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. Schenstead 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.
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 rules are as follows:
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.
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:
. . . . . . # # # # . . . . . 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 out 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.
The simple (regular) form of Y can be played on Richard Rognlie's play-by-eMail server.
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