3D Nine Men's Morris

The great game inventor Robert Abbott (Eleusis, Ultima, Epaminodas) sent along some very kind words about State of Play, as well as this illustration from a 3D Nine Men's Morris set he acquired years ago.

Click to view full size.

3D board games can be notoriously unsatisfying, but Bob says this one not only works; it's actually fun. I can see that from the illustration, which shows the traditional mills expanded into a series of nested wire-frame boxes. This is a clever design, with a logical application of dimensionality to an abstract board game. 

Not every classic game survives this kind of dimensional experimentation. 3D Chess, for instance, is not a particularly logical use of dimensionality. Adding two more planes of movement upsets the delicate balance of strategic planning and tactical maneuver that defines chess. Rather than adding complexity, it merely muddies the waters. If chess is a game of military precision, then 3D chess is more akin to a soccer scrum. 

Wayne Schmittberger, the editor-in-chief of Games Magazine, tried to solve the problems inherent in 3D chess by modifying the componants into Parallel Worlds Chess. Instead of trying to approximate chess in three dimensions, Parallel Worlds emphasizes the chaotic elements to create a deliberately crazy game. For example, every piece on the second level can move like a Queen, but they can't capture or promote. The result is entertaining, which is more than you can say for Tri-D Chess.

COLONIAL GAMING: Other Board Games

Ben Franklin's Chess Set

Colonial Americans knew most of the ancient board games familiar to us today. Some were more popular than others due to various factors. To appeal to Colonials, games had to be easy to play and fairly sociable. They needed to play quickly so that many rounds could be squeezed into a single evening. This was almost certainly related to gambling, since games that played quickly allowed for faster turn-over and more chance to wager, even if it was just for miniscule pots. Finally, gamers of the 18th century preferred chance over strategy. Their passion for cards and dice was very high, while games that lacked this random element tended to bore them.

Chess 
Chess, for instance, was considered exceptionally boring. Charles Cotton, author of The Complete Gamester (1674) found it tedious and “more difficult to be understood than any other game whatever.”

Due to its length and reliance on skill rather than chance, it also makes a very poor gambling game, which certainly added to its unpopularity. There were surely a number of chess sets in America in the 18th century, but oddly enough only a few survived, including two owned by Thomas Jefferson and one by Ben Franklin.

Franklin almost certainly was the man who brought Chess to America. He was playing by 1733, and wrote an important essay on the game. His efforts to popularize it didn’t spread far beyond members of the Franklin's American Philosophical Society, however.


Checkers (Draughts) 
Although it was also known to the colonists, Checkers was as unpopular as Chess. The rules in use would have been similar to English Draughts. These are the same rules we use today in Checkers, rather than the rules for Spanish or French Draughts, or other variations.

Whatever they called it, it wasn’t nearly as popular as it was to become later.

The game does show up in Virginia court records, however. In 1679, Mr. John Edwards and a servant were arrested and put before the grand jury because they played Checkers on a Sunday.


Backgammon 
Backgammon had a bit of a following in the Colonies for a simple reason: it used dice, which promised chance, which meant it was a good game for betting. Many Backgammon tables appear in Colonial inventories, and Backgammon games (and monetary losses) are mentioned in many diaries of the period. Thomas Jefferson played, and would win or lose several shillings in a session.

In Colonial Virginians at Play, Jane Carson describes the variants used at the time:

In the French versions, tric-trac or tick-trac, all the men started from the ace-point and penalties were different. Sice-ace was a modification for five players, each using six men. In dubblets the fifteen men used were placed differently on the tables, and in ketch-dolt all the men were piled in the center of the board. 

Dominos
Although very popular in France, Dominos didn’t make any impression in America until the 19th century. In 1801, it was still considered a “childish sport” by one writer of the time, who also noted that it “could have nothing but the novelty to recommend it to the notice of grown person in this country.”

COLONIAL GAMING: The Game of Goose

One of the most popular boardgames in Colonial Amerca was The Royall & Pleasant Game of Y Goose.” Commonly known as “The Game of Goose,” it uses a custom board depicting a circular track divided into 63 spaces. Two or more people roll dice and move markers along the track in a race to the finish. If they hit space illustrated with a goose, they move the same number of spaces again. Landing on illustrations, such as a maze, prison, or death, sends a player backwards to a certain space.

And, yes, I basically just described Candyland.

This was not a kid’s game, however. It was played and enjoyed adults, and was a very popular gambling game. As I’ve written in earlier entries in this series, most Colonials outside of certain regions in New England were compulsive gamblers, much like their British cousins. It would probably shock modern Americans to know just how common and widespread gambling was in the original colonies. George Washington himself lost large sums at the Loo table.

Just imagine people sitting down after an evening meal to hustle games of Candyland for wagers equal to hundreds of dollars in today’s money, and you can get idea of what The Game of Goose was like in 18th century American.

Origins
The Game of Goose first enters the scene during the reign of Francesco de Medici in Florence, 1574-1587. Francesco sent a copy to the court of Spain’s King Philip II, where its rapid pace and sudden changes of fortune made it a huge success. On June 16th, 1597, the game was entered in the Register of the Stationer’s Hall in London as “the newe and most pleasant game of the Goose.”

The first Goose boards were a cardboard base with a drawn or painted spiral course. The squares were illustrated with various ornaments, such as dice, an inn, a bridge, a maze, and multiple geese.

After the game caught on in England during the 17th century, boards became increasingly more elaborate. The game track was seen as a progression through life itself, with some boards depicting the first space as an infant and the last as a man entering the gates of heaven at square 63. Each space in between showed the baby aging through different stages, such as the Thoughtless Boy, the Negligent Boy, the Youth, the Indolent Youth, the Obstinate Youth, and so on.

Some believe the 63 squares are meant to represent the 63 years of the average lifespan at the time. It’s a nice idea, but the average lifespan in 16th century Italy—when the game was invented—was about 47 years.

Goose was also an early example of theming. Years before Spongebob Monopoly and Shrek Concentration, there were versions of Goose based upon the news of the day, such as the French Revolution, the Dreyfus Affair, political campaigns, romantic entanglements of the upper classes, and even World War I.

Parents adapted the game for children’s use as teaching tool. There were versions that illustrated various travels in order to teach geography, virtues and vices, the stages of life, Aesop’s Fables, and the entire plot of Don Quixote. Yes, 300 years before Harry Potter Clue there was Don Quixote Goose. The various traps and bonuses could be tied to any kind of failure/advancement, wrong/right theme.

By 1819, Lord Byron would reference the game in his epic poem, Don Juan: 

For good society is but a game,

'The royal game of Goose,' as I may say, 

Where every body has some separate aim,

An end to answer, or a plan to lay

Like other British amusements, the game migrated to American during the Colonial period, and was still very popular as the Colonies headed towards Revolution. By 1895, the University of Pennsylvania listed 146 different editions in its collection, some of them from China and Japan.

Dietz Press produces a handsome reproduction print of a typical Colonial Goose board. It sells for abut $8, but is only available in 2 stores at Williamsburg itself, or through their Teaching Resources catalog for $9.50

Sources: Jane Carson, Colonial Virginians at Play. Frederic V. Grunfeld, Games of the World. H. Peter Aleff, recoveredhistory.com.

App O' The Mornin': Tafl Review

Yesterday I continued the Colonial Gaming series with a look at Fox & Geese. There’s no version of Fox & Geese in the app store, but I did find a compilation of Tafl games, which are closely related.

Simply called Tafl, this app is the work of Machine Codex, which has done a good job at translating these games to mobile formats. The features are different for iPhone/Touch and iPad. The version I tested on my Touch includes Brandubh, Fidchell, Ard Ri and Tablut, while the iPad version adds Tawlbwrdd, Hnefatafl and Alea Evangelii as well.

The visuals are appealing, and the touch inputs are as simple as you can get. You just touch a checker and move it. It works perfectly well.

The four games are all variations on the classic Tafl gameplay, in which each side has a different number of pieces and different victory conditions. The first three are played on a 7x7 checker board, which creates an odd rank and file at the center of the board. This is where the “king” player usually begins. Tablut is played on a 9x9 board. The white side is the defender, while the black is the attacker.

Brandubh is a an Irish form of the game, and the name means “raven black.” This may be a reference to the color of one side, to a bit of lore suggesting that the game is about ravens attacking a king, or to something else entirely. No one really has any idea, since references are limited to a couple ancient poems and even the reconstruction of the game is hypothetical.

In Brandubh, the white player has four regular pieces and a special king piece called the “branan” (or “chief”). The black player has eight regular pieces. Both sides may move along the rank and file any number of spaces, like a rook in chess. Any piece surrounded on either side is captured and removed. The goal of the white player is to get the king from his starting place at the center of the board (the “Throne”) to one of the four corners, or “Keeps.” The goal of the black player is to prevent this.

Fidchell is a similar game with sketchy origins, and any modern version is pure guesswork. The version in the Tafl app simply doubles the number of checkers in play: eight white plus a white kind, and 16 black, although it’s still played on a 7x7 board.

Ard Ri is Fidchell played with a different configuration. In place of the cruciform layout of Brandubh and Fidchell, it groups the nine white checkers in a block at the center.

Tablut is the best known version, and for a very cool reason. Biologist Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, discovered people still playing the game in 1732 during an expedition to a remote area of the Laplands. They used boards made of reindeer hides, featuring 9x9 grids. Since he didn’t speak the language, Linnaeus sussed out the rules by observation, referring to the white pieces as Sweeds and the dark as Muscovites. The version in the app is played on a 9x9 board with 9 white versus 16 black.

At $3, the app might seem a little high for an abstract strategy game, but it’s a hybrid iPhone/iPad version with a good AI, and is the only worthwhile electronic version of these games that I’ve ever played.

COLONIAL GAMING: Fox and Geese

Fox & Geese is another ancient game that followed a winding road to the New World. It’s usually classed as a “Tafl” game, which is a category of games in which the sides are unevenly matched. The games derive their name from a cluster of Icelandic games related to Hnefatafl, but in fact “tafl” just means “board” or “table.” It’s a word found in various Germanic languages, and is often used as a suffix in games as diverse as Halatafl (an early version of Backgammon) and Skáktafl (a kind of Chess).

Over the years, “Tafl” just came to mean any game where one side outnumbers another, with the weaker side having different movement rules or victory conditions. Technically, they're called "asymmetrical abstract strategy games." These are classed as “hunt” games, and usually feature some kind of force (fox, wolf, king) trying to elude or eliminate a larger force (geese, hare, soldiers). The first reference appears in the Icelandic Sagas around 1300 AD, but the games are no doubt older than this. The earliest English reference to a game like Fox & Geese comes from the household inventory of King Edward IV (1461-1470), where his account books list an order for “two foxis and 26 hounds in silver overgilt.” It was not unusual for the "geese" to be called "hounds." (There's also a game called Fox & Hounds, but that's a different beast.)

Although there’s no written or archeological record for either the origin of Tafl games or their migration to England, we can always speculate. The Viking raids on Britain ended, oddly enough, in the very busy year of 1066, when the Norsemen were defeated at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Once the Norse were shoved out the back door, the Normans came in the front door, and stuck around a little while. (Like, forever.) Since the Normans were descended from the Norse, we can speculate that Tafl games might have found their way to Britain through either source. Either way, it’s wholly possible that Halatafl, the game most like Fox & Geese, might have been in Britain as early as the 11th century.

Some of my own ancestors (the de Suttons) arrived with the Normans, and their descendants found their way to American soil in the 17th century. This is how folk culture migrates. The Norse conquer Northern France, intermarry, and create lots of little Normans. The Normans conquer Britain. The English colonize America. The Americans drive off the English. Along the way, they carry their games with them to pass the time, transmitting them across the space of a thousand years to the point where I buy a small portable set in a gift shop in Williamsburg and play the game in a Colonial tavern with my kids while waiting for our meals to arrive. Cultural migration and transmission is not particularly mysterious, but it is fascinating.

In any case, by the 18th century we find Fox & Geese well and truly entrenched among the colonials. It was a popular board game, although one generally favored by children rather than adults.

Colonial children also used their Fox & Geese boards to play Solitaire, a jumping game in which a marble is placed on every space save one. The goal is to eliminate as many marbles as possible by hopping. If you've ever eaten in a Cracker Barrel, you've probably played a version using golf tees on a triangular piece of wood.

How to Play
The rules of Fox & Geese evolved over the centuries, but the version played in Colonial America was probably the 1 fox, 13 geese version, which is the one most popular today. It’s played on a cruciform board with 33 spaces. Most boards use marbles for pieces and an indented playing surface to keep them from rolling all over the place. The geese are arranged on one side of the board, with no gaps between the pices. The fox is place near the middle. It can also be played using 17 geese.

The player controlling the geese needs to surround the fox so that he can no longer move. This is commonly done by cornering him and surrounding him on all sides. The player controlling the fox has to avoid being cornered long enough to reduce the number of geese to the point where cornering is no longer possible.

To accomplish this, each side has different movement rules.

The fox can move one space in any direction. If he is capable of jumping over a goose, that goose is “killed” and removed from the board. He may also double-jump, capturing two or more geese in a sequence of jumps, just like checkers. There are no forced jumps.

The geese, on the other hand, may only move forward or to the side. They may not move backwards. They also cannot capture. (After all, they’re geese. Their much feared Honking and Nipping Attacks really don’t bother a fox all that much.) Their strategy is to herd the fox into a corner before he can escape or jump.

Most commentators consider the goose to be the favored side, with the fox unable to win if played correctly.

Halatafl board discovered in Viking ruins, Ballinderry, Ireland

App O' The Mornin': Mancala Review

I'm surprised I haven't covered this one yet, since it's been on my iTouch from the very beginning. It's just a good game to have on your device for those odd moments when you want a quick abstract strategy game. You can blast through a round in a couple of minutes (tops), yet the game has enough depth to reward sound strategy.

Flipside's Mancala FS5 features the most popular version of Mancala, called Wari. (Mancala is a family of games, not a single game.) Although the oldest extant examples of Mancala-style games only date to the 7th century, I have no doubt at all that it's far older. Based on its continued ubiquity, in various forms, among contemporary primitive tribes, it seems likely that Mancala and similar "capture" games are one of the earliest stages in the development of the boardgame. Since these games were usually carved in the dirt and played with pebbles, ancient examples are simply less likely to have survived.

The game itself remains quite entertaining. There are 6 small depressions on each side (called "houses") and one large depression at either end (called "stores"). There are a fixed number of pips in two colors: enough to fill 6 houses per side with 3, 4, 5, or 6 pips each. (Four is the standard, but Mancala FS5 allows variable setups ranging from 3 - 6.) Players alternate "seeding" by taking all the pips in one cup and counting them out to the right, one pip per cup, including the stores. Pips that land in the stores are considered captured. If the last pip of your turn is seeded in an empty house, you capture all of the pips opposite that house. The goal is to capture the most pips. The game has some subtle strategies for seeding and capture, and repeated play reveals more depth than may be apparent at first.

Flipside's version of the game is my favorite, but it's not with problems. I like the board, mechanics, and feature set. There are variable setups, and strong 2-player support via pass-and-play, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, online automatic matchmaking, and AIM. I don't do much of the multiplayer, and I certainly don't pay any attention to the rating system, but I understand that rated play has problems with scoring. These problems are mostly attributed to a scoring system which fails to account for twits who bail out of games they are about to lose. These incomplete games leave the remaining player forced to forfeit, which negatively impacts their rating.

The free version is also well-nigh crippled by an in-game advertising system which causes 5-10 second delays between games. Even the $2 version includes some ads, albeit not as aggressively. (No paid app should ever include ads. Period.)

These failings are unfortunate, since the design of the game is very good, and Mancala is an abstract strategy game that is worthy of rediscovery by western gamers.

App O' The Mornin': Mills and More

As part of my ongoing series on Colonial Gaming, I covered Nine Men's Morris over here. It's one of the classic abstract strategy games, with ancient roots and some intriguing elements of strategy.

There are several versions of Morris (aka Mills and Merrills) in the App Store, but I'm perfectly happy with Mills and More, from Antitalent Game Studio. It has simple touch controls for placing and moving markers, and clean, appealing graphics, with markers that look like Go pieces.

The Lite version includes the basic Nine Men's Morris in 1 and 2-player modes, with three levels of articifical intelligence and Bluetooth support.

The registered version adds Three Men's Morris and Six Men's Morris, and the developer is promising Twelve Man's Morris in a future update. The "flying" run can be toggled on or off.

Give the Lite version a try. If you like abstract strategy games, you might find this an appealing alternative.

Colonial Gaming: Nine Men’s Morris

Morris games are among the oldest known to man. Although claims for the most ancient examples are still subject to debate, there is little question that some form of the game existed at least as far back as ancient Roman. Some have dated it even further based on carvings found in Egypt dating to to 1400BC, but the carvings themselves are difficult to date with precision.

A Bronze Age board was discovered in Ireland, possibly brought by the Greek or Phoenician traders. Ovid may have mentioned some form of the game in his Art of Love (2 AD), a board was found with a Viking king buried around 900AD, and Shakespeare mentions the game in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

So: very old.

Morris is also known as Mills and Merrills, and there are a variety of similar games that share the name. All of them have a few things in common. They are played with pips, marbles, or checkers on a board. That board is comprised of crossing lines, with the markers moving from one intersection to the next. When a player aligns three of his pieces in a row, he may remove another player’s piece. The goal is to reduce the opponent to two pieces. The most common morris boards feature nested squares, with their corners and centers joined by lines.

Nine Men’s Morris is considered the standard version the game, and would have been the one played by Colonial Americans. Children may have drawn rough make-shift board on the ground and played with rocks, or draw them in chalk on a board, but dedicated wooden Morris boards, with checkers or marbles for pieces, were probably common.

Blue moves a marble to create a Mill, which allows him to remove 1 red piece

Players alternate placing their 9 markers on the board. There are 24 junctions on a Morris board and only 18 markers, leaving some junction empty. After markers are played, players take turns moving one a time to any free, adjoining space. The goal is to get 3 in a row, thus forming a “mill.” If a player forms a mill, he can remove a player’s piece. When a player is reduced to 3 pieces, she can “fly” to any place on the board, but when only 2 are left, the game is over.

There is a modest element of strategy in Morris that requires careful observation. Initial placement is key, as you try to set up future moves while also blocking your opponent. Placing a marker so that it can move repeatedly in and out of a move is the most common strategy, and is fairly infuriating for the person at the wrong end of the move. The “flying” rules creates an intriguing strategic shift, and some weakened may just bide their time until reduce to 3 markers, and then fly into position and potentially win the game.

Morris boards are a common item in Colonial Williamsburg, and the one illustrating this article is fine example. It only costs $11, but is made of solid, durable wood. Marbles are store inside the board using plastic plugs, making the entire game quite portable.

App O' The Mornin': Ingenious

I could write about only Reiner Knizia Apps for two weeks and still not cover them all.  The man isn't just a prolific designer, but his games and uniquely well-suited to the App format.

Among Knizia’s dominoes variants, Ingenious is probably the most famous. Tiles are comprised of two conjoined hexagons, with each bearing one of 6 colored symbols. Players earn points by laying tiles on an Agon board to create lines of matching colors. The unusual scoring mechanism means that “highest lowest score” wins. Thus, the person with the highest score for their weakest color is the victor.

For instance, if your lowest scoring color is green with 5 points, and someone else has a lowest scoring color of red for 6 points, then they win. This creates unusual strategies for tile placement and even blocking.

The iPhone/Touch version is a straightforward and effective port of the original game, with an AI that should give even seasoned players a fine challenge. A solitaire variant is also included, as you compete against yourself for highest score.

App O' The Mornin': SmartGo

The greatest challenge in computer AI programming is not Chess, but Go. It is a game that presents a truly staggering level of complexity. Chess is structured, with a finite number of possible moves and only 64 squares. If a computer can crunch enough of those numbers quickly enough, then it can defeat a master.

Chess masters are routinely defeat by computers, but this never happens with Go masters. There are 361 intersections on a Go board. Play can easily stretch for a couple hundred moves. (The longest game in history had over 400 moves.) Every move affects every subsequent move. Unlike Chess, Go has only a few rules governing stone placement. This results in a staggering number of potential board states, with each new move presenting ever more complex situations.

Obviously, this makes Go a tough game to program, but that doesn’t keep people from trying. Go is heavily represented in the app store, mostly by inferior versions or simple mock-Go variants.

SmartGo, on the other hand, is an old and respected brand that has migrated through multiple platforms, and now arrives as an App in several different flavors. SmartGo 9x9 ($1) is exactly what it sounds like: Go on a 9x9 board for learners and kids. SmartGo ($3) offers a solid computer opponent and various boards ranging up to 19x19. It comes with a thorough tutorial and 100 problems, and will probably be the ideal point of entry for most gamers.

SmartGo Pro ($13) is the full package, complete with a library of 15,000 classic games accompanied by a powerful search tool, game recording and playback, 2,000 problems, multi-language support, and other features for serious users. A unique magnifying glass and crosshairs interface make it easy to place stones even on the full-size board. The entire package is very professional.

It’s remarkable that you can carry around this powerful a piece of software in your pocket. Avoid the other versions and spend a little extra money to get SmartGo. It’s worth it.

NOTE: SmartGo Kifu ($20) is a new version for the iPad. Although it is available, it is still considered a work in progress. Since I don't have an iPad, I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, but I hope to in the future.

Chess Tweets

Now that I'm using Twitter I'm finding all kinds of interesting things, and one of the more intriguing is ChessTweets. This is just a darn clever idea: a tool that reinvents correspondence Chess by using Twitter.

This might require some explanations for any younger readers in the audience. Back when I was a young'un, people used to play "correspondence Chess." Lonely shut-ins would advertise for a partner in a magazine or newspaper, exchange letters, agree to start up a game, write down each individual move, and MAIL IT TO THEM. Using envelopes and stamps and mailmen and everything! Even when I was young, I remember thinking That's plain nuts. It would take months to play out an entire game. (What must someone have thought if they opened up a piece of correspondence Chess by accident, only to read a message saying Rxb7?)

With the advent of message boards, email, Java, multiplayer PC and console gaming, and the other tools of technology, correspondence Chess was significantly streamlined. Play-by-email and other formats allow people to make moves in their own time outside of a live online gaming session, and without relying on the U.S. Snail to stuff an envelope in your box.

ChessTweets is not only taking this to the next logical step, but putting an interesting twist on it. The site allows people to create games that can be played via Twitter. Each side tweets their moves back and forth using standard Chess notation. People can thus play a simple version of correspondence Chess using only twitter.

Even more intriguing are the "public games" hosted by Chess Tweets. During a public game, anyone can choose what they thing the next move should be. The game then uses the move with the most votes. The FAQ at Chess Tweets colorfully calls this a "hive mind" approach to gaming, but it's probably more accurate to call it plain ole Democratic Chess.

Nerd or Dork?: Watching Chess Match Replays

A friend thought that my mention (in the tChess Pro review) about "watching chess replays" buried the needle on the dork-o-meter. I realized that people who don't follow these things are probably imagining lengthy YouTube videos of men in tweed jackets smoking pipes and pondering the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit.


That would be incredibly dorky. Even I'm not that far gone. (Yet.)

I'm actually talking about PGN files, which I mentioned in the review without explanation. PGN stands for Portable Game Notation, and it's a file format that allows people to record games and then play them back on any device that supports the format.  Thousands of classic games from Chess history are thus preserved electronically, and can be played back, move by move (often with commentary or annotations) to help people study games.

Here's an example of a PGN report of Fischer V. Spassky 1972 Game 4. Put it in a text file with a .PGN extension, bring it into a piece of software that supports the format, and you can play the game back move by move.



[Event "Reykjavik WCh"]
[Site "Reykjavik WCh"]
[Date "1972.01.05"]
[EventDate "?"]
[Round "4"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[White "Robert James Fischer"]
[Black "Boris Spassky"]
[ECO "B88"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]
[PlyCount "89"]
1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 Nc6 6. Bc4 e6 7. Bb3 Be7 8. Be3 O-O 9. O-O a6 10. f4 Nxd4 11. Bxd4 b5 12. a3 Bb7 13. Qd3 a5 14. e5 dxe5 15. fxe5 Nd7 16. Nxb5 Nc5 17. Bxc5 Bxc5+ 18. Kh1 Qg5 19. Qe2 Rad8 20. Rad1 Rxd1 21. Rxd1 h5 22. Nd6 Ba8 23. Bc4 h4 24. h3 Be3 25. Qg4 Qxe5 26. Qxh4 g5 27. Qg4 Bc5 28. Nb5 Kg7 29. Nd4 Rh8 30. Nf3 Bxf3 31. Qxf3 Bd6 32. Qc3 Qxc3 33. bxc3 Be5 34. Rd7 Kf6 35. Kg1 Bxc3 36. Be2 Be5 37. Kf1 Rc8 38. Bh5 Rc7 39. Rxc7 Bxc7 40. a4 Ke7 41. Ke2 f5 42. Kd3 Be5 43. c4 Kd6 44. Bf7 Bg3 45. c5+ 1/2-1/2

App O' the Mornin': tChess Pro

Since Chess is going to be a subject here on State of Play, it’s best if I admit up front that I am a terrible Chess player. I’m fascinated by the game, enjoy playing it, and love reading about it and watching replays of classic games. Most of the time, I can tell a good game from a bad game. I can judge when someone makes a good move. I’m just no good at it in practice. I don’t have the kind of disciplined mind it takes to play a truly competitive game of chess.

With the caveat out of the way, let’s turn to Chess on the iPhone/iTouch, and see what’s available. Since Chess is heavily represented in the App Store, it can be hard to tell which version is best? Several contenders crowd the top of the list. Deep Green Chess, Fritz Chess, Shredder Chess, Caissa Chess, Glaurung Chess, and Chess Genius all have their pros and cons, and their passionate advocates.

But if I had to pick one well-rounded, feature-rich Chess package with a powerful engine and plenty of learning tools, we’d have to go with Tom Kerrigan’s tChess Pro.

It’s not the best looking app (Deep Green claims that honor), but its visuals and interface get the job done. Input is simple touch controls, with easy move takebacks for those times when you grab the wrong piece.

More impressive is what’s under the hood. The game comes in two versions. tChess Lite ($1) and tChess Pro ($8), and anyone serious about chess will want to skip straight to Pro. The basic engine is the same for both versions, with excellent teaching features and opening books. The Pro version adds an analysis mode, PGN support, a database of classic games, and other power user tools common to far more expensive chess software. PGN support is always a key feature for me, since I like to have a huge database of classic games to play back and study.

tChess lacks only online support for head-to-head gaming. That can be remedied by downloading Chess.com, a free app from one of the leading chess websites. Since chess engines are a matter of fierce debate, it’s worth noting that several of these versions (including Fritz, Shredder, and Glaurung) come in Lite or even free versions, so you can try them all out. Since the apps are frequently updated, check back to see if some are adding new features, since most apps come with free updates. Fritz in particular is shaping up to be a real competitor for tChess.

Speaking of Gaming Photography ... Mancala among the Maasai

My daughter and I love playing Mancala/Wari. (There's a very nice Mancala app out there as well.) In fact, most western games billing themselves as "Mancala" are actually Wari. Mancala is a family of games, like Poker. Wari (or Oware) is a specific version, and the one with the most popular rule set.

After posting the story about the 3rd International Gaming Photo Awards yesterday, I remembered this picture, which I found on a Maasai tourism site. When I see photos like this, I'm always struck by the ways the world finds to play game. Dig holes in the dirt, collect some pebbles or pips, and start playing. Man, if Games Workshop got hold of this, they would slap some Space Marines on those pips, change the rules every two years, and sell them collectible figures and $4 bottles of model paint.

Having said that, I have no idea what these two dudes are doing. It's obviously a kind of Mancala game, but there appears to be at least four rows of holes. (?) Maybe it's a Special Edition Mancala Expansion Set, thus proving that the desire to make your existing games bigger is shared the world over.