So, where to start?
You may already be familiar with Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles. If not, it's a very worthwhile read, but let's not get off-topic. In the second book, the narrator talks about a game called "
Tak"
. There's never much detail about the rules, but it's clearly supposed to be the equivalent to classic two-player strategy games like chess or go in his fictional world.
Long story short, the game got defictionalized.
You can find the rules here.
I feel like this is a game members of the DROD community may be very interested in. Official physical copies of the game are still in pre-order, but you can play online at
playtak.com. There's also a couple of AIs there, both for beginners and better players. My handle there is pse711933, in case you're looking for easy wins
The subtitle "
A beautiful game"
is actually a self-proclaimed title, which is a pretty bold thing to do. Even more boldly, Rothfuss himself describes it as "
more elegant than chess"
and "
more enjoyable than Go"
. Does it really hold up to that? Only time can tell, obviously, but here are some of my thoughts:
Click here to view the secret text
×(I've never played Go, so I can't compare those two. I'm a very mediocre chess player, but I think I know enough about the game to compare these two a bit.)
- The rules are very simple and can for the most part be learned in a few minutes. There also seem to be very little weird exceptions.
- I don't feel like the tactical and strategic depth of Tak is quite as deep as chess, but I'm still an absolute beginner at the former, so I can't tell for sure, and the top Tak players will probably think differently about this.
What I can say is that it's a lot more interesting than I imagined after reading the rules. The stacking mechanic sets it apart vastly from other "road-building" games. It's definitely not trivial and I don't think it will be solved in the next few years.
- The phase I liked most in chess was the middlegame. Openings just felt like memorizing sequences of moves to me, even if I had a notion about why certain moves were better than others, and endgames were too technical for me. Middlegames were those that contained the action, tactical maneuvers and traps.
Tak seems to be more or less a pure middlegame game to me. Again, this might be because I'm a beginner, but it seems like you're thrown right into the action and it won't stop until the game is done. Maybe there will be some sort of opening literature sometime in the future, but I don't think it's as important as in chess.
- From my experience, it seems like offensive play is rewarded a lot more than in chess, which might not be very good for me, but I still really like that. As far as I can tell, defensive play leads to losses. There's also a very low probability of draws, which I like.
- Initiative might be even more important than in chess. From what I can tell, if you do moves that don't really directly help you improve your position, you'll lose pretty quickly.
All in all, a really interesting strategy game, and I honestly wouldn't have expected it to be as good as it is. So yeah, go check it out!
