There has been an excellent response to the game design competition. By the time you are reading this it will have closed,
and the judges will be busy sifting through the responses and trying out the games. The winners should be announced in AG6,
and some of the best games will be described in succeeding issues.
Soon after the last issue went to press I realized that
I had omitted to advise readers without access to email or the Internet to send their entries directly to me.
One reader did take the initiative and forwarded his game to me anyway. I hope nobody was frustrated in submitting an
entry because of this, but if anyone was: keep hold of that game and enter it in next year's competition. This is
likely to be an annual event.
On the subject of new games, there was quite a
lot of positive feedback about Onyx, the new game presented in AG4. Larry Back has written an excellent follow-up article
on Onyx strategy and tactics, which will be included in the next issue. I think some readers have yet to try this game
because of the difficulty of drawing its unusual board design. I will be happy either to send a printout of the board
by mail or to email it as a PDF attachment to anyone who is interested. We have decided to try running tournaments in
Onyx and Kyoto Shogi. For more details check page 14 in this issue.
This issue contains another new game, Anchor.
The game's designer, Steven Meyers, has some other very interesting ideas that may well make an appearance in later issues.
The Renju article is experimental. It arose
because, after reading Renju World magazine, which contains plenty of references to "beautiful moves," I felt vaguely
guilty about describing Renju as "an inelegant solution to the imbalance in the primitive five-in-a-row game" in AG1.
Renju World's editor, Ants Soosyrv, kindly offered to write an article that would explain a beautiful move in Renju to
complete beginners. I think he has succeeded admirably. The next installment in this series should be entitled "A Beautiful
Move in International Checkers." If anyone has any ideas for continuing this series, please let me know.
The next installment of Cameron Browne's Hex series
was postponed for reasons of space, but it will be included in AG6. Hex fans may still get their "fix" from Larry Back's
article on Hex variants in this issue. Another article that unfortunately did not make it this time was the second of the
Chu Shogi columns. The column's writer, Nixon Bardsley, has been ill. I hope Chu Shogi will return in AG6.
Please note that due to the international expansion of
Paypal, we are now able to accept subscription payments by Visa and Mastercard through Paypal's secure server on the Internet.
This may make it easier (and cheaper) for our international readers to pay for their subscriptions.
Lastly, a very small point: readers may be wondering
about the way that the names of games are written in this magazine. From the outset we decided to capitalize the first letter
of all games because it was too awkward to distinguish between proprietary and non-proprietary games. The exception to this rule
is when reference is being made to a genre of games rather than a specific game. For this reason "mancala," "chess," and so on
may be written with a lower-case first letter in certain cases where they refer to whole classes of games.
Until the next issue, happy gaming!
Kerry Handscomb
