About a half year ago, my friend taught me a new board game after finding the subreddit randomly one day, and I'd like to share it here as you probably haven't heard of it before. Today, we're going to learn about the beautiful game of Tak.
FOR TAK NERDS: I'm talking about courtly Tak here, rather than competitive Tak, which is fun in its own right, but not quite as interesting.
Tak is a board game played on a grid quite similar to one you might find in chess or checkers, most commonly 6x6, but it can be other sizes too. It belongs to the genre of the "abstract strategy game", or the same genre you might find the aforementioned chess and checkers in. I'm not here to explain how to play Tak (you can find that elsewhere), but what I will talk about is the philosophy of Tak.
Tak is a game that originated from a book series (The Kingkiller Chronicle), and in those books the writer embedded some philosophy that has created a particularly interesting game environment.
People in the Tak community no longer associate with the books, because the game has grown to be something much more than its origin. I do hear the books are good though, and I should probably try reading them at some point. (Maybe you should too?)
See, in Tak, the ultimate goal of any one game is not to win, but to play a beautiful game. In practice, this means that in any particular game you're allowed to undo any mistakes and frequently point out helpful things to the other player. The win condition of the game is to reach Tinuë, where your opponent can only lose no matter what move they make. This is different from other games, where you could lose by simply not paying attention, in Tak you want to play against someone's best game, or otherwise there is little point in playing.
To learn the rules of Tak, I recommend this article by the US Tak Association.
Tak is a wonderful game, and while I recommend playing in real life, boards are hard to find (and frequently handmade), so if you're unable to source or make one, https://playtak.com is a great site for playing games. You can play against bots if you don't have any friends to play against, or you can of course convince one of them to come on. If you're looking for someone to play against, search for the Tak Discord server. I'm not a fan of Discord myself, but it's where most Tak players are located.
Have fun playing Tak!