A traditional North-African race-and-capture game driven by tossed casting sticks across a boustrophedon board.
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How to play
A war-race played across four rows of seven with seven pieces a side, thrown with stick dice rather than cubes. Pieces begin on your home row and cannot move at all until a particular throw activates them, so the opening is often spent waiting for the board to come alive.
The outer rows are the two home rows; the two middle rows are shared ground.
Sticks are thrown and read by how many land face up, which gives an uneven spread of results rather than a flat one.
A piece must be activated by the right throw before it can enter play.
Pieces that meet on the shared rows capture, so the middle is where the game is decided.
The game is guaranteed to end rather than cycling indefinitely.
Controls
Desktop: click to cast the sticks, then click one of your highlighted pieces to move it.
Phone & tablet: tap to cast and tap a piece, touch input is fully supported.
Tips & strategy
Activate more pieces than you think you need. A board with one active piece gives you no choice at all when a throw arrives.
The middle rows are contested and the home rows are not, so a piece that stays home is safe and useless in equal measure.
Because the stick throws are uneven, some results are far more common than others — plan around the likely throw rather than the one you want.
A throw that grants another turn is worth more than a throw that moves further.
Trading in the middle favours whoever has more activated pieces behind the trade.
Origins
Tab is a running-fight game of North Africa and the Middle East, played for generations on a long board of several rows, with throwing-sticks rather than dice — flat on one face, rounded on the other, so a throw is read from how many land face up.
The sticks give it its shape. One particular throw is required to bring a piece into play at all, so a player can sit for several turns unable to start while the opponent develops, and the same throw usually grants another turn. Pieces that meet on the track capture, and because the rows run back and forth, a piece that looks safely past danger is often merely one row away from it.
About Tâb
Tâb is a historical stick-dice war-race game played across North Africa and the Middle East. This is an original, free browser version with three AI difficulty levels and pass-and-play.
A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.
