I hadn't even heard of Tak when I first heard about Courtly Tak.
Now, The Algorithm obviously knows I'm a fan of abstract strategy board games, so when a video called Tak Is About To Be Your New Favorite Game popped up in my YouTube Recommendeds, I was already halfway sold. What followed was something pretty special. Pinged it to my other half, Hel, and my chum, Lord Mark, before I'd gotten to the end of it.
I was very much looking forward to playing it, although that took a little longer than expected, because it's often unavailable as a boxed version. The gorgeous set they use in the video above was a backer reward for a years-old Kickstarter. But eventually, after my wallet took the hit on a handmade wooden version, we got there.
If this is your first time hearing about it: Tak is a made-up game. Which sounds weird, because they all are, but bear with. Patrick Rothfuss wrote a book – The Wise Man's Fear, which I haven't read, which is part of The Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy, which I also haven't read – in which a board game called Tak is played. It's his fictional world's equivalent of chess or go. Something that's been around for hundreds of years and stood the test of time. Rothfuss thought it was basically unmakeable.
Game designer James Ernest disagreed. Rothfuss disagreed right back. But life (failing that: begging) finds a way. So James had a crack.
The result is, basically, genius. The goal is to build a road of your pieces connecting opposite sides of the board. On each turn you either place a piece – flat, standing, or your single capstone – or move a stack you control, dropping pieces along the way. Flat stones build roads, standing stones block them, and the capstone can flatten a standing stone. Three piece types, one board, an enormous number of ways for it all to go wrong.
But the rules are only half the story.
Courtly and Street
See, there are two ways to play Tak: Courtly, and Street. Think chess – compare the high-stakes championship games played by people in suits at fancy hotels, and the quick cash games played by curmudgeonly old-timers in the park outside. Same board, different intent.
Street Tak is quick, aggressive, played to win. But Courtly Tak is played to see who the better player is – a subtle difference, but an important one. You call 'Tak!' when you're one move away from winning. You point out flaws in your opponent's strategy. You rewind moves if someone messes up. Both players work together to give each other every opportunity to play their best game.
Few months after watching that vid, when my set turned up, Hel and I started playing – helping each other spot bad moves, pointing out good ones, rewinding freely, keeping it relaxed, focussing hard and allowing the other player to point out the obvious thing we'd just missed. Including, on more than one occasion, actually winning the game.
What We Were Actually Doing
Turns out, that's not actually quite Courtly Tak. Courtly Tak is still about proving who's the better player – by giving them every chance possible to play their very best game. What we were doing was something slightly different – playing together, against each other, for the sheer fun of it. Exploring the possibility space, stumbling across new strategies, coming up with counter-strategies together, in real time. The winner was more of a byproduct than the actual point.
I like giving things names, so I decided to give this thing a name.
Conspiratorial Tak. And Conspiratorial Play. From the original Latin root – conspirare, to breathe together.
Not Co-op. Something Else.
Conspiratorial Play is worth distinguishing from co-op play, because it isn't that. Co-op games are designed for cooperation – the ruleset, the win conditions, all of it points the same direction. Conspiratorial Play, conversely, keeps the competitive structure intact. Although you might be playing a variant, nobody's changed the underlying rules. The game still ends with a winner, kinda. You've just quietly agreed, between yourselves, that the game is more interesting than the result.
Now, Courtly Tak gets close to what I'm describing. But not quite all the way there. Courtly Tak is still, at its heart, about proving superiority – just politely. The courtesy is in service of the competition.
Conspiratorial Tak flips that. The competition is in service of the game.
Which got me thinking. Is this just a Tak thing? Or is there something in the idea of Conspiratorial Play that travels?
Conspiratorial Shitstirrer
...sounds like an insult. Isn't.
You might or might not know, I'm currently working on a card game called Shitstirrer – an expansion for the globally popular folk card game Shithead. If this is you learning about it for the first time: the tldr is that it adds a number of different card types that let players define, rewrite, and generally mess with the rules as they play. It's chaotic by design, and adversarial by nature. Unpredictability, and taking no prisoners as you ride roughshod over whatever version of the game you were playing a couple of minutes ago, is in its DNA.
Not an obvious candidate for Conspiratorial Play.
And yet.
Shitstirrer is designed to be flexible in the ways you can play it. Half-Deck, Full-Deck, Pure, Double-Deck. It's tweakable by nature, and that tweakability left a door open I hadn't noticed until I started thinking about Conspiratorial Play.
Enter stage right...
The Shitpact
Shitpact – aka Pact – takes a ruleset designed from the ground up to maximise the ways you can screw over your mates, and flips it into something where you're working together towards a common goal. Cards that were weapons become levellers, attacks become assists, game-changing swings become something you volunteer for rather than inflict.
And all off the back of two little changes.
First: the end state. Rather than playing to not be the Shithead, everyone's working to go out at the same time. Succeed, and you've all won. If anyone doesn't, you've all lost.
Second: the Shitstirrer cards. Rather than a private weapons stash that only you know about, in Pact you're the only person who doesn't know what you're holding – because the Shitstirrer portion of your hand faces outwards. Your co-conspirators choose when to play your Shitstirrers for you: Actions and Persistents on your turn, Interrupts whenever they see fit. What started as an arsenal gets retooled as a shared toolkit – sometimes to level the playing field, sometimes to take a bullet on someone else's behalf.
Sound kinda cool, right? I mean, I haven't actually played it yet. So it might be a disaster. But this is one of the nice glowy bits of game design – where something works in theory, and should be great, and hasn't yet met the humbling steamroller of reality.
I'll find out in the pub in a few hours.
But whether Pact works in practice or falls apart on first contact with reality, the question it asks feels worth asking. What happens when you take a competitive structure and change not the rules, but the reason you're playing?
And can you apply that lens to what you're working on? What happens when a competitive feature set is tweaked slightly – not replaced, just tilted – such that it's more about cooperation, and kinship, and working together, but within the structure of competition? That last bit is, I think, the thing that marks it out. The competition stays, but the point of it changes.
Tak It From Here
If you're interested in learning more about Tak, the video is here. A Companion Guide is here. Actually boxed versions aren't easy to find or get hold of – I got mine via CorvidaGaming on Etsy.