Y is an abstract strategy board game invented by Craige Schensted (now Ea Ea) and Charles Titus. It is a member of the connection game family inhabited by Hex, Havannah, TwixT, and others; it is also an early member in a long line of games that Ea Ea has developed, each game more complex but also more generalised. An abstract strategy game is a board game with perfect information, no chance, and (usually) two players. ... A board game is any game played on a board (that is, a premarked surface) with counters or pieces that are moved across the board. ... Hex is a board game played on a hexagonal grid, usually in the shape of a 10 by 10 or a 11 by 11 rhombus. ... Havannah is an abstract strategy board game invented by Christian Freeling. ... TwixT is a two-player abstract strategy board game invented by Alex Randolph. ...

Y is typically played on a triangular board with hexagonal spaces; the "official" Y board has three points with five-connectivity instead of six-connectivity, but it is just as playable on a regular triangle. Schensted and Titus' book Mudcrack Y & Poly-Y has a large number of boards for play of Y, all hand-drawn; most of them seem irregular but turn out to be topologically identical to a regular Y board.

Here is an image of the "official" board, sold by Kadon:

Image File history File links My vinyl Y board and glass stones from Kadon. ...

As in most games of this type, one player takes the part of Black and one takes the part of White; they place stones on the board one at a time, neither removing nor moving any previously-placed stones, and the pie rule can be used to mitigate any first-move advantage. A simple example board, 8 spaces to a side, with periods representing empty spaces: The pie rule, sometimes referred to as the swap rule, is a meta-rule commonly used in abstract strategy board games like Hex and Havannah. ... A full stop or period, also called a full point, is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of several different types of sentences in English and several other languages. ...

 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

The rules are as follows:

• Players take turns placing one stone of their color on the board.

• The first player to connect all three sides of the board wins; the corners count as belonging to both sides of the board to which they are adjacent.

As in most connection games, the size of the board changes the nature of the game; small boards lend towards pure tactical play, whereas larger boards tend to make the game more strategic. Tactics is the collective name for methods of winning a small-scale conflict, performing an optimization, etc. ... A strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. ...

Schensted and Titus claim that Y is a superior game to Hex because Hex can be seen as a subset of Y; consider the following, with number signs representing Black stones and zeroes representing White stones: Number sign in Arial font Number sign is the preferred Unicode name for the glyph or symbol # (Do not confuse with ♯ (Sharp)). The name was chosen from several used in the United States and Canada. ... 0 (zero), alternatively called naught, nil, nada, ought zilch, zip, nothing or nought, is both a number and a numeral. ...

 . . . . . . # # # # . . . . . 0 . . . . . . 0 . . . . . . . 0 . . . . . . . . 0 . . . . . 

The portion of the board at the bottom-right can now be considered a 5x5 Hex board, and played identically. However, this sort of artificial construction on a Y board is extremely uncommon, and the games have different enough tactics (outside of constructed situations) to be considered separate, though related.

Mudcrack Y & Poly-Y also describes Poly-Y, the next game in the series of Y-related games; after that come Star and *Star. *Star is a complex abstract strategy game by Ea Ea, a designer of Y. It is a redevelopment of his earlier game Star. ... *Star is a complex abstract strategy game by Ea Ea, a designer of Y. It is a redevelopment of his earlier game Star. ...

The simple (regular) form of Y can be played by email, using Richard Rognlie's Play-By-eMail Server. Play by mail games are games, of any type, played through postal mail or e-mail. ... Richards Play By Email Server is a server on the internet setup for the playing of various different online games in the play-by-email method. ...

References

• Browne, Cameron. Hex Strategy: Making the Right Connections. ISBN 1-56881-117-9
• "Game of Y." http://www.gamerz.net/~pbmserv
• Schensted, Craige and Titus, Charles. Mudcrack Y & Poly-Y.

External links

• Y Can't End in a Draw
• Y on HexWiki