A turn-based football strategy board game. Space, movement, timing — no dice, no luck, one winning move at a time.
We put that line at the top of our homepage and we mean it. Football is played at speed, in chaos, by twenty-two players at once; chess is played in silence, one move at a time, with nothing hidden. On the surface the two games share nothing.
But ask a coach what decides a match and you get a chess player's answer: space, movement, timing. Who saw the pass lane first. Who made the run before the ball moved. Strip away the athleticism and the luck — the deflections, the bounce, the referee — and what's left is a duel of decisions. That part of football fits on a board.
Taka is that board: the chess of football. No dice, no cards, no hidden information. Two players take one action each in turn, everything in plain sight, and the better mind wins. It is the promise chess makes, kept on a football pitch.
Taka is a two-player football board game — soccer, if you're American — played on a 14-by-10 board. Each player has eleven pieces, ten outfielders and a goalkeeper, and one ball. Both balls are in play at the same time: you are always attacking and defending at once.
A turn is one action. Move a piece. Dribble. Turn the piece on the ball to change the direction it faces. Pass — any distance, in a straight line. Tackle an adjacent opponent to win the ball. Or activate your goalkeeper to defend the goal. You score by getting your ball into one of the four goal squares at your opponent's end, and the game ends the moment a goal goes in.
The rules take about ten minutes to learn. The game was first played on a UEFA B Licence coaching course, and the pattern showed immediately: the best coaches were the best players. Taka measures football intelligence, nothing else.
Taka keeps what makes chess honest — perfect information, alternating turns, no luck — and swaps every chess problem for a football one.
And one thing chess would never allow: pieces move up to three squares toward the opponent's goal but only two sideways or back. The board itself rewards the forward option.
Playing online is free. The fastest way in is The Mind's World Cup: pick your nation, win your group, and run the knockout — no account needed to start. For a straight match, play online live on a ten-minute clock, or by correspondence at your own pace.
Five minutes spare? The daily puzzle sets one position a day: find the winning two-move sequence. New to the game, the interactive tutorial teaches every rule by playing it, and the full rules are published in plain language.
And Taka is a board game first. The physical first edition — wooden pieces on a roll-up neoprene mat — is limited to 500 copies at the founding price of $29. Reserve yours in the shop.
Yes. Taka is a turn-based football strategy board game — two players, perfect information, no dice and no luck — played on a 14-by-10 board with eleven pieces a side, including a goalkeeper. It rewards the same discipline as chess, but the problems are football problems: space, pass lanes, offside, and protecting the ball. You can play it free online or on the physical board.
It depends what you want from one. Most football board games simulate a match with dice or cards, so luck decides as much as you do. Taka takes the opposite path: pure strategy, closer to chess than to a dice game. If you want a football game you can genuinely get better at — where losing means you were outplayed — that is the test Taka was built to pass.
The rules take about ten minutes to learn. A game ends the moment a goal is scored, so there is no fixed match length: online, live games run on a ten-minute clock per player, and most are decided well inside it. Correspondence games let you take one turn whenever you like.
Yes. Playing on taka.online is free: live and correspondence matches, the World Cup mode, the daily puzzle, and the interactive tutorial. You can start a World Cup run without creating an account.
Yes. Taka was a physical board game before it was a website. The first edition — wooden pieces on a roll-up neoprene mat — is limited to 500 copies at the founding price of $29, available to reserve in the shop.