We only meet to play games face-to-face once or twice a week, and this time is usually spent trying new games. Most of my game playing these days takes place via e-mail. Recently, I have been playing Jetan with L. Lynn Smith, Grand Chess with Tony Gardner, and a selection of the Unequal Forces games with Larry Back.
I like playing by e-mail; it is a good pace for me. There is often a day or two to deliberate a move, but sometimes a flurry of moves may come together if both players are at their computers at the same time. There is never pressure, and a little time to analyze a position is welcome.
As a consequence, we have games set up
in various states of play all over the house—I still prefer an actual physical set with pieces that I can push around, even when the game position is sent back and forth with the e-mail. I play via e-mail because of a lack of time and a lack of opponents, but I hold back from total cybergaming.
Before the prevalence of e-mail I used to
play games by regular mail—one could meet one's future wife, get married, change careers, and buy a house, all in
the space of the Queen's Gambit! It was such a leisurely affair that everyone sent short (or long!) letters with their moves, exchanging game news or life's philosophies. Because everything was so slow, you could play fifty or a hundred games at once.
And so to this issue. As an experiment this time we have put the board for a new game, 77, on the back cover of the magazine. The rules are printed in this issue. All you need in addition are a collection of coins, such as pennies and dimes, and a pair of regular dice. I envision readers taking their magazine into the pub or coffee shop, and whiling away half an hour or so with this easygoing game. This is exactly what Larry Back and I did last spring in a coffee shop on English Bay in Vancouver, although we drew the board on a napkin. I still have that napkin. It is a souvenir of the first game of 77 ever played. Sound judgment and a little luck are the requirements for victory in 77. It has the makings of a classic dice game.
In this issue Christian Freeling introduces his new game, Dameo. Christian was not content to let things rest with Croda, in the last issue, but created this very interesting new checkers variant. Considerable work has already gone into analyzing Dameo, and some remarkable discoveries have been made in the area of endgame positions with just a few pieces left. We hope to follow up in a future issue.
Other new games in this issue are the
three Unequal Forces games, Defiance and Domain, Por'rika and Takat. Defiance and Domain reminds me
strongly of Realm, although the two games really do not have much in common. We are still playing
Defiance and Domain-by e-mail and face to face—and having a lot of fun with it.
The third installment of the Alice Chess article has been delayed until the next issue because it will fit very well at that time with L. Lynn Smith's next article on the development of 3D chess.
Several readers brought up the fact that we have not yet given much coverage to the Go variants. We will have to remedy this. I have always thought of Go itself as monolithic, austere, and perfect. How could this game be improved upon? The reality, of course, is that classical Go is, like Chess, only one of a family of related games. Many of the Go variants deserve some attention because they demonstrate interesting game concepts and because they may well be fun to play. We are therefore in the process of investigating how to include some Go variants in this magazine. We may have something ready by the next issue. In the meantime,
Happy gaming!
