Poly-Y, by Craige Schensted (“Ea”)  (1970s?)

Poly-Y is a beautiful game, evidently quite deep.  Schensted, who also invented Star and Y, introduced it to the world in a remarkable book, Mudcrack Y and Poly-Y, available from Kadon Enterprises.  The book gives the rules, strategic advice, a well-annoted sample game apiece for the two games, and a great many copies of various suggested playing boards.  One can play Poly-Y on a board of any odd number of sides; actually, the game of Y can be seen as a “special case” of Poly-Y, played on a board with only three sides.  At least when Schensted wrote his book the board had not been standardized.  Perhaps it never has been.  If a man who has never played Poly-Y is entitled to an opinion, I think the game needs a set of standard boards (novice, intermediate, tournament).  For one thing, especially in the age of the Internet, abstract games need a notation for postal play as well as for recording games.  Therefore I’ve selected a few boards from Mudcrack Y and Poly-Y and have produced images of isomorphic boards, which are shown below.

To use the boards in Mudcrack Y and Poly-Y, players place stones in the regions; in Kadon’s production of the game of Y, players play on the intersections.  The board designs here are taken from the book, but are presented for play on intersections.  (Besides being more aesthetically appealing to me, and emphasizing the game’s Go-like character, it’s easier to use the coordinates that my computer program outputs this way.)

The rules for Poly-Y are elegant:  two players alternately place stones of contrasting color (probably Black and White go stones) on the board.  (Alternatively, since stones are never moved once played, they could simply mark their moves in two colors on a paper copy of the board.)  When a player forms a Y -- that is, a connected chain of intersections -- that touches two consecutive edges of the board and a third edge anywhere else, he captures the corner of the board between those two edges.  The object is to capture more than half of the board’s corners.  Draws are impossible.

The game doesn’t seem to have made a great splash, as it probably deserves to.  As far as I know this is the only web page devoted to Poly-Y, and the images below may be the only existing GIFs of electronically-generated boards.  I hope the information here will encourage more people to try it out.  To that end I propose the boards here as “standard” novice, intermediate and tournament boards, and the labellings as a standard notation for recording games and for e-play.

If anyone has any more information about Poly-Y, I’d be happy to hear from you!

Novice board:  5 sides, 31 intersections

Intermediate board:  9 sides, 99 intersections

Tournament board:  9 sides, 208 intersections:

Questions, corrections, comments:  Send me e-mail at  markthom@flash.net