More Games
My plan to play more games in 2014 has gone quiet well so far. In addition to the chess tournament in January, I’ve been able to play a lot of friendly games with folks around Tacoma. Ticket to Ride A few weeks ago I went to Tacoma Games, where I played Ticket To Ride with some local fans of the game, (game pictured above). Tacoma Games sells board games, and also has board game nights, where you can go in to try out new games. This is a really fun game. I have the “Europe” map, but have also now played Read more…
My first chess tournament
The best chess player in the world right now is a 23-year-old Norwegian guy named Magnus Carlsen. Actually, he’s the best chess player ever–he has a higher chess ranking than any chess player has ever earned. I am not Magnus Carlsen. The degrees of separation between me and him are extreme. This writer at last year’s World Chess Championships puts it well: The skill gap in chess is remarkable: these Grandmasters would demolish someone who would easily beat someone who would wipe me off the board. And I’m guessing that this writer would crush me. Chess is one of those things that Read more…
About Jenga
I’ve recently gotten very interested in game design. If you want a fascinating 28 minutes, Jesse Schell presents at a DICE conference about the implications of games invading real life. There are many examples, but one of them would be the recent trend toward states allowing banks to give lotto-like benefits for savings. It’s something I’ve been paying a lot of attention to, and I’m glad. Because if it hadn’t been for that, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the book About Jenga by Leslie Scott. Nearly forty years ago, Scott created Jenga. She created it and, crucially, named it. I really enjoyed Read more…
You have died of dysentery
FORTY YEARS AND TEN iterations later, the Oregon Trail has sold over 65 million copies worldwide, becoming the most widely distributed educational game of all time. Market research done in 2006 found that almost 45 percent of parents with young children knew Oregon Trail, despite the fact that it largely disappeared from the market in the late ’90s. A recent frenzy of nostalgia over the game has yielded everything from popular T-shirts (“You have died of dysentery”) to band tour promotions (“Fall Out Boy Trail”) to humorous references on popular websites (“Digg has broken an axle”). via citypages.com Three Carleton Read more…
Thanksgiving entertainment included 4-player Stratego on a Mall Madness board.
Hanbergs are really good at game mashups.
Poor Koopas
via agentmlovestacos.com It’s the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Brothers. If you’ve played the game, or any of it’s successors, I think you’ll enjoy this. via frinklin.
Kasparov on computers
The availability of millions of games at one’s fingertips in a database is also making the game’s best players younger and younger. Absorbing the thousands of essential patterns and opening moves used to take many years, a process indicative of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours to become an expert” theory as expounded in his recent book Outliers. (Gladwell’s earlier book, Blink, rehashed, if more creatively, much of the cognitive psychology material that is re-rehashed in Chess Metaphors.) Today’s teens, and increasingly pre-teens, can accelerate this process by plugging into a digitized archive of chess information and making full use of the Read more…
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