Abstract Games magazine: game strategy articles, game reviews, news : MAGAZINE 15

Abstract Games Issue 15 Autumn 2003

Chess was the first game that I tried to get good at, when I was about thirteen. I read The Game of Chess by Harry Golombek, which I think was my first game book. Within a year or two I had found Discovering Old Board Games by R. C. Bell, and this inspired me to get hold of his masterly two-volume Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations. By this time I had overcome my cultural programming about the superiority of Chess, and I was avidly investigating many different games.
           I was fascinated by Trevor Leggett's Shogi: Japan's Game of Strategy, but I was hampered by the lack of opposition. Backgammon was easier to find opponents for, and I loved Bruce Becker's Backgammon for Blood. Other favorite games were Epaminondas, Mentalis, Hexagonal Chess, and Wari. Sid Sackson's great A Gamut of Games was a good source for games.
           We also played theme games like Kingmaker, Civilization, Brittania, Diplomacy, and Risk, as well as fantasy table-top war gaming inspired by The Lord of the Rings. I was captivated by Dungeons and Dragons, and I remember being very impressed with the brilliance of the role-playing concept. We played card games, too. On an exchange trip to Germany when I was fifteen I spent the whole time playing Skat. It was great!
           I had tried Go, but none of the presentations I had seen did it justice, and it was not until university that I finally got involved with Go after reading Kaoru Iwamoto's Go for Beginners. At the time I felt Go was the only perfect game. Within a few years, however, I discovered the Oxford Shogi Club. The stupendous Shogi endgame makes it, for me, the greatest of all chess-type games. Shogi was a major reason for my living in Tokyo for nearly four years.
           The experiences we have when young are sometimes special and unrepeatable, and this can be as true of games as it is of anything else.
           More recently I took a long look at Lines of Action, one of the games from Sid Sackson's book. Lines of Action seems to lend itself well to analysis and strategic theorizing, and by dint of many hours of hard work, I think I became quite good at it. I overdid it, though, and I haven't been able to play Lines of Action for a while. I'm taking a rest from Onyx right now in case the same happens.
           I feel I need another special game to look into more deeply. There is a thrill in working out a game's strategy from scratch without the aid of books or expert players. Realm, Dvonn, Hive, Pagoda, and Zhadu are attractive options, as are several of the games from the game design competitions—Three Crowns, perhaps. On the other hand, Super Halma in this issue looks very interesting . . .
           At last we return to Bashne in this issue! It has been said that Emergo is the most cleanly realized column checkers game. However, Bashne has a history and a body of expert players (in Russia) who hold regular tournaments and do some deep strategic analysis. I think it is good to give readers a glimpse of this activity.
           Also in this issue we have the winners of the Simultaneous Movement Game Design Competition and are announcing the next game design competition. The two games selected this time strike me as children's games rather than serious abstracts, but perhaps it is inherently difficult to build strategy into a game with simultaneous movement. Perhaps the four games we described in AG14 represent the limit of what is possible. The theme of next year's competition is not unduly restrictive and is known to have produced some very fine games with great depth.