Teeko

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Teeko (with victory for Black)

Teeko is a strategy game developed by John Scarne that is played on a field of five by five fields. It was marketed by Scarne's company, John Scarne Games Inc. , which, however, went bankrupt. According to Scarne, the name Teeko is a combination of tic-tac-toe , chess , checkers and bingo .

Rules of the game

The playing field consists of five by five fields on which four black and four red pieces are placed. Black begins, then one piece is alternately placed on a free space. The game is won by the player who forms either a horizontal, vertical or diagonal line with his stones or a square on four adjacent fields. If this is not yet successful by placing the stones, one stone is alternately drawn onto a horizontally, vertically or diagonally adjacent field.

strategy

Guy Steele showed in 1998 that if the game is optimal, neither player can achieve a victory.

variants

There are 16 variants of Teeko (e.g. Advanced Teeko ) with only slightly changed rules in some cases . Guy Steele showed that two of these variants allow a victory for Black (i.e. the first player) if the game is optimal, while the other 14 variants, similar to the standard version, mean a draw if the game is optimal.

useful information

  • John Scarne believed that, despite the simple rules , Teeko was more strategic than most other games. He named his son John Teeko, born in 1955, out of pride in his invention .
  • When water damage in his company's storerooms completely destroyed the game's supplies, Scarne's company went bankrupt. Today Teeko is relatively unknown.

literature

John Scarne himself has published a book about Teeko , in which he describes in detail the rules of the standard version and the variants and also goes into the strategy of the game:
Scarne On Teeko . Crown, New York 1955 (256 pages).

Further literature and sources:

  • Richard A. Epstein: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic . 2nd Edition. Waltham 2012, ISBN 978-0-12-397870-7 , pp. 341-342 .
  • Eric W. Weisstein: CRC concise encyclopedia of mathematics . 2nd Edition. Chapman & Hall, Boca Raton 2003, ISBN 1-58488-347-2 , pp. 2955-2956 .
  • Scarne, John (b.1903) . In: Salvatore J. LaGumina et al. (Ed.): The Italian American Experience . To Encyclopedia . Garland, New York 2000, ISBN 0-8153-0713-6 , pp. 579-580 .

Web links