With my first new game of this blog, I learned something... that I might play a lot of games in this series but I might also lose a lot of games. And with that, I bring you Twixt by Alex Randolph. As soon as I decided to start the blog, Andy gave me one of his three copies of this 1962 game. Andy also taught me to play the game and it quickly became clear that I was going to need to study up a bit more before being competitive. Andy has designed some impressive abstract strategy games with the Looney Pyramids and grew up playing Twixt against his brother, who he tried to reassure me beat him just as easily as he won against me.

The goal in Twixt is to build a connection from one side of the pegboard to the opposite side before your opponent. You build a connection by placing pegs and connecting them with the same color links. It took a bit just to get the hang of the distance that worked for linkable pegs. I dug around on BGG and found Twixt Live and T1j and started playing online. I've played online quite a bit and at a couple of game days with friends. I like Twixt because once I understood it, it became incredibly fun to play against other friends who got it.

One of the fun things about Twixt is that it's part of the 3M bookshelf series. It is also a 1979 Spiel des Jahres recommended game. The cover art and components for the game are really impressive compared to modern games in my opinion. Mike said in the panel that Twixt is better than Blokus, which is probably true. Twixt is certainly deeper than Blokus and it was great to learn. I'll keep playing Blokus with my friends that don't game very often but Twixt is very accessible, even if it's tricky enough that one wrong move can sink your strategy.

I'll consider this one crossed off the list, even if I still need to schedule a rematch with Andy. I'd love to hear if you've played Twixt - it's currently going for $155 on Amazon but I'm sure it's easy to find a used copy for less and the online option is great.