i've become obsessed with Tak
If you're from the old blog, welcome back. If you're new here, welcome to you too!
I recently discovered a board game that has become my new obsession. It's a beautiful game called Tak.
Its a two player tile and grid game. On each turn a player can either place a tile or move a tile on the grid which is 5x5. You can move a tile after its placed, on top of another tile and you can then control the whole stack. The simple object of the game is to connect opposite sides of the board in a road of flat tiles before your opponent. You can also place tiles on its side as a 'wall' which blocks a connection for both players. The wall can also move and can also be moved onto a stack. In a 5x5 game, each player gets one special piece called a capstone which cannot be stacked on and has the ability to crush/flatten any wall when moving on to it. You can checkout the full rules here but if you're like me and learn games better by watching you can see that here. Its a really simple set of rules yet makes gameplay unfold in unpredictable ways.
Now what I love about this game is the way you play the game. The goal is not to win per se, the goal is to play a beautiful game. Which means to make the most interesting move not necessarily the move that will cause a win and end the game prematurely. Part of this is when a player is one move from winning you say "tak" to tell your opponent "good sir i really am enjoying this game and would like to continue but unfortunately I've found myself one turn from the end, please help stop me such that we may continue playing." Sort of like a more gentlemanly version of "check" in chess. And the two players may help each other avoid ending the game early by discussing the best move the opponent can use to block or continue play. This dance continues until one player is forced to win. Now the other interesting thing is that if you try to win blindly, just go straight for a connection, you end up doing very poorly. You have to try to win, but not too hard. Too hard and you fail, too little and you lose and the dance stops. Its a bit of a balance and a koan; try but don't try.
Needless to say I was all in and really wanted to play this game myself.
After getting shocked that such a simple and elegant game now goes for over a hundred dollars on eBay, I started stewing about how to construct my own pieces and board. Its just some square tiles and a gridded board I mean come on. Well it turns out sourcing the right pieces is hard. By that I mean pieces that feel good in the hand and are the correct dimensions. This is my journey, strap in.
The vanilla tiles are 20mm square and 8mm thick. I wanted these in stone so they'd be heavy and feel premium. I found somewhere on reddit that people have previously bought bathroom tiling, stripped the glue and mesh off and used the individual mosaic tiles as the game pieces. A big part of the community is a DIY scrappy kind of angle where you make pieces and a board out of whatever you can.
I tried out Google AI searching but that was no help, a bunch of false positives (yep 12 inch square marble direct from Italy is definitely what i want). I scoured different etsy stores and mosaic tile sites and asked around about custom sizing to match the game. Turns out that almost all of them are re-salers and they generally don't cut the tiles themselves. The places I found that do offer custom sizing don't put out vibes they'd be interested in my small order of 40 odd small pieces for a board game (think luxury penthouse finishers).
The best engineering advice I've ever heard is to "make your requirements less dumb". 20mm is really close to 3/4 inches. This gave me a bunch more hits. So I settled for differing dimensions and restarted my search. It turns out that a tile measurements are kinda fake and vibey, something labeled as "1 inch square" doesn't actually measure as 1 inch. It's like lumber measurements I guess in that a 2x4 isn't actually 2x4 inches. But in tiling its not consistent. Some listings will be titled "1 inch square" but then in the specifications it'll have something like "chip size" or "mosaic size" which will list the individual pieces as 3/4 or 7/8. The thing is the gaps between tiles on the mesh backing dont even make it a 1 inch sub-unit so its a stupid name for a product but what do i know. So I just started ordering samples and figured who the hell knows what the actual size of these things are so lets measure it ourselves when it arrives.
Most of the tile samples were cheap or free, only a few dollars plus shipping. My vague plan was basically to use the sample of the best ones as the final product for the game pieces with no intention of placing a full order (not sure if this is rude to the suppliers but meh I paid for what I got). Samples were generally 4x6 inches with vaguely 1 inch tile gives you 24ish individual pieces. Perfecto!
Here are the various sources I ordered from with some notes link. Many many other sources had the correct width but the thickness was too small, often 4 mm or 3/16 inches. This would make it difficult for the pieces to stand on edge as a wall.
The best tile for game pieces are the 'Carrara White Marble 3/4x3/4 Square Mosaic Tile Tumbled' from Marble Online. The edges are smooth and they have a nice matte finish to the marble. And the size is just about right. The tiles are heavy in the hand which is pleasant. The glue is easy to remove with acetone. The black ones, 'Nero Marquina', are honed or polished not tumbled so the edges are a bit sharp. But maybe they'll stock a tumbled finsih at some point. I looked into getting a small rock tumbler to do it myself but my wife convinced me I was going too deep on this.
For a board right now im just using a drawn on paper 5x5 grid of 1.25 inch squares so you have room to grab the pieces on the grid. My local library has a laser cutter/engraver I plan to use on some thin wood that they also supply. That would give me something a little more polished and sturdy than just a piece of paper with sharpie. For the capstones I ended up using the small tiles, they're stylish and smaller than the other pieces so they can be differentiated. I also tried these stone cabochons from etsy (a few dollars for one in onyx and one in white howlite) but they were too polished and slippery to really use.
My wife and I have played maybe 5 or 6 games with this setup and we're quite pleased. We've both gotten better in such a short time and have made more interesting moves in the later games.
The easiest thing if you just want to play this game irl is to get two set of blank scrabble tiles from amazon/ebay, one dark and one light, and draw out a grid on some paper. For the capstones you can use two chess pawns. You can also play online at playtak.com. Go for it. You'll have a great time.
Bruce