TacTix is a derivation from Nim invented by Piet Hien in the late 1940s. It is played on a N×N board filled with chips. At a turn, a player removes a number of contiguous chips from a single row or column. TacTix's normal game is trivial: if N is odd there is a winning strategy for the first player; if N is even there is a winning strategy for the second player. (In both case, the clever player would utilize the central symmetry of the board.) Hence, TacTix is played in its misère variant: the player to pick the last piece loses the game.

The applet is courtesy of www.mazeworks.com, Copyright © 2002 Robert Kirkland. All Rights Reserved.

References

1. M. Gardner, Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions, The University of Chicago Press, 1988

Copyright © 1996-2008 Alexander Bogomolny