Talk:Tâb

New article; contributions welcome
This article is based on a board games book in Danish, and I wrote it mostly because I needed to link to it from the article Daldøs. Anyone having a better source or first-hand knowledge, please contribute! - E.g., how old is the game? Where is it actually played, under which names? Are the rules and game materials identical in the whole region? Are the rules presented correctly?

It's not clear to me how a tâb throw is used to split up a stack of pieces - do they still occupy the same square, bot not as a stack, or is just one of the pieces moved one square ahead, leaving the other pieces (assuming there were more than two to begin with) still stacked?

It seems to me the rules must lead to lots of disputes about the legality of various moves: Has a certain piece already been through row 4 or not? Has one of the pieces in a stack previously occupied a given square or not? Without a meticulous record of the game, how are such disputes resolved?--Niels Ø 19:18, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Note on Sources
Ultimately there are only 2 authoritative sources for Tâb. Hyde (1694) is rare, not available online (that I've seen), and (to use Parlett's phrase) "a multilingual farrago". The other is Lane, which I've just added to the References section; the pages in question in this edition are 353-56 [I updated the edition: now pp 346-349 in 5th ed]. Other sources noted for Tâb in Depaulis (2001 Jeux) (that is, Bell, Culin, and Murray) refer back to one or both of Hyde and Lane, and do not add anything independently. I have not seen Tait, but this seems to be only tangentially related to Tâb. Luckily, judging from Culin and Murray, Lane seems to provide the lion's share of information on this game. A few of Hyde's observations can be derived from these 2 later sources. So the unavailability of Hyde appears to be no great loss.

The good news is that Brik- og brætspil (and subsequently Niels Ø) seems to have transmitted Lane's information quite accurately. The bad news is that most of Niels Ø's very perceptive questions cannot be answered by referring to our de facto sole authority. Phil wink (talk) 22:27, 5 March 2010 (UTC)