Another year has passed, quickly it seems, and Abstract Games is still going strong.
We are still making incremental improvements to the magazine, but it seems to have settled
into a fairly standard size and layout. Once again, we offer our sincere thanks to
all our subscribers and advertisers for their support.
Many games have
passed through our hands over the past couple of years. A number of the best
have been written about in these pages. Unfortunately there are too many games
and too little time, and I have to make some hard choices about what games I can actually play regularly.
Onyx is probably my
favorite new game of the last two years. Realm, which will be covered in the next
issue, is another game that I like very much. Other games that I am still playing
are Twixt, Grand Chess, and my old favorites Wari and Epaminondas. Also, I have
entered the Camelot World Championship, advertised in this issue. (If you have
never played Camelot before, now is the time to learn—this competition is open to
anyone.) One of these days I am going to find time to give Trax the attention it deserves.
This is obviously a
very personal list of favorite games, and mine seems to change fairly regularly as
new games rotate in and old games are given a rest for a while. It brings me to the
question of what we look for in a game, and why choose one game to play over another?
What does make a game good enough to play time after time?
I would appreciate
some reader feedback to these questions. For myself, a game has to have, above all,
interesting tactics and strategy, but also I like originality and simplicity. There
is also a certain quality that is very difficult to define that makes some games beautiful.
We are still running
articles about games from the 8x8 Game Design Competition, and there are four more
games in this issue. Three Crowns is one game that I have returned to a number of
times, as is Mozaic. The latter makes a fine beach game and is Connie's favorite
from the competition. This series will be completed with yet more good games in
the next issue, and thereafter we should be into the games from the next competition.
In the first competition
the limitation was board size and shape. This time we have decided to make the constraint
that the games must be played with unequal forces. Examples of these among traditional games
are the Fox and Geese and Tafl families of games. I am sure this will challenge the
ingenuity of game inventors, who may use any size and shape of board they like this time,
as long as it is a regular tessellation of either triangles, squares or hexagons.
How about a connection game with unequal objectives?
This issue contains
three games dating from around the end of the nineteenth century: Salta, Congo and Transvaal.
This period saw the introduction of a great number of original games, some of which persist
to this day, such as Halma and Reversi. It was a golden age for board games. In the next
issue we will have three games from the 1970's and early 1980's, perhaps another golden age.
Thereafter, computer games began to overtake this particular market segment. Ironically,
I think the rise of the Internet may lead us into another golden age for abstract games. Does anybody concur?
At last in this issue we
return to Twixt and Hex. Apologies are due to the patient players of these games. People
are still responding to the Jetan article in AG6, and I know that some readers are playing
ten-game matches. We will definitely be printing some follow-up articles on Jetan in future
issues. In the meantime: May your thoat be tireless and your sword arm strong!
Kerry Handscomb
