Second Draft of the Book Done

Yay. And less than a year after the first draft.

Third draft means a) getting it edited, b) adding sources for and backing up all of my wild claims, c) adding any important arguments or information from the sources that I noted but forgot to include, and d) adding material anywhere my editors say to, as well as eliminating duplication or restructuring as necessary.

Fourth draft will be to pretty the book up with pictures and games.

Editors? Publishers?

Yehuda

First Draft of the Book is Essentially Done

I am just going to go ahead and say that the first draft of the book is done. Essentially. The only "real" section that I haven't written is the forward.

Unfortunately, now comes the work of the second draft:

• Several sections have to be majorly rewritten. Most sections have to be lightly rewritten. Repetitions have to be moved and consolidated in their relevant sections.
• I'm going to go through all of the research I went through the first time, as well as additional research I have collected in the last 3 or 4 years, and see what I need to add or correct. This may result in a new section or two.
• I'm going to take a lot of the fun contents from my blog, create many more similar content items, and add them as flavor between the sections. Raph Koster, I'm looking at you. :-)

 At what point do I start looking for a publisher? Or do I first ask for people to review and critique?

Yehuda

Vacation Day 2: The Game Professor and the Cave

The Game Professor

In the morning I navigated the Boston MTA, made famous by The Kingston Trio in their 1950s song about poor old Charlie stuck on train due to a proposed fare increase to charge people an extra nickel for getting off the train. Today's MTA uses the "CharlieCard" on all of its services. They're free. With one, I took a bus to the subway and then the subway back to a bus for $2.55 (more than Charlie would have paid, but reasonable by today's standards); without one, the cost would have been significantly higher.

I met the brilliant and gracious Sebastian Deterding at the Pavement Coffeehouse on 44 Gainsborough St in Boston. Sebastian wrote several important sources about gameful design that I used for research on my book. I wrote to him as a stranger, asking if I would be able to catch him lecture or if he would be willing to meet a fan for coffee, and he agreed to coffee.

I wasn't sure what the conversation would be - maybe I would interview him for my blog - but it ended up being about the central tenets of my book. He is the first person in my field with whom I have discussed my ideas. He is not only more educated that I; as a professor he is able to discuss it with a depth that I struggled with, since I live outside of academia. It was awesome (for me, at least).

We talked for 90 minutes. He asked deep questions that presented deep challenges. My ideas held out pretty well, but I need to address these challenges - in the book, or at least for my own sake, in order to be sure that I know what I'm talking about. For example:

I propose a new definition of "game" that I feel captures the essential aspect of game more rigorously than any previous definition. For one thing, my definition describes what a game "is", not what it contains. Sebastian asked me if, in my definition, a game was a) a fundamental reality, in which case "game" pre-existed mankind and humans discovered it, or b) a
human construct, in which case game could be more or less different from culture to culture, or c) my own convenient grouping of ideas/activities, in order to provide new insights into the other topics I cover in my book.

Although I had already written a bit about why I was attempting to define "game" in the book, I had not thought about asking these questions, and thus I had been moving back and forth among these usages without thought. This is the kind of insightful analysis you get from years of experience in defending and presenting your thoughts in academia, and which Sebastian generously shared with a complete stranger in a coffeehouse. I am very grateful.

When I got home, Tal told me that my hair was sticking up and my shirt was on backwards and inside out.

New England

We bought a BBQ, and some kosher food at The Butcherie, and ate at the nearby Taam China kosher Chinese restaurant for lunch. We headed out for what was supposed to be a three hour drive but ended up being a five and a half hour drive through beautiful New England. Once we were far away from Boston, most of our drive was through small towns and one lane highways through the woods. Very beautiful. However, without GPS, we still either got lost or occasionally thought we were lost and had to stop to figure out where we were going.

In one of those stops we managed to connect to Wi-Fi for around 4 minutes, and during that time Saarya was able to download the destination, the navigation, and many of the maps on the route. The phone's GPS works even without Wi-Fi or cellular connection, so long as all of that is pre-loaded onto the phone and so long as you stay on route. It helped us get back onto my pre-printed route. If we were not scheduled to meet the person whose cabin we were renting at a particular time, I would have stopped several more times to wander around in antique stores, roadside vegetable stands, and several pretty lakes and streams. Once you get into Vermont, the vegetable stands become maple product stands. We met the guy and he was willing to wait while we picked up some more food items.

The Cabin

It's really a cabin in the wood that the guy had built himself. Stunning setting and a beautiful property, it lacks only Wi-Fi, telephone, and a bathroom. It uses an outhouse. There is only cold water piped in from the stream into tanks. He provides a bathtub to use - outdoors - with only cold running water. For hot water, you have to fill up some buckets, lower heating coils into them, and wait. This kind of setup might be a first for my kids, and it's been a long time for me, too. We were able to use the Wi-Fi from the house next door, which also  belongs to him.

Dinner was BBQ'd chicken and farmer's market vegetables.

Status Update - Jerusalem, Book, Vacation

I am happy to be back in Jerusalem, hosting the Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club, attending Jerusalem's uniquely Jewish and Israeli divrei torah and poetry slams, in my new apt, valued by my manager at my new job, back in my Carlebach shul, and close to my Jerusalem friends and family.

Despite intense planning for a major apt renovation and for my upcoming trip with the kids, I have, oddly enough, made some progress on my book. A little about the book:

• It contains a new and original definition of "game", one that, unlike any definition until now, contains no edge-cases: what is a game is clearly a game, and what isn't, isn't.
• It presents an extensive new taxonomy of games, entirely unlike any game taxonomy that has ever been presented.
• It continues the subjects I've explored, on this blog and my other blogs: how games intersect life, including motivation, magic circles, gamification, arts, and ethics.
• It has a few other surprises, including some original games

But it's still a long way from done, even the first draft. At this rate, at least another year. Bleh.

I won't make any progress on the book over my vacation, but I hope to provide some new pictures and travel stories. Tal, Saarya, and I are going to Vermont and Maine for 11 days and then to Rome for 6 days. The trip starts on July 27. If you're in the area, contact me and let's see if we can get together.

Bluetooth Transfer; Book Progress

Thursday night our phones discovered each other across a crowded smoky bar (ok, it was across a table at Cafe Hillel and they don't allow smoking, but hush).

After making contact, and discovering that we were compatible, I asked for permission and she granted me access. With permission granted, and a connection established, we fumbled around for a while I tried to figure out how to share my data with her phone. With much hesitation, blushing, and apologies, I finally figured it out and send her my packet which went straight into her address book. After that we disconnected and I had a cigarette.

The whole thing took fifteen minutes. I'm pretty sure it would have been faster to just type my number into her phone.

Book Progress

Relevant sources that I've read while researching my book, so far; I've got fifty more waiting to be read, and every source leads me to another several potential sources. I wish I had an academic adviser.

• Abt, Clark C.
• Adams, Ernest W.
• Archer, Robyn
• Bartle, Richard
• Bateman, Chris
• Bateman, Chris & Nacke, Lennert E.
• Bergström, Karl Jones
• Björk, Steffan & Holopainen, Jussi
• Bogost, Ian
• Brown, Stuart
• Caillois, Roger
• Calleja, Gordon
• Chalker, Dave
• Consalvo, Mia
• Costikyan, Greg
• Crawford, Chris
• Crawford, Gary
• Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaky & Abuhamdeh, Sami & Nakamura, Jeanne
• Deák, Gedeon O. & Ray, Shanna D. & Pick, Anne D.
• Deci, Edward L. & Ryan, Richard M.
• DeKoven, Bernie
• Eigen, Manfred & Winkler, Ruthild
• Ellis, Jonathan
• Ermi, Laura & Mäyrä, Frans
• Faidutti, Bruno
• Ferreira, Emmanoel & Falcão, Thiago
• Flanagan, Mary
• Fluegelman, Andrew (editor)
• Frasca, Gonzalo
• Ginsburg, Richard D. Ph.D.
• Gobet, Ferand & de Voogt, Alex & Retschitzki, Jean
• Goffman, Erving
• Henricks, Thomas S.
• Hewes, Jane PhD
• Huizinga, Johan
• Humble, Rod
• Hunicke, Robin & LeBlanc, Marc, & Zubek, Robert
• Izuma, Keise & Saito, Daisuke N. & Sadato, Norihiro
• Järvinen, Aki
• Johnson, Cynthia E.
• Juul, Jesper
• Kelley, David
• King, Darrell G.
• Klabbers, Jan H. G.
• Kohn, Alfie
• Koster, Raph
• Kramer, Wolfgang
• Kreimeier, Bernd
• Leo, Francisco Miguel & Sánchez, Pedro Antonio & Sánchez, David & Amado, Diana & Calvo, Tomas García
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude
• Logas, Heather Lee
• Lundgren, Sus & Bergström, Karl Jones & Björk, Steffan
• Luvmour, Ba
• Malaby, Thomas M.
• Mandigo, James L. & Holt, Nicholas L.
• Marinak, Barbara A. & Gambrell, Linda B.
• Maroney, Kevin
• McGonigal, Jane
• Montola, Markus
• Murphy, Curtiss
• Myers, David
• Nichols, Steve
• Parlett, David
• Piaget, Jean
• Poremba, Cindy
• Rodriguez, Hector
• Ruch, Adam W.
• Salen, Katie & Zimmerman, Eric
• Schijns, Guus
• Schmittberger, R. Wayne
• Sicart, Miguel
• Smith, Ronald E. & Smoll, Frank L. & Cumming, Sean P.
• Sniderman, Stephen
• Steinkuehler, Constance
• Stenros, Jaakko
• Stenros, Jaakko & Waern, Annika
• Suits, Bernard
• Sutton-Smith, Brian
• Sutton-Smith, Brian & Avedon, Elliot
• Taylor, T.L.
• Van Eck, Richard & Hung, Woei
• Vanderschuren, Louk J. M. J.
• Vygotsky, Lev
• Walther, Bo Kampmann
• Williamson, Rebecca A. & Jaswal, Vikram K. & Meltzoff, Andrew N.
• Wilson, Gabriel
• Winther-Lindqvist, Ditte
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig
• Woods, Stewart John
• Zimmerman, Eric

Yehuda

Review: No Contest: The Case Against Competition

The Book

No Contest: The Case Against Competition by Alfie Kohn

Summary

A must-read for every parent, teacher, manager, and game designer. Presents several revolutionary ideas that should be integrated into every level of our society.

Notwithstanding this, Kohn loses his way when discussing certain issues, such as play and self-confidence. He sets up some straw man arguments, and tries to claim that, since extreme competition is extremely bad, moderate competition must be moderately bad.

Overview, with Comments

Competition pervades our culture. Things are not enjoyed, they are evaluated and ranked (who's the best opera singer? what are the top ten games?). Competition is not only our instinctive attitude, but it is also built into nearly every structure or our society, with artificial exclusive attainable goals: who is the highest in class, the thinnest in the room, all or nothing politics and justice, best business, and so on. Everything is built around winning and losing. [Actually, this is not entirely true. There are many instances where an independent percentage score is relevant, where a middle rank is better than a lower rank, or where performance is not simply competition based.]

Competition, when structured, seems to be inevitable: only so many acceptances to a college, only one company can get your business, only one winner in a tennis match. But goals can be achieved competitively, cooperatively, or independently. People believe competition is a) unavoidable "human nature", b) motivating and drives success, c) fun, and d) builds character and self-confidence.

As to human nature, that argument is often a convenient one for maintaining the status quo, especially if many of our institutions are already built around it. Yet, train people to act cooperatively, show them the benefits, and they will take to it. Furthermore, many societies behave far more cooperatively than others; competition is built into the Western world because everyone thinks it's better. So we train children to become good at it. That's a vicious circle.

Consider the classroom: raised hands mean competing against fellow students. The right answer is rewarded, the wrong answer is punished. Grades set some students above others, some as triumphant, some as failures. This is not inevitable. Classrooms could be organizes so that a student struggling gets help from others instead of attempts to best him or her. Grades could instead be evaluations and recommendations; and schools don't have to be rigidly organized into years the way they have been for the last century and a half; they weren't always like that.

As to animal nature, competition exists, but so does vast amounts of cooperation, within families, herds, species, and between species.

As to competition motivating and driving success, one should be careful not to equate success with victory. If victory is the only measure of success, competition may sometimes be inevitable. But racing against oneself can be just as motivating as trying to best someone else. In fact, a lot more so, because once it's clear whether you're going to win or lose, your motivation disappears.

Rewarding everyone in a group for learning a problem is no less motivating or driving than rewarding only the winner. [Unless there are a few who are simply determined not to learn, in which case it could in fact be demotivating. In which case, independent rewards are still motivating. But intervention, separating out the problems and addressing them individually, can help to solve this problem.]

Competition for newspaper stories doesn't produce better journalism, nor does competition for most food sold equal better food, or most business earned mean better service. It produces people who are good at winning and losing, not at doing the actual tasks they are supposed to be doing "better". Competition benefits some people, but usually at the expense of many others, usually the poor or the ill-connected.

The canonical idea that competition will produce better vaccines and better cars doesn't hold up to the fact that competition really produces cheaper erectile pills and bigger hummers. And poorly treated workers. And safety violations.

When the object is winning, and not performing best, cheating is inevitable. Trying to deal with cheaters one by one is ignoring the structure that breeds cheating to begin with.

As to fun, here Kohn drops the ball. He defines "play" as a free activity, disconnected with the real world, not serious, and non-goal oriented. And then he shows how competition is antithetical to his definition of play. And therefore, competition isn't really fun. He then goes on to talk about the effects of extreme competition in child's sports and so on, which serve to make the game less fun and more work for everyone.

I must not be having fun when I play games, I guess.

As to building self-esteem and character, he brings in the cases of extreme competition which produces winners and losers, and can have a deleterious effect on self-esteem, even for the winners. However, trying to transfer the same argument to light competitions just doesn't work. If failing to achieve something is something that everyone experiences, and harder work will let you win more often than before - in other words, if failure is safe, then the effects of extreme competition don't really apply.

Still, a pervasive competitive society, where everyone tries to be the thinnest, richest, most beautiful, most admired, and so on are detrimental, not enhancing, to most people's self-esteem. And everyone knows people who are "so competitive", and we don't really admire their character.

Competition bred into our work and schools leaks into our personal lives. Many women, and some men, know the husband or wife who is always competitive, showing off, showing off their spouse, and otherwise ruining a good relationship. Competition between cultures and nations results in wars, disparate resources, dependency, aggression, mistrust, and so on.

Wrapping it up, Kohn states that our society is caught in a circle: we think we have to be competitive because that's the way our system works. And our system is built around competition because that's the way we think it should be.

Breaking this cycle is difficult, but not impossible. Kohn has written dozens of books on the subject of education and parenting, the best places to start undoing the learned competition. From the quality of this book, they're probably worth checking into.

- Unconditional Parenting

- The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing

- The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards"

- The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools

and others.

Yehuda

Selling Oxford History of Board Games

I'm selling my copy of Oxford History of Board Games. It often sells for around $100 to $200, but I sometimes see it for as low as $70.

My copy is here, on eBay for $50 plus shipping. If you're reading this, worldwide shipping's on me (just let me know when you win).

Yehuda

The Well-Played Game

I've got a boat load of game books to read. I sent them, one by one, to a friend's house in the U.S. anticipating that I would eventually get there to pick them up. This didn't happen. So after two or three years of this I finally asked him to mail them all to me in Toronto, to take back with me to Israel.

I accidentally acquired duplicates of some of the books. Also, some of the books deal with issues I was dealing with on the blog a long time ago but have since abandoned. So not all the books are useful to me. Luckily I generally buy books used at around $1 or $2 plus shipping.

One of the first I got though is The Well-Played Game, by Bernie DeKoven. The edition that I read is the 1978 edition; the one pictured is apparently an updated edition. Many of you know Bernie from his Major Fun awards or Deep Fun blog. Bernie's been in the play business for a long time. In the 70s he ran his own play center, organized play dates for 250,000 people at a time, and taught and took part in the New Games Foundation. I met him for lunch a few months back; he was a real hippie back in the days, and he's still a bit of one today.

The Well-Played Game was written in the 70s, and so is really infused with his hippie mentality and style. Present tense, spiritual, somewhat meandering, and embellished with personal anecdotes, what-ifs, and stories.

The main thrust of the book is that we strive to play "well-played" games which have less to do with winning or rules and more to do with moments of feeling good about our play. One example would be volleying in table tennis without keeping score: a better player might handicap themselves to make it challenging for both players. The book examines the factors that tend to help or hinder this feeling of having played well, both on a personal and communal level.

Two chapters in particular deal with issues about which I don't often read. Chapter 4 examines the way in which games, or play, provide help for players who are stuck, need hints, need to bend the rules, take a time out, or overcome interference. Chapter 6 discusses how games or play end: what happens when someone wants to leave early, loses, wins, or gets eliminated.

It's an interesting and fairly quick read. His lessons about games are metaphorically about life, as well.

Yehuda

Oxford History of Board Games and other books

Books I Own and You Don't

The Oxford History of Board Games by David Parlett is the Holy Grail of board games books, as it is generally available only at astronomical prices (ranging from a low of $80 up to $200, $300, or more). Which is rather odd, as it was only written in 1999. And you can get a zipped download copy of the book from the author here (albeit for $60).

The book was meant to be an updated and better version of H. J. R. Murray's A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess from 1956. I haven't read either of these books, yet. But Parlett's book certainly looks like a treat.

And, oh yes. I just picked up a copy at a used book store in Toronto.

It's a really nice book store on Younge south of Bloor (if you ignore the large porn DVD section in the back) with really good prices. It has a vast section on sci-fi and a nice section on games.

Another find was a rather odd looking book called Favourite Family Games (listed on Amazon as Favourite Party Games, for some unknown reason) by John Alderton and Pauline Collins. If you don't recognize these names, they were famous actors, husband and wife, who often acted together in film and television, including the well-regarded TV series Upstairs, Downstairs.

This 1993 book is a collection of over 100 games, mostly party games, contributed from dozens and dozens of famous actors and actresses. These are their favorite games or the favorite games of their children. The proceeds of the book were contributed to the British Leukaemia Research Fund.

One of the funny things about it is that a number of the games are outright nasty or naughty, such as "try to guess the person by his or her anatomy after looking through a hole in a sheet".

I also picked up The Fantasy Worlds and Folk of the Air by Peter Beagle. The former includes two of his novels and two novellas.

Toronto: Objects Are Farther Than They Appear

Went traipsing with Rachel on the beach of Lake Ontario today, which is quite a lovely spot. It's a very uncommercialized stretch of green, tan, and blue, with multicolored rocks. No party spots, no stands hawking goods, and no loud music. Of course, we're off season; maybe there's loud music in the summer.

Of course, a walk with Rachel means an adventure. This time she was convinced that we could walk to the Scarborough bluffs in no time at all. It took us over an hour of winding up and down rocks and ravines. Every time we got past one cove to find yet another cove, the bluffs didn't look any closer. Then it started to hail.


A section of the beach.


The elusive "Scarborough bluffs".


Fall colors growing in the rocks. Space Needle in the background.


Something there is that doesn't love a wall.


View away from beach.


More colors on beach.


Evil squirrel.


Squirrel the Gray locked in combat with a Balcorn.

Yehuda

Review: Roger von Oech's Ball of Whacks

Summary: Much ado about a neat little toy.

The publishers of the Ball of Whacks sent me a copy to review. While it's not a game - it's a toy - I thought some readers might be interested in reading about it.

The Ball of Whacks is a d30 - a rhombic triacontahedron, to be precise - where each face is actually the base of a separable pyramid. The proportion of the diagonals in the base of each rhombus is one of my favorite numbers, the golden ratio.

The pieces hold together through the use of small magnets in the sides and bases which provide a medium amount of pull.

You can buy it from Amazon.com.

Toy

Simply taken as a toy, which is really all that this is, it's a fairly neat toy. You can take the pieces apart or squoosh them together. You can make all sorts of interesting shapes with the pieces, although they only really hold together well in their canonical configuration.

Hype

But the story only begins here.

Take a board game, add a theme and sell it for $10.00. Take another board game, add a theme and sell it for "only $199.95". Both teach the same principles; maybe one does so slightly more overtly than the other.

That's marketing for you.

The inventor of this toy was so taken by playing with it that he decided that it possesses all sorts of creativity enhancing benefits. In this, he's not wrong. It's just that ANY toy you can play with possesses all sorts of creativity enhancing benefits.

The instructions tell you to take the ball in your hand and play with it. By virtue of throwing it, arranging the pieces, considering the forms, and so on, your mind will drift away from the mental blocks you have and enhance your mental clarity. Well, I guess it will, for many people. Although why the BoW does this any better than, say, a superball, is never really made clear.

The Ball of Whacks is so called because playing with it is supposed to give your brain a whack.

The Guidebook

The ball comes with a 96 page "creativity guidebook". Luckily, only about 2/5 of the book tells you "how to play with the ball".

The next 2/5 of the book are a series of practical steps for achieving creativity, most of which boil down to trying to think about your problem from a different perspective. In each of these steps, of course, you are instructed to first use the Ball of Whacks as a meditation tool, but that's really superfluous. As a guidebook to creativity, it's fairly nice and may be useful.

The last fifth of the book is information about the geometry of the pieces, the golden ratio, and inspirations for the design.

Conclusion

My ball came in a single color, red. Other versions come in other colors or even multiple colors. Get several balls together and you can make more elaborate sculptures, just like if you had several boxes of Lego rather than one.

As I said, it's a neat toy, and fun to play with. It's being sold as a unique creativity tool, but don't let that bother you too much.

Yehuda

Weekend Gaming

Rachel was invited to teach in Beit Shemesh for shabbat. Meanwhile, my parents were away for shabbat. So we stayed in their house.

Naturally, somehow the house experienced an electrical outage, followed by a plumbing leak in the ceiling while we were there, which resulted in my having to explain to my skeptical father that "it just happened" and "we didn't touch anything".

Dinner at friends (the Ehrmans), and lunch at friends (the Fensters).

Team Hearts

I taught Team Hearts to Tal and two of the Fenster children. All had played Hearts before. Team Hearts is like regular Hearts, except that you always pass across to your partner. Shooting the moon is still an individual act, but give points only to your opponents, of course.

Just about any card game is much better when played as a team game. From being able to signal with the pass, to the subtle play of giving bad cards to your opponents rather than to your partner, the tactics of the game are heightened immensely.

Nevertheless, Tal didn't like it because you can't "dump" your bad cards on your partner.

Rules of Card Games

I didn't play any other games, but I saw this delightful book at the Elkins, yet more friends of ours. It is one of those classic books on card games, dating back to the late 1800s. As such, it includes not only rules of play but chapters on organizing card parties, teaching games to children, and card play etiquette.

It is quite amusing.

Children's first card games are, according to the book, at age four, where they learn to pick up the cards and throw them across the house.

When planning parties, if you have four strong Bridge players and four weaker players, sit the strong players together and the weaker players together, but try to avoid explaining to anyone why you did so. Also, don't let couple play together, to avoid arguments.

Apparently, the hostess (sic) decides not only on the games played but also on all the rules of play, so as to avoid the participants getting into any arguments about what to play.

And furthermore, it was as true then as it is today: regardless of how well you know the rules, no one likes to wait around for a slow player mumbling to himself over every play, "Oh, I just don't know what to play." [emphasis the book's]

I didn't get to read more, but I hope to borrow it when my friend is done with it.

Looking for Game Books

By the way, if anyone has any books about games of any sort, I am always interested in acquiring them.

Game News

Singapore's Pitstop Cafe lists five things it likes about board games.

The 15th World Computer-Chess Championship and the 12th Computer Olympiad will be held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in conjunction with the Computer Games Workshop 2007 (CGW2007).

Computer programs will compete in the following games:

Abalone
Amazons
Arimaa
Backgammon
Bao
Bridge
Chinese Chess
8x8 Checkers
Clobber
Computational Pool
Connect6
Diplomacy
Dominoes
Dots and Boxes
10x10 Draughts
Gipf
Go
9x9 Go
Hex
Kriegspiel
Lines of Action
6x7 OCTI
9x9 OCTI
Othello
Poker
Renju
Scrabble
Shogi

Other notes:

The game of Renju, claimed to be solved, is still welcome since we have not seen a fully-operational program on internet that plays perfectly. Moreover, we are willing to host more games, such as Ataxx, Dvonn, Mediocrity, Onyx, Tamsk, TwixT and Zèrtz but we do not know of the existence of adequately playing programs. We are awaiting suggestions and proposals of programmers before we include them in the official list given above.

Don't Drink & Drive is a game that tries to discourage drunk driving, apparently. At a website called "Drinking Fun".

And in more fallout from the war in Iraq, nightly games of Backgammon by displaced Iraqi refugees give their Egyptian hosts insomnia.

Yehuda

Raph Koster is Back on the Fun Track

Raph Koster is forging forward on the topic of fun, games, and grammar. His latest talk at ETech looks like it was very interesting.

When I reviewed his book, A Theory of Fun for Game Design, I proposed that the book was more about the theory of art in games than fun in games. This talk looks like a definite step back in the fun direction - less about internal transformations, and more about pleasure.

I'm looking forward to his next book, A Grammar of Game Play: How Games Work (due out when, Raph?).

Game News

Merscom will be bringing Ingenious to the PC. Details here.

The Herald Tribune talks about the shortening of board games. Apparently, Hasbro's down to 51.3% share of the marketplace, listing both Mattel and Cranium as its competitors.

Here's an article about a prisoner who hanged himself. And what, pray tell, does this have to do with board games? Apparently, the "attention" buzzers were taped off and the lights ignored while one guard was teaching the other how to play Backgammon.

A History of Playing Cards

I was out with Saarya this morning - many interesting stories therein, which I shall skip for the moment - and we had a chance to stop into a used book store for twenty minutes where I found this book for around $8.00.

It is dry, dry, dry, but exhaustive, with 1400 beautiful pictures of so many cards from around the world. Unfortunately, it reads more like a collector's guide: this card came from here, and this one from there, and so on. It could have gone into more about the lives and culture around the time, the games and gaming culture, and so on.

I truly recommend it if you're into the historical nature of cards, but not for a "good read".

More interesting is an amazing bibliography, not only for works cited by the book, but thousands upon thousands of books about cards and games of every sort, printed from the 15th century until the early twentieth century. Some of the books cited pre-date the printing press, and exist in only one copy made of gold clasps and lambskin.

The books are divided by subject, and one of the subjects is "Plays, Poems, and Satires on Gaming". There's a whole two pages of them! You can bet your bazookas that I'm going to report back on those, after I track some of them down on the Internet.

Update: Well what do you know? You can find the bibliography part of this book online in PDF format, for free.

Another thorough bibliography is "A Bibliography of Works in English on Playing Cards and Gaming" by Frederic Jessel. Catherine Perry Hargrave's book (which I bought) is a complete reproduction of the original book "A Bibliography of Card-Games and of the History of Playing Cards" by Norton T Horr.

Both Jessel's work, and the bibliography part of Horr's work, were published in "Bibliographies of Works on Playing Cards and Gaming" by Jessel and Horr, which is available here (warning: 415 page PDF).

This work was put online by the University of Calgary's Alberta Gaming Research Institute.

They have also put many, many other works online in PDF format, including seminal books on game theory, gaming, and gambling. You have to search through the results, however, because only some of them are online. I would have thought that it would go by date/copyright expiration, but some books as late as the 1970's are also online. I haven't figure out a pattern, yet.

What a treasure trove.

Yehuda

Look at my new duds!

Comments on my new site design are welcome. Especially regarding the decision to fix the background image rather than have it scroll with the contents. On the minus side, text at the top of the page is slightly harder to read. On the plus side, it sure looks cool. Update: I decided to go with readability and scroll the image.

I'm having trouble with the ad placement. On the one hand, I would be thrilled to earn money as a blogger; that would let me devote more time to blogging. On the other hand, I want my site to be about content, and I want it to look clean. Ads really clutter up the landscape.

Also, Ad-sense is doing a particularly sucky job of matching to my content, right now.

Links:

Wired notes the well-known issue about laws against violence in Germany as a hindrance to video game acceptance.

New Zealand and Australia are going through the same hooplahs that the U.S. did last year regarding new and updated Monopoly versions. I mostly ignore all the local newspapers article urging their citizens to go out and vote for such-and-such to be included on the mew board. In this case, however, it is at least worth mentioning that Palmerson North's idea was to set the world record for simultaneous games of Monopoly as a media boost to their voting campaign.

Gamer Hotsheet notes that Steve Jackson has slashed prices on a number of downloadable GURPS books, some at now very low prices.

Games: A Tale of Two Bullies is a new book by Carol Gorman about a principal who takes two fighting kids in school and forces them to sit down and play board games to work out their differences.

My Rewards Game is a "new game" that encourages "good" behavior in children. Basically, it's a track, and each day you move your child's pawn forward a space if they do something "good" and back if they do something "bad".

Moving on to an actual "game", Disqualified is a board game with some cool car minis, whose theme is to "Elude that police car on your tail. Dodge those tiresome speed cameras and compete with your opponents using strategy, vehicle upgrades and your sheer driving expertise to be the the 1st player to drive 500 miles without getting DISQUALIFIED!. How fast do you dare to go?"

Yehuda

The Oxford A to Z of Word Games

This little book contains the rules to hundreds of word games of all shapes and sizes.

What is a word game? Basically, any game that can be played with paper and pencil and involves language of some sort. So you will find obvious games, such as Hangman and Scrabble, as well as less obvious ones, such as Charades and other party games - or, games that use only words. I suppose the contrast is essentially to games that use cards, lines and boxes, and so on.

Details:

The book is written by Tony Augarde, who also wrote the Oxford Book of Word Games, which is supposed to have less games but a more detailed history. It contains about 250 games in a 250 page soft-covered book with some humorous line illustrations.

Each game listed includes the number of players, the game type (e.g. guessing), the required equipment and how it is played. The rules for each game are included, and all games also include a sample round of play. Lastly, a number of alternate names are given for each game, followed by similar or contrasting games, and a line or two about its background or authorship.

A fair portion of the games, maybe about a fifth, are just variations on one another, e.g. in this game you are given the initials of the words, while in that game you are given an anagram of the initials of the words, and so on. So it really contains a bit less than the promised 250 games.

Reading books like this is a reminder of what games can be: simple, yet challenging; social, yet cerebral; cheap and accessible. Games range from all out competitive strategy games to party games, to activities which one would hardly classify as games, such as where each person simply tries to come up with a list of the most X, whatever X is, and no scoring is involved.

It's also a reminder of how, even in my youth when I thought there were no good games in the world beyond Bridge and Scrabble, there exist so many thousands of good games just waiting for the right people to play them in the right circumstances. Where were these games, or the players who would play them, when I was young?

One of the reasons I wanted this book was because I am still unarmed when I am at non-gaming social events. People know I'm a gamer, but I can't lug around games to show them, and even if I could, I can't teach them to most people or play them with a group of ten or more. I needed to arm myself with an array of games that required little or no equipment and could handle large groups. This book answers this need.

Most of the games are variations on a few themes: guess words by virtue of knowing a few letters, homophones, context, a pantomime, etc; form words using themes, letters, or some limitations; tell stories or create names or puns from given information; remember words that were used; etc...

My favorite entries are the ones with more strategy, and less straightforward word recall, however. Some favorites include:

Centurion: Each letter is assigned a value. Players alternate writing three-letter words, and the last one to write without going over a predetermined value is the winner.

Crossword Game: Players alternate calling out letters, while each one fills his or her own private 5x5 grid. Count lengths of words at the end.

Letter Auction: Where letters are auctioned off, and players score the words they make plus cash left at the end.

Word Battleship: Players fill a grid with some words and then play Battleship.

As well as many more.

Bottom Line: A great addition to the bookshelf if you are into games that are quick to explain and quick to play, play with many people and have only verbal, or pen and paper, components.

Weekend Gaming

We went to Nadine's for lunch, as did Adam and some other family.

I brought a copy of The Oxford A to Z of Word Games (which I'll describe in another post). Nadine showed me the Amazon.com Book Lover board game, or somesuch, which is essentially a board game version of the game Zero Is which I reviewed a few weeks ago (essentially, there are five clues to an item on a card, and the earlier you guess the item, the more points you get.

But we didn't play that.

Instead, inspired by the book I brought, I tried to conduct a game of Questions Only, A-Z; you may have seen this played on Whose Line Is It Anyway? Each person has to continue the conversation with another question, and each question has to start with the next letter of the alphabet.

I wanted to give a time limit of three minutes for the whole conversation, but it turned out to be hard enough for everyone a the table to even figure out what letter we were up to, let alone come up with a question. It turned into a fifteen minute activity (fun) just trying to get to the end of the alphabet.

Adam pointed out that some letters are simply more conductive to being made into the beginning of questions.

Later in the evening I played Puerto Rico with Rachel and Adam. We played with an assortment of expansion buildings. Adam shipped well, but didn't switch over to buying a big building when he should have. I built well, but was behind Rachel in shipping, again, and so she beat me by one point, again. Argh.

Yehuda

Review: A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster

Summary: This mistitled manifesto examines games as an artistic medium, describes their capability of combining both entertainment and art, and encourages designers to create more artistic games.

Raph Koster wesbite.
A Theory of Fun website.

Overview

This book attempts to tackle the idea of what makes games fun. It begins with Raph's attempt to validate his chosen profession (game designer) to his grandfather and progresses through: boredom and noise in games; facing, avoiding, and mastering challenges; theme's overlay onto mechanics; and where games fit in comparison with other forms of media as entertainment and art. It asserts that "fun" in games is mastering challenges, and therefore game designers play the role of teachers, presenting their audience with lessons that should have some applicability in the real world. It provides an exhortation for game designers to produce quality games that not only challenge players but also reach some level of artistic quality.

The Mistitled Book

I have now read through this book three times, and have enjoyed it each time. However, it was clear to me even after the first reading that something was wrong. It took a while before I hit the eureka moment as to what this was.

The book is not written as an academic book; there are no formal footnotes or endnotes, no bibliography, no sources. Raph writes many observations and assertions with no supporting data. Of course, it is not hard to write many things that seem to make sense even without supporting data, but several times I disagreed with his assertions. There were no real grounds to argue with him, either for or against.

Instead, the book is like a series of excellent blog posts, clearly written, and generally sensible. Half the book - each facing page - is illustrations, which, with little exception, are not necessary. I understand from some comments that Raph has made that he deliberately made the text less "heavy" and more reader-friendly and has been surprised by reactions that the audience wanted a more thorough, academic, "boring" book.

The first time though the book I understood the ideas and agreed or disagreed with them. The second time, the things I disagreed with I now disagreed with even more. Raph had thought of many of the counter-arguments and noted them in the book, but not dealt with them. It wasn't all fitting together.

The book is supposed to be about "fun" in games. Was I unfairly bringing my own ideas about "fun" into my reading and therefore not giving him a chance to explain it? Or was Raph not cogently arguing his ideas? Furthermore, while a lot of the book is sensible, it doesn't address the main idea of the book, namely "fun". Instead, the book talks about purpose, cognitive function, "fun", education, art, patterns, social responsibility, and so on.

The third time through the book I used a highligher, finding the main assertions of the book, as well as my main disagreements. I emailed Raph at one point when I was totally stuck on one of his assertions: that games are "puzzles", presenting challenges to be overcome.

Raph insists that not only the game mechanics but even the self and the opponents are patterns to overcome. Even luck is a challenge, in that it involves learning odds. This contrasts with my own ideas about challenges in games. Could we be arguing semantics?

But no. I can't - don't - accept that self, opponents, and luck are patterns to overcome. There is more to games than simply finding and mastering patterns. So what is really going on in this book?

Raph defines fun as mastering challenges. He acknowledges fulfillment, enjoyment, and so on in games, but doesn't categorize these as "fun" in order to concentrate on a manageable definition. He then goes on to assert that this definition is all that games are about. It's circular reasoning. But he uses this definition in order to present the rest of the book, which is about art and a comparison of games to other media. Again, all of the pieces don't fit together.

I finally figured out how to fit the pieces together. I think Raph started with one idea for a book and it morphed along the way, but he never really noticed. The book is called:

A Theory of Fun for Game Design

But his theory of fun isn't really more than an assertion of what he wants to talk about. So it doesn't work. If you change the title to:

A Theory of Art for Game Design

Then the whole thing falls into place. This book is about games and art, not games and fun.

Fun, Art, and Games

The parts of the book that talk about games and art hold together cohesively from one end to the other. He defines fun only because he wants to talk only about that aspect of games, the challenge. If part of a game is mastering challenges, that is also what art is: presenting challenges to be mastered.

The difference between entertainment and art is that entertainment (or craft) presents something comfortable and pleasurable to the audience, while art presents something challenging and therefore growth-inducing to the audience. Raph covers all of this. He acknowledges that people are lazy and want entertainment without art. But he obscures this by trying to dissuade you from recognizing comfort and pleasure as fun.

If you toss out that part of the book - if you allow that comfort and pleasure are also fun along with challenge and mastery - you are left with a neat manifesto about games and their artistic value.

Raph asserts that games present an artistic pallet like any other media. Therefore, presenting hateful images and crying that what you have done is "only a game" is indefensible. Also, presenting the same games over and over, without adding real human challenges, relevant challenges for modern man, is like producing endless pop music records without artistic content. We should be able to find a balance between unchallenging and valuelessly offensive, just as we do for other entertainment/art forms.

The book ends before exploring just how to do this, however. Games are defined variously by many people, but seem at their heart to have an element of competition and an end result of mastery. The activity process of a game seems to require not only general interaction but specific interaction in a form of challenge/overcoming. Therefore, unlike painting, dance, music, or architecture, where the artist is leading you and can present any path along which to travel: sadness, happiness, glory, etc., the game designer appears to be limited by the form imposed on the interaction: one of challenge and overcoming.

Sonnets and Haiku are also restrictive in their formats, but an artist can use these to present very powerful art. Surely we can do the same with games. For one, are games really only about challenges and overcoming them? Or is that simply the only type of game we currently recognize, much the same as we may once have only recognized a specific type of painting style or music?

Unfortunately, I haven't read a tremendous amount of other material on play and games - my wishlist on Amazon is long, and you're welcome to assist my studies :-) . Otherwise, I will get to these books eventually.

In the meantime, A Theory of Fun (Art) is a book full of nice ideas on the subject and a clear manifesto to bring more art into our game designs.

Yehuda

Holding Steady

ekted's comment on my blogging post has me thinking. And I just went back to work after a week of being sick. So I don't have much new to say, today.

I posted to topics192 (now up to 36 countries, including Jordan and Egypt), and I'm preparing a post for Gone Gaming.

I promised a review of A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster. I've read the book twice and I'm now going over it a third time, this time with a highlighter.

The first time through I was all set to say "yes this" and "no that", but I got the feeling that I hadn't given the book justice.

The second time through I rewrapped my head around some of the points he was trying to make and found answers to some of my questions that I hadn't noticed the first time.

Now I want to dissect the book and construct a model of what he is saying.

I can't say if the book is "important", as I haven't read many other books in the field; but it's definitely thought provoking. It covers a lot of ideas, many of them quite well. Unfortunately, it's not written academically, so there's no footnotes, references, or bibliography; there are some formless endnotes that explain certain references used in the book.

If anyone has recommendations for books on the same subject, I'm all ears.

Yehuda

"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

Learn to Love Board Games Again:100+ Ways to Rejuvenate the Games You Already Own

New Games ... For Free!

Do you have dusty games in the closet that you grew bored with years ago?

Do your kids beg you to play with them, but you can't stand another round of roll-the-die/pick-a-card, move-your-piece, do-what-the-space-tells-you-to-do, and somebody wins a few hours later?

Do you want to add fun and excitement to your life without spending a dime?

In the last fifteen years, board game designers and dedicated board gamers around the world have learned a thing of two about what really makes board games fun for adults. The principles used in modern board game designs can be used to help you rejuvenate your old board games. You, too, can learn to love board games again.

It's time for you to break out the old board games. But I PROMISE you: you're not going to play them the way you remember playing them! This time, you're going to have fun with them. All it takes is a little preparation: no more than ten minutes for any game.

All you have to do is select a few new rules, and possibly write down some instructions on some index cards, for your old game to become fun again. It's like getting dozens of brand new games, better games ... for free!

Follow along with me; you're in for one hell of a ride.

• The Problem With Older Games
• New Rules for Old Games
  • Starting Player
  • Special Powers
  • Limited Ability Cards
  • Round Rotation
  • Round Order
  • Board
  • Pieces
  • Movement
  • Action Cards
  • Missions
  • Trivia
  • Purchase
  • Conflict
  • Auctions
  • Trading/Negotiation
  • Set Collection
  • Game-End/Scoring
• Examples
• What Next?
  • Books
  • New Games

The Problem With the Old Games

The main problems with those old board games are:

• They're too long.
• You've already read all the cards. It's just the same game each time you play it, and the game never changes.
• There's an unfair advantage for the first or last player.
• There are no real decisions to make - it's mostly dice rolling, or doing what the card says.
• You can be eliminated early in the game - and that's the best outcome for some of those endlessly long games!
• Worse yet, you may have to keep playing for hours with no chance to win.
• There is no interaction between the players; there's nothing to do while others take their turns.

Now I'll show you how to eliminate every one of these problems.

New Rules for Old Games

The following rules are designed to address all of the above problems. They are organized by topic.

Disclaimer: I didn't make most of these rules up, myself! I am borrowing them from a whole bunch of really great games, including games by designers such as Klaus Teuber, Reiner Knizia, Alan Moon, Sid Sackson, Andreas Seyfarth, and so on. For more information on better games, as well as references and additional reading material, please see New Games at the end of this post.

Starting Player

In some games, the player who starts has a decided advantage over the other players. In other games it is the last player who has the advantage. Many games do nothing to address this problem, but solutions are not that difficult. Here are a few options:

• AuctionA simple auction can be used to determine first or last player. Players bid either money or points, depending on the game, and the high bidder pays the amount or loses points in order to gain the advantage of paying first or last. Alternatively, all seats could be up for auction. No matter what the advantage of first player, some price paid will equalize that advantage. For more information on auctions, see Auctions, below.
• Initial FavorsGoing first/last is an advantage, so why not offer other players an equal advantage? For instance, additional advantages could be starting with extra money, a few extra points, starting anywhere you want on the board, a bonus spare card to use when you want, the ability to re-roll one die roll during the game, or something similar. Create a set of cards with advantages, including "going first/last". Make one more than the number of players, and either deal them out before each game or let players pick them. If some get picked more frequently than others, you will know that you have to rebalance them properly.
• Advantage/DisadvantageIn some games, you can balance the starting positions by granting disadvantages to players earlier in the player order, or advantages to players later in the player order. For instance, the starting play may receive less money to start with, with progressively more money being given to each player in turn around the player order. The exact amount of money or points depends on the game. The best measure is to try some reasonable amount and see if all players still only want one position (first or last). Continue to adjust this amount until all positions are equally attractive. In games without money, sometimes points or some other advantage can be used to achieve the same result.

Special Powers

Most games have a decidedly short shelf life for one reason: monotony. Sure, the dice roll differently and the cards get picked in a different order. Wouldn't you love to have a game that is vastly different every time you play it?

There are several easy ways to have the game change each time you play, One way is to create special player powers.

Grab some index cards and write down a special rule-breaking power on each one. Some examples:

• The player gets to roll twice, choosing the best roll each time.
• The player can add or subtract 1 from his or her roll.
• The player starts forward of other players on the board by 5 spaces.
• The player can start from any position on the board - in games with tracks to the end, the player then needs to loop around and return to his or her starting position to win.
• The player gets an additional privilege, or double the privilege, when landing on certain squares.
• The player gets a free card whenever he or she lands on a square of a certain color.
• The player is allowed to choose between two questions, rather than only one.
• The player picks two cards and chooses one when picking a card.
• The player starts with an additional piece, additional money, or additional points.
• Whenever the player successfully performs an activity, such as selling a property, he or she gets an additional 10% bonus in cash.
• Once per round, a player can veto the use of any other player's special ability by losing a point or paying some money to the bank.

As you can see, the possibilities are limitless. Some of these may not apply to each game; in some games, you will have to balance the powers through experimentation.

If you create only ten special power cards for a four player game, then you have created two hundred and ten games out of only one! With only another ten special power cards, you will never play the same game twice.

Before starting the game, distribute special power cards in one of the following ways:

• Randomly
• Player's choiceIf the same cards are picked over and over, this means that the card's powers are not yet balanced.
• AuctionSee Auctions, below.

For a wilder game, allow players to have more than one power. For an even wilder game, have the powers rotate or change when certain events occur, such as when a player lands on a certain colored square, or when a certain number rolls up on the die.

Limited Ability Cards

This is the same as special power cards, but these cards are used only once and then discarded. Limited ability cards can be more powerful than special ability cards, because they are only used once. For example:

• Set the die to whatever number you want.
• Take an additional $100 from the bank.
• Move your marker to another square of the same color.
• Pick an additional action card.

And so on. Create a number of these cards and deal out three to each player before the game begins. Even better, turn three cards face up for every player and either auction them off at the beginning of the game, or let players purchase the cards when they land on certain colored squares - but no more than three times per game.

Round Rotation

We all know how a game turn works: I go, and then you go, and then you go, and so on. Like clockwork. It's simple and it's fair, but it doesn't have to be this way.

A more interesting turn progression can add excitement to a boring game. Now you don't necessarily know if you will be going next after three other players go, or maybe earlier, or later.

How do you add intrigue to turn order, while still keeping it fair and easy?

• Rotating Starting CardThe first player gets a Starting Card. After each player gets a turn, the Starting Card is passed one player to the left. The new starting player then takes a turn, and so on. It's a funky ordering (1234234134124123), but it's simple and fair.
• AuctionAfter each player has a turn, put each place in the turn order up for auction. For more information, see Auctions, below.
• PurchaseGoing out of turn can be a card that can be purchased for a set amount, or an increasing amount each round.
• TradingTurn order can be something that is traded along with other items in the game. For instance, you can give away your next turn to another player for $200.

Round Order

On every player's turn, you do A and then B and then C, and then D. Ho hum. Let's see what we can do about that.

• RolesLet's say that each player's turn in a game consists of something like: 1) roll the dice and move your piece. 2) Pick and play cards. 3) Trade with other players. 4) Buy and sell properties. For a four player game, create four "role cards", one for each of these activities. Using the above Starting Card system, the first player chooses a role and then all players, in order, do the task on the role. Then the next player chooses one of the other roles and all players do that task. And so on, until all players have chosen roles. The roles are then returned to the center, and the Starting Card passes to the left, as usual.
  Using this method, the savvy player can choose actions that, while everyone gets to do them, they timing in choosing them benefits the selector more than any other player.
  For spice, add another role, such as "Take $100 from the bank" or some of the other limited ability cards described above. This way, not every action will necessarily be taken each round. The great game called Puerto Rico uses this system, and adds yet another feature: unchosen rolls get incentives placed on them, such as $50 each time they remain unchosen. On the next round, anyone choosing that roll gets the additional benefit of the money on the role.
• PurchaseYou could separate the activities in a round into pieces, as we did above. Then, each player can do them in any order that he or she wants on their turn. Additionally, you can let a player do actions more than once, by having to pay some increasing amount for each time beyond the first. This amount should be sufficient to prevent players from simply winning in one turn!
• Action PointsSimilar to the above, each player can be given a set of points with which to buy parts of their turn each round. E.g. you get 5 points. Rolling the die and moving costs 2 points, picking a card costs 2 points, and getting $10 from the bank costs 1 point. Players can do whatever they can afford in points each round.
• NegotiationPlayers could be able to sell off parts of their turns to other players in exchange for fixed prices or a negotiated price. For instance, I could sell picking the card (before it is picked!) to another player for $10. Sorry, no refunds for bad cards!
• RandomizedYou could have players pick their round order from a stack of round order cards.

Board

The board comes with the game, but that doesn't mean that you have to stick with it to play the game. You can draw more paths on the board, cross some out, put two boards together to make a larger one, or cover over half of one to make the game shorter.

• A fantastic way to make games like Othello, Checkers, Chess, and so on more interesting is to play them on larger or smaller boards. Instead of 8x8, try 6x6, 10x10, or 12x12. Try 10x8 or 12x8. For Othello or Checkers, you simply need a few extra pieces.For Chess, you can add not only more of the same pieces, but you can also add new pieces that have different abilities, such as pieces that can move three spaces in any direction, swap places with any other piece on the board, be summoned to right next to any other piece, jump three spaces one way, and two any other, and so on.
• The best change you can make is to get rid of any squares that say "Do this!" which offer no decision making to the players, and instead replace them with decision making squares. This could be as simple as "Do this OR do this!", or it could be as complicated as "Before rolling the die, pay any amount of money; you add +1 to the die roll for each $100 that you paid." You can add all sorts of other decision squares: "Trade one of your houses with another player", "Pick a limited action card from the deck and auction it", or "Draw three cards, pick one to put in your hand, and put the rest on top of or underneath the deck in any order".
• For some games, you can create random boards. For instance, say a board has 100 spaces. Take 100 index cards and duplicate the spaces, one on each card. Then lay them down in a random order before each game starts. Each game will play differently.
• Another thing you can do with boards is make a board that changes during the game. For instance, get some construction paper in an assortment of colors and cut out squares equal in size and color to the game's spaces. Now add the following rule: whenever a pawn lands on a red square, it turns orange. From orange it turns yellow, then green, blue, purple, and back to red. Using this mechanic, the game may start off looking the same, but it won't stay that way for long.
• Here's another secret of better board games: game flow. Most games are the same activity, over and over, from the beginning until the end. A better games flows, where the beginning of the game is different from the middle of the game and the end game.It's not that hard to achieve game flow for many otherwise dull games. For instance, let's say that pawns landing on certain spaces at the beginning of the board gain 1 chip. Pawns landing on those spaces in the middle third of the board gain two chips, and pawns landing on those spaces in the final third of the board lose five chips. The winner is the one with the most chips when any pawn crosses the finish line.
  You've now got a game with a defined narrative flow: small but important early gains, large gains in the middle, and then trying to hold on to your winnings before the end. Another good thing about this game is that anyone can win right up until the end. In most games, that guy way out in front is uncatchable. Here, he may be in front, but he may also suddenly lose all of his chips while the ones that are hanging back keep theirs.
  

Pieces

If you come away with nothing else from this post, I want you to come away with this one, the simplest and easiest change to make to any roll and move game: Play with more than one pawn.

By playing with two or more pawns, you take the simplest action - rolling the die - and change it into a decision making skill - which pawn do you want to move? It's that easy.

But let's not stop there.

Why should all of your tokens be the same? A Captain token works the same as any other token, but it has a different effect. For instance, if a Captain lands on a space, the rewards or penalties for that space can be doubled. Or if you have a game where you send another player back to the start by landing on his token, only a Captain token can send another Captain token back to the start. Any other token landing on a Captain token is instead sent back to the start itself!

You can give each player a Captain token as one of their starting tokens, or you can allow players to upgrade their tokens to Captain tokens at any time during the game, on their turn, or after landing on a certain colored space. Upgrading should be expensive, but not too expensive.

Of course, you don't have to stop at only pawns and Captains. You can give each player a veritable army of pieces, each with its own special rankings and abilities. For most games, however, three types is enough, or you risk the game becoming too complex.

If you play with multiple pawns, you can then have them interact in various ways, like little armies. For instance, two pawns together could make a square impassable. Or you could allow a player to move one pawn to a space adjoining another pawn instead of taking his or her regular turn. You could add rules for pawn positioning. For example, if all of your pawns are on a certain color, do something or gain something. Or if your paws surround an opponent's pawns, take something from them or eliminate their pawn. And so on.

Movement

Probably the biggest icon associated with board games is the ubiquitous die roll. You roll the die, you move your piece, you do what the space says (pick a card or answer a question). And probably the biggest cause of boredom associated with board games is this very mechanic.

We've been doing this for hundreds of years. Isn't it about time we bring our games up to the twenty-first century? And by that, I don't mean simulating a die roll using a computer!

• Draw DeckMake a batch of 36 cards, with each of the 36 possible dice roll combinations on them. Shuffle. You may optionally remove up to five cards at random. Each player then picks a card instead of rolling. When the deck is exhausted, reshuffle and repeat. While this method is not much better than dice rolling, it at least ensures a roughly fair distribution of rolls for each player.
  Consider giving each player his or her own deck of die rolls. Each player is still picking randomly, but each player is going to be assured roughly the same total results over the course of the game. That means that the way a player plays is going to have more effect than the numbers that come up on the dice.
• Card HoldingSimilarly, unless you're playing a game where the highest number is always better, give each player a hand of three cards, or a set of three die results to choose from on each turn. A player then picks back up to three cards at the end of his or her turn. This can also be used as a way of limiting turns that can be played out of order, if you are using that; you only pick back up to three when play passes to the next player.
• Draw vs drawA game designer named Bruno Faidutti wrote about the difference between drawing a card and then playing vs playing a card and then drawing. The former adds some more excitement to the game, at the expense of being slightly less strategic. A player may have to think longer on his or her turn if he or she is suddenly presented with a new option. The advantage of the latter is that you have every other player's turn in which to think what you will do next.
• NegotiationPlayers could be able to negotiate movement. As an example, let's say that there is a pool of 30 movement points available to all players for one complete set of rounds. Players can negotiate with each other how many movement points they get, through trading or requesting favors. If deals cannot be made, the points are distributed evenly among the players, perhaps with a penalty.
• Action pointsMovement is made for action points. As an example of how you can use action points for movement, you could give each player ten action points to use on each of his or her turns: one point moves your token one space, three buys you a card from the deck, five buys you $100, and ten points plus $1000 buys you an upgrade to a Captain token. Experiment. Be warned that action points can lead to apparent brain death in some indecisive players (what we call "analysis paralysis".)
• PurchaseYou could allow each space moved to cost a certain amount. For instance: Not moving at all gains you $10, moving one space is free, two spaces is $10, three is $30, four is $60, and so on.
• Push your luckUsing this variant, you still roll dice, but you can roll as many times as you want before moving your piece. You can stop whenever you want and move the total of all dice rolled. However, if you roll a 1, you lose your entire turn (or at least your entire movement) and cannot move at all.

Action Cards

This is just another word for limited activity cards. These may be familiar to you from Monopoly, where landing on a certain space may give you a Chance or Community card.

The difference between those cards and these cards is that Action cards offer you choices. Making the better choice then becomes a learning experience.

You can either replace the action cards that you already have in your game with new ones, or you can add new action cards to otherwise blank squares on the board.

If someone lands on the space, or buys the card, or whatever, you can either give the card to the player, offer the player a choice of one card from three, or turn up one card for each player in the game (or each player minus or plus one) and auction off the cards. See Auctions, below.

Using the "turn up one for each player" method, you can also have "bad" cards. Each player then has to join the auction in order not to get a card.

Players can "draft" the cards: Turn over twice as many cards as the number of players. The player whose turn it is takes the first card, the player on his left the second, and so on until reaching the player on his right. Then reverse the direction. Using this method (called Rochester draft), the current player gets the first and last card.

Example action cards:

• Choose one: take $100, move your pawn three spaces in any direction, or roll two dice on your next move.
• Pick an item out of play and auction it off. If you win the auction you pay the bank. If anyone else wins, they pay you.
• Draw three negative cards and hand them out to three different players any way you choose.
• Lay a bridge down anywhere on the board. This bridge connects to spaces on the track with a shortcut and can be used by any player who lands on one of the spaces.

The possibilities are endless, of course. Just ensure that all cards allow for choices to be made, and that most cards are about equal in overall value.

Missions

Similar to action cards, missions are a staple in certain types of games, such as war games and train games.

Create missions on cards like you create action cards. Example missions: occupy the following three spaces on the board, have one of your pawns in each area, collect three cards of a certain type, land on an opponent's Captain piece, etc.

Each mission card gives a reward for completion, such as points towards winning, money, a special bonus item, or some such. You can have easier and harder mission cards with worse and better rewards.

Mission cards can be made available to the players in a number of ways:

• Flipped up at the beginning of the game. The first player to complete a mission takes the card.
• Two or three dealt randomly to each player at the start of the game. Mission cards can be kept open or closed. You may be dealt a new one every time you complete a mission.
• You could allow players to buy mission cards for a price, or after a certain event.
• Mission cards can be auctioned off at certain times during the game. See Auctions for more information.

Trivia

If you already basically know all of the cards in a trivia game, you can still play the game by adopting the mechanics of the game of Balderdash, itself adopted from the old game of Dictionary.

Each time you read a question, have each other player write what they think is the right answer OR any answer that they think might fool other players into thinking is the right answer on a piece of paper. You write the correct answer on a piece of paper. Collect and mix up the answers, and then read them aloud. Have each player pick which he or she thinks is the right answer.

Each player gets a "point" if they wrote the right answer, or a "point" if someone picks their answer if it was wrong. Play to a certain number of points.

For games where you've seen all the questions, you may find it suddenly hard to remember the right answer. Sure, if no one tries to confuse you, you can remember a certain obscure date. But if someone writes August 8 and the real answer is August 9, you may get confused. And many of the answers are likely to be hilariously wrong.

Purchase

In any simple game of roll and move, you can make the game more interesting by allowing players to purchase things that they generally get automatically. For instance, if a space says that you get a card, you can give each player money at the beginning of the game and assign point values to each card.

Players then have a limited amount of times during the game that they are allowed to get cards, and must choose when to get them. Alternatively, you can have a constant pool of flipped up cards, and allow a player to buy any face up card for it's price when they would normally get a card. This gives even more decision opportunities.

As mentioned elsewhere, you can also offer face up cards for auctioning or drafting.

You can flip up a number of cards and then negotiate with other players as to who gets what. You can set a time limit, so that if players don't agree within one or two minutes, no one gets any cards. Or you can give out the cards with a penalty if players can't agree.

You can also have one player divide a number of cards into piles, and then have another player choose which pile he or she gets and which one he or she leaves for the dividing player.

Conflict

If your game has conflicts, such as the ability to knock one player back by landing on his or her space, you can offer other choices to the players.

A player may be able to buy insurance from the bank; one insurance card is good for avoiding one setback. Actually, you can offer insurance in almost any game where something bad can happen to a player.

Alternately, you may be able to buy enhancing strength points. When conflict occurs, each player decides how many points to add to the conflict, and the higher value wins. You can have the attacking player decide first, and then the defending player, or you can have both sides choose secretly. You can also opt to allow uninvolved players to toss strength onto either side of the battle.

You may be able to negotiate truces with other players, where your pieces won't send his or hers back for a certain number of turns. You have to decide before the game starts whether these type of deals are enforceable!

Auctions

I've mentioned auctions many times in this post, because auctions are a great way of keeping all players involved at all times. What you may not know is that there are many types of auctions that you can use in your games. Try them each out until you find one that you like, or use a different type each time you play.

• Blind BiddingThis covers a whole genre of different types of auctions, but the essential idea is that every player at the table takes a certain amount of money, or writes down a certain number of points, and then all players reveal the bids at once.
• CircleThis is a traditional circle auction, each player in turn either upping the bid or passing.
  Again, like blind bidding, you can decide that only the top bidder pays. A very nasty variant here is that the top two bidders both pay but only the top bidder gets anything.
  In this version, you can give the first player to withdraw from the bidding either a bonus or a penalty.
• FreeformA traditional freeform auction, where each player shouts at any time, and someone says "Going once, going twice, sold!"
• ChineseI don't know where the name comes from, but in this variant, each player secretly assigns any amount of money or points to any or as many items as they want. Each item is then revealed, and the person who paid the most for that item wins it. Or, each point or dollar spent on an item gives you an additional chance of winning the item, which is determined by drawing from a hat, but you may end up with nothing if you have bad luck.
• Combined biddingIn some cases it may make sense for players to be able to combine bids. For instance, if there is a group of items being auctioned, two or more players can combine their bids, splitting the results if they win.
• Auction tokensYou can give each player a set of auction tokens with which to bid, each token having a different value. If a bid is successful, the bidder loses the token. That leaves the other players better chances of winning future auctions.
• NegativeYou can have people bid on not acquiring a bad item. Or, you can set the price of an item, and lower it one step at a time until someone is willing to buy it.
• One per playerYou can have one item available for each player. Each player will get one item, the highest bidder picking the first item, and the lowest getting whatever is left over.
• FutureYou can have the results of one auction influence future auctions. For instance, the second highest bidder may be given a bonus to his bid for the next auction. Or the lowest bidder.
• Divide and ChooseWhile not exactly an auction, you can have one player divide items into separate piles, and then have the other players choose which piles that want. The divider gets the last unchosen pile.

Of course, there are many other variations of auctions. Feel free to pick the one you like best, or have the auction style vary randomly each time an auction is called for.

After the bidding, there are many ways to determine what happens next:

• The top bidder pays the bid and all others keep theirs.
• The top two bidders lose their money, but only the top bidder gets anything.
• All players lose their money. If players were bidding on multiple items, the top bidder gets first choice, and so on.
• Same as above, but the bottom bidding player gets his or her money back. You can also let anyone who bids 0 get nothing but receive something small as a compensation.
• Or, lowest bid could get nothing at all.
• And so on.

You also have to decide where the money goes. If it's a bank auction, the money probably goes to the bank, or the player whose turn it is (unless the player whose turn it is won the auction, in which case the money goes to the bank). If it is a player's item up for auction, the money probably goes to the player. Another possibility is for the money to be split among all the other players.

Trading/Negotiation

Trading and negotiation are very much like auctions, only more than money or points are being exchanged for one or more items, and the parties are not required to accept the highest offer. Instead, multiple items, money, or points can be traded for multiple items, money or points. Basically, anything the traders can agree to within the bounds of the trading rules.

You will want to determine before the game starts what things can be traded and what cannot be traded. For instance, can houses be traded? Turns? Future promises of assistance? For future items, can players renege on their promises, or are they bound to keep them?

A good practice is to limit promises to only a single game round, which is much easier to remember. For players with sensitive temperaments, you may also want to exclude promises and behavior, and limit all trading to only physical items that can be transferred between player instantaneously.

Can non-involved players also take part, or is trading only between two participants? Can you trade only on your turn?

You will want to set time limits for any trading session, as the open nature of trading can tend to drag a game out.

Set Collection

You already know set collection from Monopoly, where you have to get a set of two or three properties from the same group. You can add this feature to most games.

For instance, you can keep track of how often a certain number is rolled or card is picked, and give a special bonus for the third or fourth time.

Normally cards are simply picked and then played. If you allow players to pick cards and hold them for later use, you can then give bonuses for playing multiple cards of the same type at once. For instance, if the card says "Collect $20", you can have two cards of that type played at once collect $50. Now a player has to decide whether to play the card now, because he or she needs the money now, or hold the card for a potential greater reward.

The same can apply to most any type of item in a game.

Game-End/Scoring

So many games are just too long. And I admit, adding new features like the ones above could potentially make them even longer.

Furthermore, most games are pretty one dimensional. You try to get to the end of the board. Or you try to get the most points. That doesn't leave many avenues for exploring different strategies.

Here are some ideas to help solve these problems. We'll start with how the game ends.

• You can end the game after a certain number of rounds. E.g. twenty times around the table, and that's it. Whoever has the most points or money at the end wins.
• You can add a card (or mark a card) as the game's end. At the beginning of the game, mix the deck and then separate it into two parts. Mix the game ending card into one half of the deck, and then place that half underneath the other half. Now the game will end somewhere near the bottom of the deck, but the exact time will be a surprise.
• You can have the game instantly end on some event, such as the third time a 12 is rolled on the dice, or as soon as someone lands on a green square from a blue square.
• I don't recommend limiting the game to a specific time (such as one hour) as that may encourage people to drag the game out on their turns if they are winning.

Alternate ways to score games:

• First of all, you can add additional scoring mechanisms to the traditional one used in the game. For instance, you could say that holding a certain card at the end of the game is also worth ten points or ten dollars. Or having your pieces on certain squares.Or you could keep track of certain events during the game. For instance, every time you land on an opponent's piece is worth five points; on their Captain is worth ten points. At the end of the game, add these points to your total.
• You may have to collect various different things during the game, and your final score is whatever you have the least of. For instance, if you have 2 blue coins, 4 red coins, 5 green coins, and 7 yellow coins, your score is 2. That keeps you striving for balanced items as the game continues.
• Another interesting twist is the required game token. You can have any score you want, but you can't win the game at all unless you have also fulfilled some other condition, such as having acquired a certain type of card, moved your pieces onto a certain square, or gained one of each type of favor. It is best not to use something that relies too much on memory, unless you will be writing things down.
• You can also simply change the scoring altogether. Instead of scoring based on who reaches the end first, you can score based on what squares you landed on on the way, for instance: 1 point for each square of a different color, but each additional square of the same color is an additional 2, 3, 4, etc points. Or vice versa, giving bonus points for additional colors, and only one point no matter how many squares of one color that you land on.

Examples

Here are some examples to get you started:

• Candy Land"Not another game of Candy Land," you may think to yourself, as your daughter pulls out the candy-coated box yet again. If you've played this game one too many times with your child, he or she is ready to take it up a step. It should be just a little challenging, but still not too hard for a young person.
  Basic: First of all, each player gets two pawns, and must decide which pawn to move each turn. Secondly, each player has three cards face up in front of him or her. On his or her turn, a player decides which card to use, moves one of his or her pawns, and then draws another card. The game is now just a little more bearable.
  Intermediate: After twenty games of that, you can add one more rule: a player can toss out two cards of the same color to move to the next square of any color, but they only draw back one card. So you can only do it twice during a game, and your hand loses flexibility.
• ChessYou don't mind your grandson wanting to play Chess with you, but it's really not a challenge for you. How do you keep from being bored?
  Basic: First you make the board 10x8. You get two additional pawns, and your grandson gets two pawns and two Footmen, each of whom can move either two spaces forward or three spaces sideways. If a footman reaches the other side of the board, it can promote to a Rook. Your grandson is still learning the basics of strategy and tactics, and now you have a new set of interesting problems to handle.
  Intermediate:Your grandson gets a special power: he can move two pieces, one after another, so long as neither takes off your King. You also gain a special power: you win if you take off his King OR Queen.
• Chutes and Ladders.Whoopee, another roll-and-move game with no decisions to make. Let's spice this one up.
  Basic: Each player gets a special power: one person picks from the deck of special powers and gets: "Each time you land on a multiple of nine, you gain an additional die to roll on each of your following turns. You choose which die to use when moving." Another player's power is "If you land at the bottom of a slide, you may climb two levels and jump off on either side."
  Intermediate: That's still a bit of a bore, so add this rule: you can move either forward of backwards on your turn. You get 5 points for landing on a square that is a multiple of five, and twenty points for ending the game by landing on the last square. The game is over in any case after exactly thirty turns by both players, unless someone ends it by landing on the last square. Add up your points at the end to see who wins.
  Advanced: 1) Each player has three pawns, a Captain and two soldiers. 2) In the upper half of the board (51-100), a player can land on another player's piece. A pawn landing on a pawn gives 5 points, and knocks the attacked pawn straight down two levels. A pawn landing on a Captain, or a Captain landing on a pawn gives the Captain 5 points and knocks the pawn straight down 4 spaces. A Captain landing on a Captain gives 10 points and knocks the Captain straight down 2 levels. Follow whatever rules are involved on the space on which the knocked down piece lands. 3) Whenever a piece lands on a space, cover it with a white piece of paper. If a piece lands on a space with a white piece of paper, it gets a free move, and the white piece of paper becomes a black piece of paper. Skip spaces with black pieces of paper when counting for normal movement. If a piece gets knocked down and falls on a space with a black piece of paper, it continues falling another level. If this results on it falling off the end of the board, the pieces is eliminated from the game. In this variant, you don't have to have a turn limit, because the game will eventually end when the spaces are all covered with black paper.
• Checkers (Draughts)This is an old standby, maybe a bit boring.
  Basic:Start by trying the game on a 12x12 board, and two kings in your back row.
  Intermediate: Each player has a secret mission to control two squares in the opponent's second row. You win the game in either the normal method or by accomplishing your secret mission.
• Sorry!This pick-and-move game provides for few choices during the game, but is a great springboard for some deeper fun.
  Basic: each player holds a hand of three cards. On the player's turn, he or she picks a card and then plays one.
  Advanced: Auction off starting positions using points. Each player has four pieces: a spider, a goat, a swan, and a dog. The spider leaves a web marker on any space from which he moves. Any piece other than a spider that lands on a web marker is stuck; instead of taking your turn, you may remove a web marker from a piece by playing any card. The goat knocks a piece back whenever he overtakes any other piece, even if it doesn't land on your space. The swan cannot be blocked, and if you land on him, he bats you back ten spaces. The dog moves to any other one of your other pieces on the board if you play a five and choose to move him.
  If you land on a colored square, a mission card is put up for auction (players bid the number of turns they are willing to give up for it). It is a simple round auction, where only the winner pays. The mission cards require the player to arrange their pieces into various pattern on the board. Completing a mission gives you a free move as well as four points. Each piece you get "home" gives you five points. The winner is the player with the most points when someone gets all of his or her pieces home, or by the end of the fortieth round, whichever comes first.
  

You get the idea, I hope. If you need some suggestions for a specific game, just email me.

What's Next?

I hope you learn from this article that there's a lot more out there in board gaming than you may remember.

Board games still have a lot of things going for them: they are social, they are intelligent, they require patience, they are cheap, they are portable, they don't need electricity, and they teach good skills. They can also be a whole lot of fun, if you're willing to make the leap I did into the modern world of board games.

Very few of the above ideas are wholly mine, most come from some great games and gamers around the world who are still creating board games. You probably haven't heard of them, because you thought people only play video games now. But there are more than ten million people who can prove you were wrong!

New Games

Some of the games whose mechanics I included above include: Puerto Rico by Andreas Seyfarth, Tigris and Euphrates, Ra, and Modern Art, by Dr Reiner Knizia, Tikal by Dr Wolfgang Kramer, Settlers of Catan by Klaus Teuber, Can't Stop by Sid Sackson, San Marco by Alan Moon and Aaron Weissblum, and many more.

These games are available at local hobby game stores around the world, or online at places such as Funagain Games or Time Well Spent.

You can find out more about these games, and many, many others, at Board Game Geek, the Internet's largest site for board game information.

Books

Great minds think alike. A wonderful book with similar ideas about renewing old board games is New Rules for Classic Games by R. Wayne Schmittberger.

Other great books include a series of books by America's godfather of game design, Sid Sackson. Click to find his books A Gamut of Games, Beyond Solitaire, and many others.

Enjoy,
Yehuda