Author Archive
The world of Taskmaker is a world of 30×30 pixel blocks. Everything in the world is represented by these black-and-white blocks: grass, trees, water, walls, cities, people, monsters, items. Some blocks you can walk over, like the roads and items. Some you bump into, like walls, and people. Some you can walk through, but you [...]
Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep was one of the most significant games of my childhood. Released for the Mac in 1989, Citadel was an amazingly full-featured RPG. Replaying it today makes me realize how many of the cutting-edge features of Fallout 3 or Dragon Age were already present in Citadel 20 years ago. For [...]
The original Dark Castle was one of the first computer games I ever played. I must have been very young, and I remember very little about it save for the awesome splash screen featuring a dark castle, Dark Castle, lit up by flashes of lightning with the ominous strains of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor playing in the background. Its sequel, Beyond Dark Castle is the first game I remember getting really excited about. Before we bought a copy I was giddy with anticipation; I had heard there were lasers, a helicopter jetpack, and giant flaming eyeballs. Most amazing of all, you could save the game! No more starting from scratch every time you died.
In Galaxy Trucker you play an impoverished space ship pilot, charged with hauling a load of construction components across the galaxy. You are too poor to even buy a space ship: you must build your own out of the very components you are delivering.
Race for the Galaxy is a card game in which players vie for domination of the galaxy through military, economic and cultural might. Each player begins the game with a single homeworld, but over the course of a game they settle, build and conquer their way to a galactic empire. Although players can build up [...]
The history of chess-playing machines goes back at least as far as 1770. It was in that year that Baron von Kempelen first exhibited his “Turk”, a clockwork automaton that could play chess as well as the top human players of the day: The Baron’s new invention was wheeled into Court by an attendant and [...]
In Poker or Chess, you always want your opponents to guess wrongly about your true intentions; in Charades or Taboo you always want your teammates to guess correctly; but as the storyteller in Dixit you want to create a state of affairs that is perfectly ambiguous. As the players cast their votes and the round resolves it sometimes becomes clear that you should have made your story more or less obvious in order to place it more fully within that region of fuzzy uncertainty.
In the case of modern games, authors are, in principle, much more readily identifiable, and yet unlike with books, visual art, music or film, the creators of popular games are rarely known. Few people know the names of the inventors of Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit or Monopoly, even if they play those games all the time. I suspect that designing a game that is fun, challenging and well-balanced requires just as much skill, artistry and hard-work as writing a book or recording an album, and yet game designers seem to be considered so unimportant that they remain totally anonymous to the majority of gamers. Why is this?
I started playing Blood Bowl in primary school in the early 90s. The game is roughly based on American football, but with none of that nonsense about downs and changes of possession and times-out. A Blood Bowl match is a mad scramble to get the ball into your opponent’s end zone by whatever means possible, and if this involves seriously injuring or killing members of the opposing team who get in your way then so much the better. Oh yes, and the teams are made up of Elves, Dwarves, Goblins, Skaven and other races from Games Workshop’s Warhammer universe.
In the Summer of 2007 a team of computer scientists at the University of Alberta announced that they had “weakly solved” the game of checkers (aka English draughts). Their computer program, called Chinook, had reached the point at which it was demonstrably unbeatable at the game. If you are particularly bloody minded you can play [...]
In a sense, Monopoly is the ultimate postmodern game. In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson identifies the postmodern era with “a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense [in which] depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces.” Scratch beneath the surface and we might find that Grateful Dead-opoly is an identical game to Winnie-the-Pooh Monopoly, but to scratch beneath the surface is to misunderstand Monopoly: it is precisely the surface that matters.
Over the holidays I played two different robot-themed board games: Ricochet Robots, and Robo Rally. In some ways the two games are very similar. In both, players must guide robots around the board and reach a series of goals faster than their opponents. Both games rely on the idea that robots follow instructions perfectly, but inflexibly. In Ricochet Robots, the bots can only move in straight lines and must continue until they hit a wall. In Robo Rally players program their robots with five moves at a time and then the bot carries out these moves in order, even as its course is interfered with by conveyor belts, rotating gears, pits, lasers and the movements of other robots.
