"One has a stronger hand when there's more people playing your same cards."

Links

Gosh, so many links, I don't know where to start.

Let's start with the title quote, which is some sound strategic card playing advice from our American president, George W. Bush. This quote, as well as many other well-known sayings of his, is also an exemplary example of fine grammar.

The above was quoted on a recent Daily Show, which also provided a reference to Kuma War Games, a site that specializes in bringing out games about real world conflicts with as little time lag as possible. In one instance, they were even able to bring out a game about a conflict while it was still happening, so you could shoot bloody murder on your screen while real people were also dying at the same time. What fun!

For other news on war games, here's a large site I managed to overlook until now, The Wargamer.

Speaking of overlooking, I missed this lovely article back in July, about obsessive board gamers (Euro gamers, actually) flunking out of school.

A Frederiscksburg, VA newspaper waxes nostalgic about board and card games.

A Fort Wayne newspaper informs us about the Bible version of Apples to Apples and a slew of really bad Jewish board games,

Here we have some Gothic themed paper board games (scroll down).

Wikipedia has a game themed version called eGamia. Most of the entries are about video games, but they have some entries about board games. The entries could use some fleshing out.

Meanwhile, some Scottish children are being taught to play Chess in nursery school at the age of three.

Books

The Greatest Games of All Time by Matthew Costello is a nice book and a great read, with stories about games from history. It's from 1991, so it's knowledge of video games ends with Nintendo and it's knowledge of board games ends with Sid Sackson. One whole chapter is devoted to Miniature Golf, which only after you think about it do you remember that, yes, it used to be a "craze" in America.

Most chapters also contain games that you can photocopy and play, including versions of classic games and some unique variants.

I asked Tom Vasel about his books with George Phillies (here and here). Tom says:

One of the books contains about half of my interviews, the other contains 126 of my rules explanations from reviews. George comments in and around both books. Both books are aimed at video game designers, in an attempt to broaden their horizons by looking at designing in a different medium - board games.

Local News

Gilad of Modiin will be hosting a games evening this Tuesday evening.

Nadine has sent me the files she used to create the Jewish themed version of Ra. If you wanted a copy, email me. The files are about 1MB altogether.

Yehuda