Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
Take-Back-Toe is a short abstract strategy game for two players. Starting with a central row of ten chips on four adjacent spaces, players try to move chips to create three stacks of equal height on their side of the board.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Read the full game description
Take-Back-Toe is a short abstract strategy game for two players. Starting with a central row of ten chips on four adjacent spaces, players try to move chips to create three stacks of equal height on their side of the board. On a turn, a player rolls a six-sided die, then moves a stack of exactly that many chips to an orthogonally adjacent space on the 3x4 game board. A player cannot reverse the opponent's previous move. For a longer challenge, players can complete a set number of games, alternating the start player and scoring as many points for a victory as the height of the winning stacks. The player with the highest cumulative score wins. The game was the winner of the Thousand Year Game Design Challenge, a 2011 contest to design a game that might still be played a thousand years hence.