Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype on Kickstarter

Paul Nowak of Eternal Revolution has begun a Kickstarter Campaign to continue the production of Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype, which just won a MENSA select award and was also on our Games 100 list for 2011. Paul just sent me a copy of this wonderful game, and I hope to have a review of it here in the near future. In the meantime, enjoy these video that explain a bit about the game, G.K. Chesterton, and Distributism.

Chesterton On Chess and Madness

The previous post about Bobby Fischer calls to mind a famous passage from Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton. Long before Bobby Fischer, G.K. Chesterton wrote of the madness of chess players, the sanity of the imagination, and the challenges of reason. (I've paragraphed the passage to make it easier to read on the blog.)

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. 

Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.[...] 

The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein*. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

*Note: This is a reference to Montague Holbein, who tried to swim the English Channel.

Bobby Fischer Against the World

Susan Polgar posted a link to a trailer for Bobby Fischer Against the World, the first feature documentary about Bobby Fischer. (Polgar is featured at the 22-second mark.)



It's an interesting minute that explains the sheer mathematical complexity of chess, which may or may not be what drove Fischer batty. You can find out more at bobbyfischermovie.co.uk.

Ticket to Ride and Bohnanza Are Now Apps

The headline pretty well says it all.  Ticket to Ride is iPad only. Here's a 5 minute video walk through from Days of Wonder.


Bohnanza, a port of the classic bean-planting card game, is available in regular and HD flavors. I've spent some time with the Bohnanza app and it plays fairly well, albeit a bit slowly.

Both of these are classic Eurogames, now available in handy portal formats for a fraction of their original price. With Tikal released last month and Puerto Rico on the way, the Spring is shaping up to be a very good season for mobile Eurogames.

Review: Stacking (XBLA/PS3)

A game set at the turn of the century dealing with child abduction, labor strife, and poverty, all done in a whimsical silent-movie style and featuring a cast of matryoshka (nesting) dolls with diverse powers? Yeah, Tim Shafer and Double Fine Productions are back.

Stacking is a small, Xbox/PSN Arcade game developed simultaneously with Double Fine’s more high-profile Brutal Legend, and is altogether more entertaining and imaginative than its big-budget cousin.

Stacking concerns the adventures of Charlie Blackmore, the smallest member of a family of nesting dolls. When his siblings are kidnapped and forced into indentured servitude, Charlie is left behind due to his small size. This, however, becomes one of his greatest assets, because Charlie is able to “nest” in any doll that is one size larger than him.

Each kind of doll has a unique power. Some of these are useless, such as playing tag or going to the bathroom. But some are essential for solving puzzles, and therein lay the key to the gameplay. If you need to lure a doorman away from his door, you can use the female doll that screams (he’ll rush to her aid) or the female doll that “seduces” (he’ll fall in love and abandon his post for a few seconds). Many locations include multiple solutions, so you might find yourself clearing a room by (ahem) passing gas into a ventilator, or by infiltrating the room as a mechanic, or by sneaking past the guard.

The variety of dolls and powers along with the detailed environments mean the game is rich in content. You can simply go about collecting new dolls and trying out their powers. You can search out sets of matching dolls in order to learn their stories. Or you can just follow the adventure where it leads by talking to characters and using various doll abilities to solve puzzles.

This is an immensely clever and appealing game. There is a bit of potty humor (belching, flatulence, bathroom visits, etc), but nothing too offensive. The odd and disappointing part is the length. For a game that is jammed with detail and loaded with potential, the adventure itself plays out rather quickly. A sequel—The Lost Hobo King—is already out, but it’s even shorter. I guess there are worse things to say about a game than “I wish it went on longer.”

Site Update

Sorry for the light blogging lately, but a combination of work, vacation, volunteer obligations, the beginning of grad school, minimal gaming time, and the complete meltdown of Blogger conspired to keep me away from the game table and the blog.

Also: I'm lazy.

While I find some balance among work, school, home, and sanity, blogging may be light, but there will still be new content each week. I have a lot of items I've been wanting to review, and I hope to start getting some of those posted next week.

And just so reading this post wasn't a total waste, here's a sculpture made of Scrabble tiles.

The sculpture and the photo are by David Mach (the link is NSFW).

The Rivals For Catan: The Card Editor

I haven't had a chance to play The Rivals for Catan, but I just noticed that Mayfair has a custom card creator for the game. Here's how they describe it:

Here you have the possibility to create your very own playing card within minutes. The “Harald” card serves as a template. Just insert a picture, choose a name, and create a short text for your very own hero card. After that, all you have to do is save your work as a JPG or PDF file, print it, and glue it to the original “Harald” card.

Repostings

Blogger kept saying they were going to restore the posts they wiped out, but that never happened. Instead, I've reconstructed them from the RSS feed. It's not that the content was so deathless and essential that I felt it needed to be preserved forever, but it's irritating to do something and have it deleted.

Games Magazine: Online Contest (Xiangqi/Chinese Chess)

Wayne Schmittberger, my boss at Games Magazine, designed a new online contest based on Chinese Chess (Xiangqi). I haven't tried it yet, but it looks fairly brutal.

The goal is to use the opening setup shown above, and then "determine the number of different positions that can occur after the first player’s (Red’s) second move in a game of xiangqi, if both of Red’s moves are made with cannons. That is, after Red moves a cannon, Black replies with any legal move by any piece, and Red moves a cannon again (either the same cannon as before or the other one), how many different positions can appear on the board?"

Check out the site for the full instructions and details on how to enter the contest. The prizes are a year's subscription to Games Magazine. Deadline is July 1st.

NOTE: This is a republication of a post lost by the Blogger software. Originally posted 5/12/2011.

Home Sheep Home: A Shaun the Sheep Game

Home Sheep Home is a remarkably popular free Java game featured on the Shaun the Sheep home page. It's a simple but immensely appealing puzzle game with a gentle watercolor/ink art style and clever challenges. The goal is to get Shaun, Shirley, and Timmy back to the barn by solving various obstacle-based puzzles. It's not particularly hard, but it's fun nonetheless.

Now, Home Sheep Home has made the leap to the App Store. It's the same as the flash game, but for $1 you can take it along with you on all your plasticine-animated adventures.

NOTE: This is a republication of a post lost by the Blogger software. Originally posted 5/12/2011.

Tetris Gets a Movie

Directed by Michael Bay, starring Johnny Depp as "Four-Block-L-Shaped-Piece," and with special effects by WETA Workshop!

Okay, so I made that up. But there is a Tetris movie, and it's called Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters. In the tradition of The King of Kong, Darkon, The Dungeon Masters, and Word Wars, this is a documentary about a particular gamer subculture, and no doubt will feature the usual obsessives and Aspergians wrapping their entire lives around something most us only find passingly entertaining.


Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters Full Trailer from Adam Cornelius on Vimeo.


NOTE: This is a republication of a post lost by the Blogger software. Originally posted 5/12/2011.

WIM Sona Pertlova Passes Away

Susan Polgar is reporting that Woman International Master Sona Perlova died last Sunday at the age of 23. She was diagnosed with cancer during the 2008 Chess Olympiad.

Viktor Novotny writes:

Sona decided to fight the disease, under the influence of strong medication she played the Dresden Olympiad and undertook the chemotherapy right after it. After a year of intensive medical care she seemed to be fit again and she made the best individual result of the Czech players on the European Team Championship achieving a WGM norm. But the cancer came back. In the September of 2010 she became paralyzed during the tournament in Rijeka and the prediction of the doctors didn’t give much hope.

Our prayers are with Sona and her family.

NOTE: This is a republication of a post lost by the Blogger software. Originally posted 5/12/2011.

Blogger Problems

Blogger had some sort of meltdown and wiped my last couple days worth of posts. They're making noise about restoring them, but so far, nothing. I'm not going to post much until they straighten this out. If my posts don't return by tomorrow, I'll try to reconstruct the lost items.

Scrabble Gets Dumber, Sort Of

Last year around this time, Mattel announced that Scrabble would now "allow" proper nouns in play. (Mattel owns the rights to Scrabble outside of the US, while Hasbro owns the US rights.) This was the outrageous outrage du-jour among the gaming community in general and Scrabble cognoscenti in particular.

Except that Mattel didn't do anything of the sort. They were merely creating a branded spin-off called Scrabble Trickster, and misleading the press just a bit in order to gin up controversy and thus get some free publicity.

It worked like a charm (searches for the phase "Scrabble proper nouns" yield thousands of links), so they decided to do it again.

The latest news is that stupid non-words like "grrl","innit", and "thang" are being added as "official" Scrabble words. Wellllll ... yes and no.

The Collins Official Scrabble Word Book, in a desperate attempt to get themselves permanently dropped as a resource for tournament play, is indeed publishing a new edition with 3,000 additional words, some of them quite stupid. "Innit" is a kind slang contraction, which would exclude it from play. "Grrl" is just an abbreviation that's not abbreviated. No word yet on whether "pwned" is included, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

The World Scrabble Championships uses the SOWPODS list as its official word source. SOWPODS is a combination of the US/Canadian Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (the OSPD) and the UK Chambers Official Scrabble Words (the OWL). In 2005, Mattel changed their preferred (non-US) dictionary to the Collins Official Scrabble Word Book, but as far as I can tell, SOWPODS remains on the OSPD/OWL standard. If I'm wrong about that, please correct me and I'll update this post.

The US, Canada, and Thailand still use The Official Tournament and Club Word List (TWL), a modfication of the OSPD for tournament play, so these changes affect US play not at all. One the other hand, WESPA, the World English Scrabble Players Association, appears to be getting ready to use the new Collins list for international play.

All this does is create maximum confusion for international play and further discredit the use of Collins as any kind of international standard. The US player associations were correct to maintain conservative standards for acceptable words, thus avoiding the desperate trend-chasing and regionalisms of the international Scrabble community.

None of this matters one jot, however, in standard play. If someone slams down "grrl" during a home game, you're quite free to shake your head in sad disappointment and refer to the OSPD or TWL. This is exactly why my ancestors fought the Revolutionary War: so I didn't have to suffer stupid British word standards during Scrabble play. Up the Colonies!

Sid Meier Wants to Friend You

CNN has a long story about Sid Meier's upcoming Civilization game for Facebook. The social gaming version of Civ, dubbed Civilization World (or CivWorld), has been rumored at least since 2009, and Meier posted a more detailed note about it last January. The game went into closed alpha-testing shortly thereafter, and remains in that state today. Sid had this to say about the game:

I’m having a really fun time hands-on designing and programming Civ World along with our terrific team at Firaxis. In the coming months, we'll be posting a series of gameplay updates here on the fan page detailing parts of the game. Today I’d like to talk a little bit about the organization of the game to tide you over until that time comes. 

Civ World games will have a well-defined beginning and end, each ending with a triumphant civilization and one person recognized as that game’s most prestigious player. Along the way, as you progress through the different eras of time, you'll have the chance to win era victories as well. We want players to have both a final goal to work towards, as well as short-term objectives to achieve as they play. The trophies you unlock with your triumphs will carry over from game to game, and you can show them off in your throne room.

A social game with a beginning and an end? As if. Social games need to go on and on and on forever, preferably while selling people imaginary coins and annoying as many friends as possible. This Sid Meier guy doesn't know a thing about how to design quality games, like FarmVille.

Epic Gaming Con

Epic Gaming Con is a new gaming convention being held this year in Las Vegas (June 16 – 19 at the Paris Hotel and Casino) and Philadelphia (September 29 – October 2 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center). This is a free-to-attend gathering of board and trading card gamers.

The con is being organized by Cryptozoic Entertainment, which is currently working on a board game based  based upon the Lookout comic from Penny Arcade. It looks like the Cryptids have been inspired by the Penny Arcade gang to create an analog equivalent to the PAX gaming show, which is currently the biggest electronic gaming con in the country.

Is there room for another Gen-Con/Origins-style show on the roster? As long as they reach parts of the country that rarely get board/card-gaming cons, I'd say yes. I never get to either Gen Con or Origins because they're too far away. Since is Philly is just down the road from me, I may actually get to go.

Chesterton On Games

I'm an avid Chestertonian, so I loved this shirt from Eternal Revolution, the makers of Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype. Make sure you look around their shop while you're there, and learn a bit about Distributism while you're at it.

UPDATE: Brett J. Gilbert shot me a Twitter message with a link to the entire essay from which this quote is taken. People, if you love language, if you love a man with a cheerful hunger for life, if you simply love good humor, then you need to read more G.K. Chesterton. He is the great author that your teachers kept you from all those years because of his dangerous ideas. You become a better person for having read him.

The Angry Birds Theme by Pomplamoose

And if you need to know more about Pomplamoose, go here.

Eyeball Benders--Vacation Edition ANSWERS

Wow. I knew I made these hard, but I thought some Orlando visitors would have recognized some of them. No luck: no one figured out any of the answers, so here's each original Eyeball Bender with the larger picture from which it comes.

1. Hogwarts Castle: Wizarding World of Harry Potter (Universal)

2. St. George & the Dragon: Germany Pavilion, Epcot

3. The Lorax: Universal Islands of Adventure

4. Daisey Duck: Disney World

5. Beetle Bailey: Universal Islands of Adventure

6. Butterbeer Cart: Wizarding World of Harry Potter (Universal)

7. Magic Brooms: Disney Hollywood Studios

A Closer Look: French Tarot: Trumps 13 & 14

Many people are familiar with the standard Tarot suits (the "Major Arcana") used for "divination" purposes, but they're less aware that Tarot cards were created for playing trick-taking games and have a rich and diverse design history. These images are part of an ongoing series highlighting the art of a single deck used in France, which contains scenes of rural and domestic life in the 19th century.

Click to enlarge.

Tarot Trump No. 13 Detail

Click to enlarge

Tarot Trump No. 14 Detail