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This is a two-players game, where each players construct a line.
The first player has to join the top and the bottom of the board whereas the second has to join the left and the right. The two lines cannot intersect.

Do this game has a name?
Where I could find other informations about it?

PS: I’m currently writing an HTML5/Canvas implementation here (only in French for now, and the “AI“ plays at random, the smart AI is not finished yet), so you can see more precisely what I’m talking about.
I’ve called it “Percolation” because this looks a little like percolation, but this is probably not the “official” name.

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My first thought was "Blockbusters" :) – Mark Longair May 21 '11 at 18:08

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The game is called Bridg-It and it is a specific implementation of the "Shannon switching game". There's a very elegant win for the first player which is based on pairing the edges together. I think it's in a book by Martin Gardner, but I can't seem to find it online. There's another solution here, but it's not as easy to understand.

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Thank you very much for your answer! I have found a strategy for this game which seems to always win, but I never managed to prove that this is indeed an always winning strategy (when playing first). Thanks to your links, I will perhaps be able to prove or disprove it :-) By the way, the other solution (with the electrical circuit) does not seem optimal, I managed to beat it twice while playing second. – Guillaume Brunerie May 21 '11 at 14:47
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TwixT "... was popular in the 60s and 70s as part of the 3M Bookshelf Series.

TwixT is a "connection-type" game, very similar to Hex . Other related games are Havannah... "Connection type" means the object is to form a path connecting something to something else. This requires very different thinking from the standard battle-type game such as chess or checkers.

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On a personal note, I loved Twixt when I was about ten or eleven years old. It was the first thinking game that let me excel enough to feel smug. Plus the futuristic people on the cover looked ludicrously intelligent (and smug). – Smandoli May 21 '11 at 19:53
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Quoridor is similar but not identical - two to four players try to reach the opposite end of the board with their pawn. Each turn, instead of moving, they can choose to place a wooden wall piece as an obstacle to block the opponent's path.

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