Connection game

[1]: 4  [2][3] Martin Gardner is credited with popularizing the genre in his writeup of Hex in Scientific American (1957),[1]: 4  [4] expanded and republished in Mathematical Puzzles & Diversions (1959).

[5]: 79  This was a variant of the game Y, which was a generalization of Hex that had been invented independently by John Milnor, Charles Titus, and Craige Schensted in the early 1950s.

[6] Hex and Y were examples of games where the players competed to build a path connecting sides of the board.

Each player is assigned a pair of opposite sides of the board which they must try to connect by taking turns placing a stone of their color onto any empty space.

The game has deep strategy, sharp tactics and a profound mathematical underpinning related to the Brouwer fixed-point theorem.

Its design was based around the fictional game of Tak described in Patrick Rothfuss' 2011 fantasy novel The Wise Man's Fear.

[13] The goal of Tak is to be the first to connect two opposite edges of the board with your pieces, called "stones", and create a road.

To accomplish this, players take turns placing their own stones and building their road while blocking and capturing their opponent's pieces to hinder their efforts at the same.

In addition the player may place and move a piece called the capstone or play normal stones "standing" up on their edge.