Ways to Play Trax
There are two different ways to play Trax using the standard rules, called limited and unlimited Trax. You can find details of both of them below, followed by descriptions of two non-standard variants called Loop Trax and Lucky Trax.
Unlimited Trax
 Unlimited Trax is the purest form of the game and is used in tournaments as well as for informal games. Taking advantage of the fact that there is no playing board and hence no limit on the number of tiles that can be used, players keep playing until one person wins, however long that takes.
The longest Trax game played in a tournament to date (see right) lasted 87 turns and used 227 tiles! Games this big are very unusual though - most games finish before 64 tiles have been used and 99% of games finish before 128 tiles (ie two Trax sets) have been used. However, if you want to be 100% sure that you will never run out of tiles during a game, then one alternative to investing in an extra set is to play Limited Trax, as described below.
Limited Trax
 Limited Trax limits the size of the playing area, so may be a 'safer' option when playing with a set of 64 tiles. Once the tiles played span 8 rows across or down, no more tiles may be added in that direction.
In the example on the left, the game has already reached the limit of 8 tiles across, so no more tiles may be added to the far left or right of the layout. Vertically though, this layout only spans 7 tiles, so it can be extended either upwards or downwards by one tile.
 Once both limits have been reached, the remaining tiles must be played into the resulting 8 x 8 square (shown in grey on the right), following the normal rules.
If neither player has won by the time all 64 tiles have been played or no more legal moves can be made, then the game is drawn.
Trax Variants
Loop Trax
Loop Trax simplifies the rules in that Winning Lines do not exist, instead the game can only be won with a loop. You can still choose to play either limited or unlimited Trax, though you may find this version to work better with unlimited Trax.
Lucky Trax
If two players with different levels of experience and skill play each other often and one player nearly always wins, you may want to introduce an element of luck into the game.
One way of doing this is to start with all of the tiles in the Trax bag and agree that at the start of each player's turn, they must carefully pull a tile out of the bag straight towards them. They must then play it the same way up and in exactly the same orientation as it came out of the bag.
An alternative way to do this is to assign a number from 1 to 6 to each of the possibilities as shown below and then roll a die at the start of each player's turn to determine the orientation in which the next tile must be played:
One advantage of rolling a die to do this is that it avoids disputes which might arise using the first method if a player pulls a tile out of the bag not quite straight.
Another advantage is that you are likely to get twice as many curves as lines to play using this method, which fits in nicely with the fact that in a normal game of Trax, more tiles tend to be played 'curves up' than 'lines up'. Conversely, with the drawing from the bag method, you will have to play roughly equal numbers of lines and curves over the course of a game.
N.B. Whichever method you use to determine how each tile should be played in 'Lucky Trax', this only applies to the first tile of each turn - any forced spaces that result from playing it should simply be filled normally.
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