In Black and White: A GIPF Project series, part VI: TZAAR

It's possible for some games to live quite successfully in...

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Another great in-depth article. I really think the
Look of these scares of players who were hit
With Go at an early age and never truly gasped it.

That's a distinct possibility. I've never really grasped Go, either. I know how to play and I like it, but it's one of those games that you really have to work at to become "good" and there are just too many other things to play. I still kind of regret never taking the time to do so, but I always think about getting better at the GIPF games, too.

Not mentioned but interesting to note is that Tzaar formally replaced Tamsk in the series. Early advertising for the Gipf project relied quite a bit on the contrast between Gipf discs, Tamsk hourglasses and Zertz marbles. It's interesting that today the series appears to be most familiar as those games with discs on hexagonal boards.

That's true! And the funny thing is that I always considered the most visually striking of the games to be YINSH, even including TAMSK when it was still considered to be part of the set. Did you ever get a chance to play TAMSK? I never have, as it disappeared from the market pretty soon after release (when they discovered the issues with the timers) and I only got into the series when YINSH was the most recent.

I knew about the series before Yinsh came out, but Yinsh was also the first game I got after an introduction at a boardgame fair. After that I bought the other available games (Dvonn Zertz and Gipf at the time although some were not that easy to find) and around 2005/6 there was a reprint run of Tamsk done, I think, or in any case I got it around that time from an LGS. It's a fun game but doesn't hold a candle to the later games in the series for some obvious reasons: it's fairly frantic, there is a huge gray area of 'was it on time or not' that just doesn't mesh with the whole abstract boardgame thing, and the hourglasses were pretty low quality. Mine haven't worked properly for the better part of two decades (moisture got in them no doubt). A digital version of the game could be interesting though, even asynchronous online play could work but not sure I've ever seen that.