Board Games
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 [...]
How we in the West perceive the past reflects more often than not a bias for the glitter and gimmick culture of modern times. It is easy to disparage ancient traditions by dint of their being old; how rarely is the fact of their survival (as in the case of Yoga, which made it through 5,000 years of history and is still going strong) considered an attestation to their worth? Naturally, society will fulminate in both directions, and a healthy counter-cultural taste for the “retro” prevails to give the lie to my words: and so much the better! To fully appreciate the old requires first the abandonment of an inherent sense of progress through time, and secondly the recognition that all the cultures and peoples of history engaged with the raw stuff of life with an equal capacity for genius.
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.
