values are used as “priorities” or “weights”. With a priority-based strategy, a thief selects the victim that has the highest known priority at that time. With a weight-based non-uniformly random strategy, a thief uses the relative weights of victim candidates as their selection probabilities. Second, we propose work-stealing strategies to alleviate excessive intra-node work stealing and excessive “steal backs” (or leapfroggings); for example, we allow workers to steal tasks from external nodes with some frequency even if work remains inside the current node. Our evaluation uses a parallel implementation of the “highly serial” version of the Barnes-Hut force-calculation algorithm in a shared memory environment and five benchmark programs in a distributed memory environment.