How to play Mudcrack Y
Same game as Y, stranger board. Black moves first; on your turn you claim one empty cell. Cells are never taken back. You win the moment one group of your cells touches all three sides.
Why this is still Y
A Y board does not have to be a neat lattice. Any way of cutting a triangle into cells works, as long as exactly three cells meet at every junction — which is what dried mud does when it cracks, and where the game gets its name. On any such board, filling every cell leaves exactly one colour connected to all three sides: no draws, always a winner, same as on the regular board.
A cell that touches two sides counts for both, corners included. The board you are playing is drawn fresh each game and has never existed before; the number under the board is its seed, which is enough to rebuild it exactly.
The shapes really are random, not just the drawing. Each board starts as the regular honeycomb and then has forty of its walls re-hung: take the diamond formed by two cells and the two cells at the ends of the wall between them, and swap which pair the wall separates. That keeps three cells at every junction — so the board is always legal — while leaving quadrilaterals, pentagons, hexagons and heptagons all over the board, where the regular one has nothing but hexagons and pentagons.
Reading the board
- Groups merge. Two cells of the same colour that share a wall are connected, and the wall between them is not drawn. If it looks like one shape, it is one group.
- The three sides are coloured along the edges of the triangle. You need all three.
- The dot marks the last cell claimed, so you can see what the machine just did.
- At the end the winning group is outlined, right out to each side it reaches.
The pie rule
Moving first is an advantage, so the second player may take it: on White's first turn only, clicking Black's cell claims that opening for White instead of replying to it. The page says so when the option is live.
The controls
- You play
- Black or White. Black moves first; changing this restarts the game on the same board.
- Strength (1–10)
- How long Ginny thinks per move, not how clever it is: 1 is near-instant, 5 about half a second, 10 about half a minute. The line under the controls names the search that setting resolved to on your device.
- New game
- A new board, generated and checked in your browser — the check being that it really is a Y board, which the page insists on before letting you play it.
About your opponent
Ginny is a graph neural network trained on the regular 55-point Y board and nothing else. It has never seen any of these boards: a board reaches it only as a list of which cell touches which, so an irregular one is simply a different list. It is a decent player here and not a specialist — beating it on a board neither of you has seen before is a fair fight.