Trax is a two-player abstract strategy game of loops and lines invented by David Smith in 1980. The game is played with a set of identical square tiles. One side of the tile has red and white straight lines and the other red and white curves. History Trax was invented in 1980 by David Smith, a chartered accountant in Christchurch, New Zealand. Smith published five games between 1970 and 1980, including Chess Cards, a variant of chess in which players could choose to either draw a card (with a chess piece printed on the obverse) or move a card already in play according to the revealed piece's rules. Chess Cards featured "boardless" play; once drawn, the card could be played onto any flat surface, subject to additional rules that would prevent playing the cards into isolation from the cards already in play. In November 1980, Smith began to develop the boardless aspect of Chess Cards with a more original, abstract game, which led to Trax. He quickly developed the idea of two coloured paths, but discovered that play could stop if three edges had the same colours, leading to his breakthrough invention of the forced-play rule, approximately one week later on November 26. The game was first published in New Zealand and the United States in 1982. Originally, the tiles were made out of cardboard and were red with black and white lines. As the game became more popular, the tiles were changed to high-density plastic using the same colors. The change to black tiles with red and white lines took place in 2005. In 1999, Microsoft Corporation selected Trax as one of the first proprietary games in its Internet Gaming Zone. For the 2015 International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology in Queenstown, New Zealand, Trax was selected for the design competition for implementation using a field programmable gate array processor. The reigning world champion is Donald Bailey, an engineering professor at Massey University in New Zealand. , with the exception of a loss in the 1994 final, he has won every Trax world championship since 1990. Gameplay TRAX is a two-player game that does not have a defined playing board, but any flat surface is suitable. For the commercial boxed versions of the game, 64 identical square, double-sided tiles are included. On one side is the cross/straight paths, where the colors connect opposite sides, and on the other side is