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THE MIND GAME

	History The first version of Tantrix was called "The Mind Game", named after the game shops owned by the inventor, Mike McManaway. It was created in 1988 and used 56 cardboard pieces with a yellow background and lines of only two colours - red and black. The strange hexagonal playing board folded three ways into a diamond shape, which determined the shape of the box. A couple of thousand sets were silk screened in Chile and shipped back to New Zealand to test out sales in the inventor's shop. The set sold well enough to publish a second edition the following year. This time an offset printing process was used, along with a number of minor improvements. Having his own game shops, Mike was able to "test the market" and get immediate feedback from customers to decide if design changes were improvements. An experiment with the first plastic version of the Mind Game followed a year later.

Rules

The Objective:

The Mind Game consists of 56 hexagonal tiles and a hexagonal playing board. Each tile has three red or black links, each of which may be connected to other links of the same colour to form continuous lines. Each player attempts to form the longest possible line by skillfully connecting up links of their own colour, while also trying to block the growth of their opponent's line.

The Play:

All 56 tiles are placed in the bag and the players each select a colour.
Both players pick up six tiles at random from the bag and place them face up on the table.
Red always begins, and places a tile on any space on the board. However, Red may not place an all red tile in the very centre space on the first turn.
All subsequent tiles must be place adjacent to tiles already on the board. Connecting links must always be of the same colour. For example, a red link cannot connect to a black link.
Tiles may not be placed on or outside the black margin of the board.
There is no restriction against placing tiles which are of the opponent's colour.
Each player alternately places a tile on the board at each turn, but may occasionally be required to play more than one tile in a given turn, to comply with the "priority move" rule.
Whenever players have used up all their six tiles they must pick up another six tiles from the bag. Players should always wait until after their opponent has played before picking up a replacement set of tiles.
If at any time, players are unable to place any of their tiles on the board, they forfeit their turn and pick up new tiles (enough to bring their total back to six).
A hole is a space entirely surrounded by tiles. Care must be taken with the placement of the sixth or final surrounding tile, so that the space can theoretically be filled by a Mind Game tile. In practice this means that the hole must be surrounded by an even number of red links and an even number of black links.

Priority Moves:

A priority move exists when four or more tiles surround an empty hexagonal space.
A tile must be immediately played to fill this space by the player who placed the fourth surrounding tile (if that player has a tile that fits).
Otherwise the opposing player must place a tile in the surrounded space (if possible). A player may not play a further normal turn after filling priority moves.
If neither player has a tile that can fit in the surrounded space, play continues as normal (neither player loses a turn).
If two or more priority moves exist or the filling of one priority move creates another, they must all be filled immediately when possible.
When either player picks up fresh tiles, they must try to fill any and all priority moves that exist. When players are forced to fill priority moves, they lose their normal turn.
When a player cannot fill all the priority moves on the board and is faced with a choice, the following priorities take effect: a space surrounded by six tiles must be filled ahead of a space surrounded by five tiles. A space surrounded by five tiles takes priority over a space surrounded by four tiles.

The Winner:

The game ends when all the tiles have been placed on the board or both players agree that neither can increase their longest line. The player whose longest line has the greatest number of links is the winner.

Mind Game Strategy

Set of Tiles

Mind Game Puzzles