Notation

The Official Quoridor Notation

This topic is mentioned in our Intermediate Guide. Here we explain notation for Quoridor and proclaim this notation official.

Quoridor Notation Explained

Quoridor notation closely follows Chess notation. Each column is given a letter A-I and each row is given a number 1-9. The first player always starts on e1 and the second player always starts on e9. This is important because it marks the top and bottom of the board, which are needed for recording wall placement

Wall placements are recorded by the lower left space they touch along with their direction, horizontal or vertical. Every wall touches four spaces, and by lower left space, we mean the space closest to the a1 corner of the board.

Moves are recorded by marking the space the pawn moves to. To keep things clean don’t add any special markings for a jump. Two characters for a move, three characters for a wall.

An example game with notation.

Officialness

This is the official Quoridor notation. Quoridor needs an official notation so that players can easily record games and efficiently talk strategy and refer to the board. We’re going to spread the word and encourage players, developers, other sites, and tournaments etc, to use this notation. There are already a number of people in the Quoridor community that follow this notation.

Beofre this notation was proclaimed the closest thing on the web to an official notation came from a paper written by Lisa Glendenning from 2005  (as noted on Quoridor’s Wikipedia page). We make a minor but important distinction from Glendenning’s notation in how we number the rows and columns and by how we refer to wall placements. We believe our notation is more intuitive and will be easier for newer players to pick up.

So there you have it! Start practicing with Quoridor notation today so you can better understand our guides and posts here, and so you can tell your friends about the killer e1v wall you threw at your opponent. Spread the word and tell all those naysayers and nonbelievers that it’s not true: Quoridor does in fact have an official notation!