I spent last weekend at PAX and had a great time! Our USTA tournament went very smoothly, I got to play some casual Tak, and relaxed with friends enjoying good food and board games.
I should probably be writing a post mortem about PAX, but I got excited about ptn.ninja version 3, and so I built a puzzle using the new interface. If you haven't experienced it yet, go check it out!
For those new to my puzzles, I try to post one every other Saturday night (EST) and respond to answers on Sunday morning. They are usually one of the following types: Tinue (game ending via forced road), Tinue Avoidance (is there a way out?), Gaelet (game ending via flat count), and Best Move (what would you do, and why?).
The type featured tonight is a Tinue puzzle. Tinue is defined as a board state in which no matter what the opposing player does during their turn (White, in this instance), a road win will be awarded to the other player (Black) on their next turn. If you are familiar with Chess, Tinue is very similar to Checkmate.
The best way to solve these puzzles is to find a move that forces your opponent into doing something. Then, you use that forced move to force another move, until you have won. Sometimes there are more ways than 1 to go about this. While I love seeing the different variations, usually the shortest path to a forced win is considered best. The following is a simple example to show how this works (you can use the arrow keys to step through the moves and the number keys to select which branch you are following):
Please form your answer with PTN or a link to your solution via ptn.ninja. Also, be sure to use the spoiler tag so as not to ruin it for later puzzle solvers.
** I have noticed some people commenting directly to my blog post when answering puzzles. I would kindly ask that you post your answers on the appropriate post on the Reddit page for Tak (r/tak). This will make it easier for me to respond in a timely manner. On that note, I would like to also apologize to those same people for my delayed replies.
The new Reddit spoiler tag is shown below:
>!spoiler!<
Ex: >!35. a3> 3b2+!<
Thank you and enjoy!!
