News flash: Craige Schensted’s game of Star is now implemented on Karl Heuer’s play-by-email server! For details, see my Star page. The June 2000 GAMES magazine, in an excellent article by the editor on connection games, includes a link to these pages! Welcome GAMES readers, who will find several connection games (along with many others) discussed on these pages: Bridg-It, Poly-Y, Split, Star, TwixT, The Game of Y. Many good abstract games are not well known, and I give rules for some of these here. In cases where it seems feasible and worthwhile I include a GIF of a board, which you could download, print, and use to play the game, if you’re interested. I also have pages for some games about which I have something to contribute, such as pictures of my homemade equipment, or proposals for variants: Archimedes, Blockade, Breakthru, Bridg-It, Camelot, Congo, Gabriel’s Chinese Chess, Glass Bead Challenge, Hip, Ideal’s Give & Take, Jati, Jumpin, MacBeth, Moxie, Nackgammon, Oh-Wah-Ree, Omino Go, Outwit, Poly-Y, Professional Archimedes, Reed’s Game, Slide 5, Split, Star, Trap, Trax, TwixT, Y Some new games, published here for the first time: Capriccio, a good game by my friend Larry Wheeler Alhambra*, Cairo, Cairo Bead Game, Cuarenta, Domino Backgammon*, by myself (*= not true abstract strategy games) If discussions of undeservedly-obscure games interest you, you should subscribe to Kerry Handscomb’s new Abstract Games Magazine , which just began publication early this year. This is a beautiful little quarterly that deserves to succeed. I wrote an article with some of my thoughts on abstract games and published it in this space in 1999. Later I revised it and early this year it appeared under the title “Defining the Abstract” on The Games Cafe, a fine webzine edited by Burt Hochberg. But on a sad day for game-lore that site folded recently. So my article is back here now, with a few more enhancements. |
