Tantrix Game Pack

If like me you, like puzzle board games such as chess, dominoes, then you might like this fairly new game I have recently came across. It is called Tantrix.

The initial concept of the Tantrix was first convieved by Mike McManaway in 1988 whilst camping in South America. Over the years, the game pieces and rules evolved into what we know know as tantrix. It is a visual-spacial strategy game for two to four players. A full set of Tantrix consists of 56 hexagonal tiles made from high density plastic with lines and curves of red, green, blue and yellow.

In the multiplayer version of Tantrix , each player chooses an individual colour they want to be (red, blue, green, yellow). To win the game, it is the player with the longest line segments of their chosen colour (each tile is worth one point) or if you manage to form a loop, each segment is worth two points. Only the longest loop or line counts.

Each player draws a single tile from the hexagon shaped bag. The player with the highest number starts. Each player then takes six tiles from the tantrix game pack and then puts them front of them with the colour lines showing. The player who picked the highest number plays one tile. The next players turn is the person who is clockwise from the last one who played. After laying down a tantrix tile, each player takes a replacement tile from the bag, therefore there should always be six tiles per player until the trantix bag is exhausted. When laying a tile, each edge of the tile must match the colour of the edges adjoining it.

When there are three tiles edges forming an empty space, so it is effectively forms half a hexagon, this is called a forced space. If the next person turn has a tile that fits into that space, then they forced to play that piece. This repeats until there is no more forced spaces they have a piece for. Then it is goes to the free move stage, where they can play any tile. Once the player have finished their free move, they must fill any more forced spaces that they have just created.

The three restriction rules are:

1. You cannot create a forced space with the same colour leading into it three times
2. You cannot create a four sided forced space
3. You cannot play along an edge that, when forced spaces are filled, will create a four sided forced space.S

Once there are no tiles left in the bag, the three restriction rules do not apply.

After you have played a few games of tantrix, it is easy to pick up all the rules. The strategy comes into play when you start to force the other players to extend your lines and use up the pieces they require to extend theirs.

The first version of what we now know as Tantrix was called the "Mind Game". It used 56 cardboard pieces with a yellow background and but only had lines of two colours. 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 made to test out sales. This version sold well enough to publish a second edition in the following year. An experiment with the first plastic version of the Mind Game followed a year later. This eventually evolved into the game we know today.

There are several versions of tantrix available to buy, the three main Tantrix sets are:

• 10 Tile Tantrix Discovery - This is a single player version, where players take on the challange to solver puzzles that take between 30 seconds and 45 minutes
• Super 5 Tantrix Puzzles - five tantrix Puzzles, ranked from Student through to Genius.
• Tantrix Game Pack - This is the main multiplayer tantrix game pack. It consists of a hexagon shaped bag with all 56 tantrix tiles that allows players to play all forms of Tantrix. This alsoincludes the single player puzzles. A complete set of 56 tiles can also be split up into 5 individual "Rainbow Puzzles" according to the colour-coding on the reverse of each tile