The 8x8 Game Design Competition comes to a close this issue with Royal Carpet. It is the last of these games we will be describing for the time being. In total, we covered 11 of the more than 50 competition entries. There are still some interesting competition games that we have not written about yet, and maybe we will be able to return to these at a later date. The wealth of original ideas was astounding. In retrospect, my personal favorites are Three Crowns, Freeze, Cross, and Mozaic.
It turned out that limiting
the games to an 8x8 board was very restrictive—a number of competition entries, I think, may have been better if the inventors had been free to select a different board size. In a few cases, I know, a game that originally had been designed for a different board size was squeezed into the 8x8 format.
As of writing, entries
are still coming in steadily for the Unequal Forces Game Design Competition. The restriction in this case is to a particular type of game, those with some kind of built?in imbalance. This possibility has been given scant consideration by game inventors in the past, so it is going to be fascinating to review the entries. Although it is not a competition entry, Miller's Thumb, described in this issue, is technically a game of this type.
Of the many new abstract
games that are published many very good games, sadly, disappear quite quickly from the market.
We have given coverage to some of these "forgotten classics" in the past, notably Mentalis and
Epaminondas, and this issue describes three more, Take the Brain, Realm, and Chase.
Take the Brain was given a little attention when it first came out, with articles by Leonard Barden
in Games & Puzzles, numbers 3, 4 and 5. The piece in this issue was written before I had access to these older articles, so there is little overlap.
The article on Othello marks the third in the "A Beautiful Move..." series. It seems to be a good idea to continue this train of thought through some other games, but I am uncertain which direction to take now. Perhaps Pente would be the right choice. We are open to suggestions!
This issue contains an article on
Croda by Christian Freeling, and we have decided to run a tournament as a small way of encouraging
this game. R. Wayne Schmittberger's Chu Shogi column should be back with the next issue. Also,
this issue is a little light on reviews—we'll catch up next time.
Aside from the reviews, most of
the games we describe were either never commercially available or were once but are now out of print.
I think it is good, however, to give some in-depth coverage now and then to games that
our readers can still go out and actually buy. Zèrtz has filled this role for the
last several issues, but Trax will be moving into the limelight in the next issue.
We have a series of articles planned on Trax.
Now and then readers comment
that all of our game reviews and book reviews are very positive. That is true. Of course
more games and books come our way than are actually reviewed—we select the best ones to write about. Early on in this venture I decided not to write bad reviews: I far prefer to project a positive, upbeat, excited message about new games.
Turning to the letters page, readers may notice that for several issues most of the letters have come from readers in the USA. Of course, a significant proportion of our readership is American. But this is truly an international magazine, and we have readers from many other countries. I heartily encourage our readers everywhere to contribute! Write to tell us what you like or (maybe even more importantly) what you don't like about the magazine. Tell us about your favorite games and what you think we should be covering.
