Y (game)

Y is an abstract strategy connection game for two players, played by placing stones on the intersections of a triangular board, most commonly drawn as a hexagonal grid arranged into a triangle. Each player uses one color of stone, and the objective is to be the first to build an unbroken chain of one's own stones connecting all three sides of the triangle at once, a winning structure that guarantees the game cannot end in a draw once the board is filled. The game was first described mathematically by John Milnor in the early 1950s and was independently invented as a playable game in 1953 by Craige Schensted and Charles Titus. Y belongs to the same family of connection games as Hex, Havannah, and TwixT, all of which share the basic idea of racing to complete a connecting path across the board before an opponent can block it. Schensted went on to develop a series of further games built on Y's underlying board and connection idea, each one more complex than the last but also more generalized in its rules.