A Moment's Thought

Here's how I keep track of every card played in a hand of bridge, or any other card game, for that matter:

1) Think about it.
2) Use shorthand.

Let's first talk about number 2: using shorthand.

It's difficult to juggle more than seven numbers or items on a list in your head; so it's a bad idea to try to remember every card one by one as it's played. I don't keep a mental checklist with 52 boxes to check off. I just remember a single four digit number.

On each hand, I start off with 0000. That's how many cards have been played from each suit, in suit order (spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs). After each trick, the number goes up: 0400, 0701, 0741, and so on. Counting the cards in my hand, I pretty much always know how much is left of every suit. If a suit's count goes over 9, I'm fairly confident in remembering that there is only either one or two cards left in that suit; if there are three cards, I don't have any of them, so it generally doesn't matter to me, anyway.

That covers number. What about the values, such as the honor cards? Oddly enough, just doing the number count is pretty much all I need to do in order to remember the values played, too. When I think of the number (e.g. "7 hearts have been played"), I usually remember the tricks in which they were played, and therefore the values played in those tricks, too.

Which brings us back to number 1: thinking about it.

If I don't think about something, if I give something not a moment's thought, the memory of that thing passes through me like water through sky. I can walk by people I know, but if I don't pay attention, no impression of their passing remains with me. You can tell me your name, but if I don't take a moment - just a fleeting moment - to think about it, or remembering it, I won't even have heard you say it.

A moment's thought it no guarantee that I'll remember anything for a long time; interference, such as the unimportance of the thing or a cacophony of other things can crowd out the memory and cause me to forget, even when I take a moment to remember. To remember things long term, I have to repeat them to myself, write them down, or perform some other kind of conscious task. I couldn't tell you most of the bridge hands right after I've played a set of them, unless I write the results down after each hand.

A moment's thought is the difference between a short term memory and no memory at all.

Online Bridge

Game night was canceled this week owing to Purim and so much else going on. But I played a few hands of Bridge online at Bridgebase.com . First time on the site.

I used to play Bridge at OKBridge, and then Yahoo Games, and then MS Zone. I'm probably missing a few. Each place has it's own interface, it's own proportion of good to bad players, and annoying to polite players.

I don't know why I keep moving. Actually, I play wherever my brother/friends are playing at the moment, so it's more accurate to say that I don't know why they keep moving. Except for OKBridge, which stopped being free.

What's your favorite place to play mainstream card games like Bridge and Hearts?

Three Player Bridge

I spent shabbat at my parents. My brother was there as well. My father prefers not to play with us too often anymore; it's hard for him to sit at the table and he wants to read his newspaper. Still, he did play a few hands with us.

Otherwise, my brother, Mom, and I had to play the two card games we usually play with three: Progressive Rummy and Three-Handed Bridge.

If you want a good bridge game for three players, your best bet is for one player to play two hands, partnering for the other players. Or play a three player game, such as Skat or something. But my Mom and brother are used to this already, so it doesn't look like we're going to be changing to a new paradigm any time soon.

Three Handed Bridge Rules

Three-player Bridge has come in several forms, but the one we play is as follows:

Deal four hands. Turn face-up exactly 8 cards of the fourth hand. Players bid for the contract. Whoever wins the contract gets the fourth hand as a dummy. The remaining 5 cards of the dummy are revealed after the first lead.

This makes for difficult bidding, as you don't know if the remaining five cards contain no points or ten points, two suits or four suits. Furthermore, with players bidding without conventions, less information is available for the play of the hand. Still, a lot of the game still remains and it's still enjoyable.

Other sites I've seen indicate that 0, 4 or 6 cards are turned up, instead of 8. The people I played with in college played that the dealer could choose open as many or as few cards of the fourth hand as he or she wanted. In this case, the decision as to how many to open had to be finalized before looking at your own cards.

Wikipedia has another variant, and other variants exist, such as Dummy Bridge and Cutthroat Bridge.

Other games played

Ben also played some Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers with my mom, and Sorry! with his kids. I tried, again, to teach Ben how to play Netrunner, but he once again resisted. He keeps asking why we don't just play Magic.

Game News

Lifelearning is running a competition for a logo for their yearly award for best homeschooling resource. Prize for the logo is $100. What does this have to do with board games? Well, gaming and homeschooling are both non-traditional means of education. And Lisa's a cool chick who likes my site.

Do you live in Ireland? Invite me for a week! No wait, that's not what I meant to write. Oh yeah: schools across the Midlands are being encouraged to support children with autism by taking part in a National Boardgame Day.

A new company called I Can Do That Games has acquired the rights to produce games based on Dr Seuss books. Four games are already printed.

Police solved an old murder case by giving inmates playing cards with unsolved murder victims' information on them.

I somehow missed this entirely awesome ... something on the subject of video games and art: Gamescenes. It's packed with nifty articles on the subject.

Boylston's blog points us to Kasparov's appearance on the Colbert Report, where Steve beats Gary in a game of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots.

There's an article in Wired magazine entitled "It's Alive" about the persistence of the Frankenstein myth. Someone should make a board game on the subject.

There can never be too many Islamic Barbie dolls. Here's the latest one: Elif, who kneels and performs namaz.

And JK Rowling has given many Q&A's about Harry Potter, but this one is one of my favorites. Aside from declaring that Dumbledore was, in fact, gay, she fielded this tricky question:

Q: In the Goblet of Fire Dumbledore said his brother was prosecuted for practicing inappropriate charms [JKR buries her head, to laughter] on a goat; what were the inappropriate charms he was practicing on that goat?

JKR: How old are you?

Eight.

JKR: I think that he was trying to make a goat that was easy to keep clean [laughter], curly horns. That's a joke that works on a couple of levels. I really like Aberforth and his goats. But you know Aberforth having this strange fondness for goats if you've read book seven, came in really useful to Harry, later on, because a goat, a stag, you know. If you're a stupid Death Eater, what's the difference. So, that is my answer to YOU.

[loud applause]

Yehuda

XBox, Settlers, Ho Hum

Old news, really. Check out the screen shots in the mainstream press, if you like.

Project Goldfish presents Perilous Gateways, another entry into the grand epic starship -based combat board games. And they're looking for designers to help them draw the ships and aliens (commission based pay).

If work and games isn't your thing, how about education and games? Apparently, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet ponied up a million dollars to teach Bridge in middle schools in Winston-Salem. A million bucks to teach Bridge???

In India, the National Institute of Design is offering a two-and-a-half-year degree in toy and/or game design.

And in The Mayor of Casterbridge dept, a man bet his wife in a card game and lost, prompting the wife to divorce him and leave with the winner.

Yehuda

Linkety Link

Chris Brooks has written his own parallel session report to mine about his visit to Israel and dinner and games at our house.

Someone made a rather amazing diorama in which to play Puerto Rico. With pictures.

Chris Bates compares the rise of Poker to the decline of Bridge.

The Toronto Star talks Eurogames. (via Ryan)

The Globe and Mail talks about an Israeli company using virtual reality to train people to reuse their physical limbs. (via Serious Games)

MAJAX! is a serious board game that aims to recreate the pressure and chaos of an emergency situation, and is aimed at health services to "provide an inexpensive way of testing major incident control procedures and promote team building".

Front Row Crew talks about "good" and "fun" in board games on their latest podcast. Just skip the first 30 minutes or so.

Yehuda

The SNR May Be Falling, but Not the Signal

Many people complain that the ability for anyone to write online has lead to vast amounts of information being produced. The SNR ratio gets lower and lower. Who can sort through all that information?

But this logic somehow extends this into assuming that we are therefore producing less useful content. That's not true.

The signal is not going down, only the ratio. More worthwhile information is produced than would be without blogging, emails, message boards and so on.

Consider the glorious days of our past, a few centuries ago. We can count in double digits the number of influential philosophers whose voices have been preserved. We only took the time to preserve the thoughts of those who a) had many important things to say and b) could overcome the difficulties involved in producing a written and published body of material.

Nowadays, the obstacles to producing a written and published body of material is practically non-existent. I think, I blog, there it is; usually I reserve what I wrote a day for editing and publishing, but that's it, in essence. So b) is overcome.

That leaves a) those who have many important things to say. Name the number of respected philosophers from previous centuries who only had one important thing to say; say, something that would take up no more than a few pages.

The loss of barriers to publishing not only permits those with large quantities of important things to say, it also permits those with only a few pages of things to say. Important things.

Oh look. Another example of the Long Tail.

The distribution of important things is not equal among all people. Few people have many brilliant things to say, many have none. A whole lot have a few, and they write one book or an album and then disappear. But how many have not enough even for an album, but have that one important idea that is worth preserving along with human history?

I am guessing, off the top of my head, that the number of good ideas that get lost each generation equals or exceeds the number that get recorded, because until now, only collected large bodies of information were considered important enough to publish.

What if now, with our blogs and forums, we are suddenly tapping into the vast untapped potential of millions of great ideas that would otherwise die along with their possessor? And only because the barriers to publishing are so low and so quick.

The noise may be increasing exponentially, but the signal is growing, too. Maybe the first million have X to say, and the next million X/10, and the next X/100, but it's still increasing. And we have unlimited and timeless storage capacity. Which means that eventually, someone will find them. Unlike all the great ideas that went to their graves with their owners in generations past.

I don't know about you, but this gives me the warm fuzzies.

Update: Note that this ignores the issue of things being said better when they are reflected upon and edited.

Links:

Abridged is a new form of Bridge, with special cards, that is aimed at making the game of Bridge faster and easier. An article in the Independent describes it:

In Abridged, there is no bidding. The contract is calculated by a different method. Players go round the table, first stating their hand strength, and then stating their color strength (how many of the most numerous color you are holding). The team with the highest number of points immediately becomes the declaring team, and must estimate how many tricks he thinks his partnership can win. A contract has been arrived at, and play can start.

The cards are changed to 2 to 14, with colors instead of suits. There is still a dummy.

Erm. Sounds like a joke I wrote a month or two ago.

The U.K. is considering easing restrictions on betting on card games, especially poker, at local pubs and so on. And just in time, as here's a story of a couple who claims their marriage was saved by learning to play poker together.

According to Debora and Mike they have tried, during the last 5 years of their marriage, to find a mutual interest, but they could not find anything they both liked, let alone loved. The lack of this mutual interest has made the distance between them greater. They say this new passion has helped their marriage where many other things have failed.

Lastly, Grateful Dead, The Game. Doesn't look like a great game, but probably it will become a collector's item.

Yehuda

A New Bidding System for Bridge

Bridge

Friday evening I roped David Elkins, Ari who has come to the game group occasionally, and my Mom for a bridge game. We played for an hour or so. David and I played together, because we have a special system.

A special system? you ask. And what, pray tell, is our special system?

Come listen in to our description of the system that we laid out during the bidding. The players are Ari (A), David (D), Mom (M), and me (Y).

A: Pass.
D: Pass.
M: Pass.
Y: 1 diamond.
D: Alert.
M: What does 1 diamond mean?
D: 11 to 15 points and a 5 card minor.
A: What system are you playing?
Y: You've heard of Standard American?
A: Yes.
Y: And Precision?
A: Yes.
Y: Well we call this system "Im-precision".
A: ?
Y: *twinkle* See, we found the traditional bidding systems to be overly difficult. We worked very hard in creating a new bidding system that was easier to work with, and we came up with this one, which we found dramatically increases our playing success.
A: ?
Y: See in the traditional bidding system, a bid of one indicates that you need to get seven tricks or you go down. In our system, a bid of one only means that you need to get five tricks. As you can see, that makes it much easier to succeed.
A: Uh ...
M: Wait a minute.
D: Yes, also every bid is a game. Or slam. That gives us bonus points.
A: So, if you bid 4 hearts, and we make 4 tricks, then you're saying that we set you but you still made the contract?
Y: Oh, no. You didn't set us, because we only had to make 8 tricks. Also, we don't lose any points if we don't make our bid in our system.
D: Yes, we can only win points.
Y: Exactly. We find this whole competitive thing, you know, winning and losing, isn't good for our self-esteem. So we can't lose points in our system. We only get points, no matter what we make.
D: Or what we bid.
Y: Exactly. We're thinking of renaming the system to be the "Happy Self-Esteem" bidding system.
A: ...
Y: By the way, it's your bid.

Give it a try, boys and girls. But remember, it's patent pending.

Anagrams

Sat afternoon I played with David, who I may remind you was once the Israeli Scrabble champion. As such, his vocabulary includes thousands of words that I still don't remember. However, my pattern recognition ability is pretty good, so I do well at Anagrams.

At the end, we both had roughly the same amount of words, tiles, and probably points, but since we didn't agree on a scoring method, we can't say exactly who won according to the traditional method of scoring.

Nevertheless, we both agreed that I won, because I took a "U" and a "P" from the middle of the table and rearranged LOCATION to form a much better word.

Yehuda

- More on games in the real world, Geospacial Semantic talks about location-based board games, which are board games using live players.

- Luchabra describes an interesting looking new abstract game. I like the way he also adds a number of optional themes that can be tacked on, for those that need one.

- GROGnads points out a few interesting books, including two by Tom Vasel in collaboration??? Here's the third. I must get to the bottom of this. Oh, To-ommmm!

- Also pointed out on BGG, the Mathematica Journal tackles board game design.

How Talking More Equals Saying Less

The Narrowing Nature of Words

Language is used to communicate. Words are used to describe. The more words, the more you are telling. Or so common sense would tell us. I would like to look at speaking and writing from a slightly different angle.

From my perspective, the more words you use, the less you actually tell.

Consider the following story:

Bird

That's a pretty short story. And it doesn't tell very much, does it? It doesn't even have a verb. However, this story tells us the entire idea of bird without anything more specific than that. Every part of bird, past, present, and future, is contained within this story.

Here's the next story:

Brown bird

From one perspective, this story tells more than the previous one. In the previous story you spoke only about bird, but you now tell more about this bird, i.e. you are talking about a brown bird. Isn't that more information?

From one perspective, yes. But from another perspective, we now have less story; a story dealing with less information. Before, the story being told encompassed all birds of all types. By adding the word brown to the story, our story has shrunk to being only about brown birds.

The next story:

I saw a brown bird

The story space is shrinking rapidly. While it is true that more information about this particular story is being revealed, the story is now encompassing a narrower and narrower experience. The story was once about birds. Now it is about a particular time that I saw a particular type of bird. The story perforce now includes both birds and me; all other instances of birds and time are excluded from this story.

The more I say, the less possibility of information I actually convey.

Another way to look at this: the more I increase the specifics in the story, the more I decrease the general nature of the story. Each word narrows my story from a generic tale to a specific event.

Cutting Down to the Elephant

I am comparing the idea of telling a story to the idea of cutting an elephant out of a block of wood. After all, from one perspective, the elephant was already in the wood; the sculptor is merely removing all parts of the wood that don't match a particular elephant. From another perspective, however, the wood contains all elephants until it is cut into a single elephant.

There is a contrary take to my view of this, however. You could say that the elephant is not contained in the block of wood. It is not the wood that makes the elephant, but the boundary imposed on the material. The elephant was in the mind, and only imposed on the wood. The wood never contained the elephant, because it never contained the boundary.

From this perspective, the story "Bird" does not contain all birdness in it. For that to be the case, all possible stories must be floating about in some sort of ether. Creating the words doesn't "unleash" a story that is already there; it imposes a story from within a mind onto formless words.

From this perspective, the story is created by the boundary, i.e. the words that are imposed.

Bidding in Bridge

Consider the rules of bidding in the game of Bridge. In Bridge, each player makes a bid of a rank (from 1 to 7) and a suit, or passes. The bid must be on the same rank or higher than the previous bid. If on the same rank, the bid must be a suit ranked higher, from clubs to spades, or no trump. There are only 35 possible bids, along with a few other possible declarations, such as "double" or "redouble". The bids must be in sequence, lowest to highest. If you skip a bid, you can't go back to it.

Bridge players have been working for a century to communicate as much as possible within this limited and terminating language. The language takes full advantage of not only what is said, but also what is not said.

For instance, if a player opens "1 spade", not only does the player declare that he or she wishes to win the auction at "1 spade" (the player may not, actually), but also declares certain ranks of cards in hand, and certain card distribution, as well. In addition, by not bidding any other opening bid, the player declares absence of all of the other possible holdings that weren't declared.

The bid imposes quite a lot of structure onto the initial formless unknown of a hand. Subsequent bids, by their statements, or by their absence of statement, further refine the hand to a high clarity.

The possibility space of what the hand could have contained (any combination of thirteen cards out of fifty-two) shrinks with each bid. In fact, it shrinks even with your opponent's bids. And in parallel, the possibility of specific holdings increases with each bid.

In this case, more specific means more information, because all information is no information. This is conveyed as much by indicating what does not exist, as by what does exist.

Abstractness in Games

War games and RPGs often contain thousands of pages of rules. In contrast, generic mainstream board games may have a single page of rules, or even just a paragraph or two.

Longer rules equates to a more specific game. The more words describing a game, the less abstract the game is (that's a rough observation, not an absolute rule). But is it more rules that create less abstraction, or more rule description?

If I describe the Go board as China on the fields of Ying Yung, on the snowy morning of December 12th, in the year 956, at 6:50 am, is my game less abstract? Or just the rules description? If I add a rule to the Go game such that any five stones in a row of one color are removed from the game, does that make for a less abstract game? If I say it's because of scarce supplies and starvation, does that?

Either a game tells all stories that it's mechanics can contain. Or, if you hold the opposing point of view, the game mechanics are only a language imposed by the designer, and stand unique. In the former view, the mechanics are the words, and the more mechanics, the more specific your theme. In the latter view, the mechanics come into existence to support the theme, and cannot be separated.

It seems to me that the two camps of game players - those who look at a game as a tool for creating fun, and those who need to play by the rules - parallel these two camps. The former believe that the game is an instance of ether, a representation of numerous similar games. The latter believe that the game was created out of the mind of the designer, and has no form other than of that imposed by the designer.

Unwritten Rules

The less rules in the game, the more people say "the rules don't say that you can't!"

The reason game rules can feel incomplete is because designers instinctively know that they are working in the former model - a game is etched out of ether. It does not come from the mind, complete, in want of a substance out of which to carve it.

You don't need to specify that players shouldn't cheat, that each player should take turns as starting player, that holdings should be open or closed, etc, unless you want to impose a particular vision onto the game space. All of these rules exist; players can decide how or whether to implement them as they best like.

Imposing on this space turns a generic game into a specific one, one that not everyone shares. You run the risk of someone not liking the game just because he or she doesn't like the method for choosing the starting player. On the other hand, it also provides concreteness for those who can't deal with finishing the work themselves.

Yehuda

Edited for cohesion ...

Weekend Gaming

I went for the weekend to my parent's house, along with my daughter Tal and her friend, and Rachel.

Spit

Tal is a game player. She likes all the standard games, as well as some non-complicated Euros, like Settlers of Catan, The Menorah game (she loves, as do all of her friends), and Havoc.

Most of the time, however, when she is not playing with me, she is playing Chinese Spit with her friends. This weekend we played: The Menorah Game once, where Tal won and I was about to win on my next move; and regular Spit, which she made me play with her friend. Tal claims that she hasn't beaten me, yet. I was feeling particularly slow, because I am still sick, so I lost to her friend.

Actually, it came down to single card. I was already down to no flip pile when I missed a single card play. Her friend emptied her hand without my having a chance. The next round, she didn't have a draw pile, and it again came down to single card. I was left with 8, and she with 10. Naturally a 9 eventually flipped up, rather than a 7 or J. We both hit the pile at the same time, but my card somehow ended up stuck halfway into the pile, whereas hers was correctly located on top. Oh, well.

Lexicon

I brought along a few other games. One was Queries and Theories, which I though might interest my father who had once been a computer science teacher, but he doesn't remember anything about natural languages. Another was Lexicon. Lexicon is an old game, one of I don't know how many that are designed around the idea of cards that each have letters on them, and with which you need to form words.

The basic problem with card games with letters whose rules simulate various standard card games is that it is much, much easier to meld words than it is to meld the numbers in a standard deck of cards. True, it takes a little more thinking, but so many more combinations can be used that it is rare that someone doesn't go out within two or three turns.

In this case, the game is a melding rummy. You are dealt ten cards, and on your turn you can either a) lay a word, b) add to an existing word, c) swap cards with an existing word, or d) swap cards with the deck or discard pile. First one out gains no points, and the rest gain the face value of their cards (common letters have higher values). Players are eliminated as they go over 100. Last one standing wins.

As I said, if the game really played out like Gin Rummy, where ten or twenty turns occurred each round, it would be a grand game. As it is, someone always goes down within two or three turns, which makes the game fairly uninteresting. Still, it is fun playing around with the anagramming, and I would play it again, casually.

The game comes with a rulebook that contains another twenty variations, all simulating regular card games, such as Lexicon Bridge, Lexicon Whist, and so on.

Anyway, Rachel and Mom and I played a few rounds, and then my Mom and I played a few more two player later in the day.

Scrabble and Three-Player Bridge

After Mom and I both got bored with Lexicon, I suggested Scrabble as a better alternative, and then won by an embarrassing amount. I scored 395.

Later, my Dad actually volunteered to play three handed bridge with my Mom and me. Three handed is bridge extremely gutted, but still ok if you are not really expecting "bridge", per se.

There are variations, but ours is that eight cards of the fourth hand are turned up. Each player bids, and whomever wins the bidding gets the fourth hand as dummy. The remaining five cards are turned up after the lead is made, and always turn out to contain four cards of some suit one of the defenders was bidding on, at which point they make some pithy remark about how "if they had only known!" That's why it's not really bridge: no partnership bidding, no control over the contract, and no information about where the other cards lie.

I find it generally useful to be quite aggressive when bidding three player. However, you can get a feel for how many values are underneath by listening to the other player's first bids. If one of them passes, odds are that there is a lot under there. If everyone is bidding aggressively, odds are that not much is under there.

We played a few hands.

Yehuda

Weekend Gaming

I went to my brother Ben for shabbat. He has a lot of little kids which makes it hard to find any time to game. We managed to get in a few, anyway.

Ben is a champion bridge player, and he often has a hand he recently played to show me. This time, he had answered an ad from someone looking for a serious bridge partner for one gaming session for the one week he was in Israel. Ben responded, and they had a good night of bridge at one of the local clubs. The last hand of the day was the one that resulted in their coming in 4th place instead of 1st. They failed to make a hand that was makeable, but not easily.

You are in 6 spades, and your opponents have already taken the first trick, the ace of diamonds. You get in with the next trick. Your RHO had 4 trumps to the jack and you have 7 in your hand and the singleton ace on the board. Obviously you find out about the split after taking the ace, playing to your hand, and then playing the king. You can take every other trick, but how to get that jack of trumps?

You need to play cards out of dummy until RHO trumps, at which point you overtrump and then take the rest. The problem is that if RHO keeps ducking, eventually you will run out of everything in your hand other than trumps. Eventually, you will have to take a trump in your hand and lead away from it, giving him the jack.

The only way to make it is to purposely ruff winning tricks, so as to run yourself out of all but two trumps, and then play the remaining cards from dummy. Cute.

Anyhow, Ben, myself, and Saarya got in a game of Cosmic. We played 3 hidden powers, where you get to reveal two. Ben was Aristocrat/Spiff, Saarya was Miser/Warrior, I was Visionary/Deuce. Ben chose Spiff after Warrior grew large enough to always give him a Spiff landing.

Saarya and Ben both started off with a lot of flourish, whereas I played very low key, and eventually won with very low key moves. Visionary did a lot of the work.

Afterwards, I took croquet balls and played Bocce/Croquet with Tal and Ben, throwing one ball across the yard, and taking turns hitting our own balls until one of us hit the thrown ball. What do you know, I can still balance a croquet mallet on my fingers, and I can still juggle croquet balls.

Towards the end of the day we players San Juan - I drew garbage, while they each drew Library. They made short mincemeat of me. Ben won 36 to Tal's 33, and my 26. Both played with lots of producing and trading. Ben had his Well, and Tal 1 of each production building, eventually ending with 8 production buildings, Guild Hall, and little else. Ben had City Hall and Palace.

I have now committed myself to publish the first part of my story on Gone Gaming, and I don't know if it's ready! I don't know if I like this deadline thing...

Yehuda

Purim Fest

Went to the parents this shabbat, and out to a friends for lunch. Of course, games played:

Fri night

Bridge: I've been playing bridge since I was 4 years old with my family, one of the first games I learned after rummy (many different types) and war. Bridge is to card games what Go is to board games - the pinnacle. But you have to play often, and many years, to get the patterns down and start playing well. Experienced players just can't enjoy a game against inexperienced players, or with an inexperienced partner. Even when all players are competent, good manners is keenly important, since the "right" play is sometimes obvious to one player in a partnership, but not the other. That is part of the game, and you have to accept it. But playing "right" does make you feel so smart.

Sat lunch

Pit: Tried to rope my host in to play with me and his kids, but my host, while a lovely man, can't handle this type of game.

Go: His son and I, both amateurs, played a few games. I initially gave him the starting advantage, which he soundly beat me with. I took the advantage the next game, and still lost due to a hairs-breathe race for one point in the middle of the board. We then played the same position several times, each time backing up further to see if I could win by making slightly different plays, but I lost each time. There was something wrong with my initial placement, which I still have to discover.

Arimaa: I don't know where he (son) learned this from, but I tried this game which was designed specifically to be "difficult for computers to solve." The game is played with chess pieces, where each piece can move one space orthogonally in any direction, and you get 4 moves each turn. In addition, bigger pieces can push or pull smaller pieces. There are four spots on the board where, if your piece lands, and is not orthogonal to one of your other pieces at the same time, it is removed from the board. Lastly, one your pieces next to a larger enemy piece is frozen (for you), again unless orthogonal to one of your pieces. Search Google for details.

Anyway, I found the game difficult, but my first impression was that, like Abalone, a good defensive position will probably beat any offensive position. With certain exceptions, such as Go, and the Gipf series, I am not much of an abstract/no randomness gamer, so this doesn't really appeal to me.

Spit/Speed: Whatever you call it. I played against my friend's 11 year old. I still got it, but I am slowing down every year. I measure my lifeblood by assessing how good my spit skills are.

Sat night was Purim dance party. Boomba boomba Boomba boomba.

Yehuda