A suggestion for how an official notation could work:

1) Tiles are numbered according to the backside of the "how to play"-booklet. (Are there several numbering schemes? Then one should be chosen as the official)

2) Two vectors are made, one that goes one position to the right, the other going upwards and to the right. The numbers of right and up-right step you have to go to get to the played position. These are the first two numbers in the move.

3) Rotation is relative the picture on the booklet/numbering scheme, as n*(-60'). (Thus ranging from 0 for position as on booklet, to 5 for rotated one step CCW (=5 steps CW). This is the third number in a move.


4) Player names are inserted before or after the move, a forced move is indicated by using an F before. Moves can be enclosed in "hard brackets" []. When one player has no tiles left, that is indicated by the _other_player_'s move having an asterisk to the right of the move. If it's a multiplayer game, one asterisk is added for each player not able to move.

Example: In the picture found at "http://ekengren.no-ip.org/tantrix/notation.jpg" the first played tile was (according to my booklet) tile #5, rotated 3 steps CW (if I turn the booklet 1/4 of a turn CW first). The position is obviously 0*A, 0*B -> PlayerA [0 0 3]. The second tile was tile #25, played at position 0*A, -1*B, and rotated one step CCW = 5 steps CW -> PlayerB [0 -1 5].

By Jens on Saturday, September 27, 2003 - 03:11 am:

Oops: Of course the tile number should be included in the move, as in the example

1 PlayerA [5 0 0 3]
2 PlayerB [25 0 -1 5]
...

By Rick Yagodich (Ricky) on Saturday, September 27, 2003 - 05:27 am:

You forgot one little detail Jens... or two. Indication of initial hands and replacement tile drawn.

By Jens on Saturday, September 27, 2003 - 06:00 am:

Heh... True enough. To my defense, I wasn't really that awake then.. =)

Perhaps something like this?

PlayerA {6x tile#}
PlayerB {6x tile#}
PlayerA [5 0 0 3]{tile#}

By Puddleglum on Monday, October 06, 2003 - 03:19 pm:

Could the position on the board not be indicated by a clockwise spiral of hexagons with position 1 being the posiition of the first played tile. Position 2 would be to the right of this - then wrapping round in a clockwise direction to form a spiral (hence if the second player played above to the right of the first tile then this would be board position 7.

The tile played could be indicated by the colours from the 2 o'clock position i.e. BBRYYR the tile number could be added for clarification.

The tiles in the players hands could simply be indicated by number.

By Jens Kash on Monday, October 06, 2003 - 05:10 pm:

I think it might be harder to keep track of individual tiles being played, if positions are indicated this way, as the game might "wander" away from the tile played first. If so, there would be several gaps in the series of positions played, and I think once you reach the first 100 positions things might get very messy... (The 100th position occurs at ~7 tiles from the first tile played, if I've counted correctly.)

I _think_ it's easier to keep track of "how many steps do I have to move to the right/upper right to get to this position?".

I also think there should be only _one_ notation of tiles - either one official numbering, with rotations, _or_ a definition by colour (if so, one should think of colourblind - what is the notation then?). With the numbering of tiles, it is also more easy to see what tiles are left.

By Dave Dyer on Tuesday, October 07, 2003 - 11:25 am:

A sucessful scheme for manually recording a game
can't depend on external referents such as the
pictures in the manual, and should be "constructive"
in the sense that the recorded game is easily
converted into instructions to reconstruct the
game.

My proposal: Use the numbers from the back
of the tile. Record a move as

27rgy : 32ggy

the "ggy" notation is the preceeding, middle
and trailing color of the connection. In this
scheme it is easy to figure out where to place
the tile and how to orient it, and there is
enough redundancy in the description so accidental
placement errors will not be a big problem.

By Jens on Wednesday, October 08, 2003 - 05:12 pm:

Nice one! It solves the problem of having to decide on orientation of tiles & board alike.

By Jens on Friday, December 05, 2003 - 03:06 pm:

So, how should a game be written?

For initial tiles:
PlayerA (comma-separated list of tiles drawn)
PlayerB (...)
(PlayerC ... , PlayerD ...)

Move (move#) Tile#ccc:Tile#ccc; drawn tile# or 0 for end game

I suggest there be a time limit to add comment for this thread. Dave...?

By Jens/Kash on Monday, October 11, 2004 - 02:39 pm:

This thread is now about a year old.