The Glass Bead Challenge, by David Balmer Jr. (1980’s I think)

Onto a 10x10 board the two players, Red and Blue, alternately place glass beads on any square not owned by their opponent.  The beads are never moved or captured.  A player owns a square if he has a piece on it, or if the square is adjacent to more of his pieces than of his opponent’s.  It is convenient to have, in addition to the glass beads, a supply of flat colored markers such as poker chips to indicate squares’ ownership.  After each move the affected squares would gain or lose a chip to indicate any changes of ownership.  A cribbage board could keep track of the running score.  The game ends when every square is owned by one side or the other, and the player who then owns the most squares wins.  Red plays first.  On the board shown, the dark circles are pieces and the light circles show ownership of vacant squares.  Red leads by 39-35.

A very nice version of this game, with beautiful graphics and sound, was distributed as shareware years ago.  In fact, I believe the shareware version was the game’s original publication:  for all I know the game may never have been played over-the-board.  Unfortunately the erstwhile distributor no longer supports the program, so over-the-board is now the only way to play.  I think the reason for naming it “Glass Bead Challenge” rather than “Glass Bead Game” may have been to avoid conflict with Christiaan Freeling’s game of the latter name (see MindSports).  Since Hermann Hesse wrote about the “Glass Bead Game” in his book Magister Ludi long before either game was invented I think both games should be allowed to use that title.

The 10x10 board is the largest size the software supports, but it also supports 9x9 (which it calls “tournament” size) and 8x8.  An odd order is good for eliminating draws, but I think the order also should not be divisible by 3:  games on the 9x9 board sometimes end after 9 moves, to b2, b5, b8, e2, e5, e8, h2, h5, and h8.

Glass Bead Game seems to suffer generally from a serious first-player advantage.  I think it needs some kind of handicapping rule, as in Go, where the second player is given a certain number of extra points at the end.  Perhaps the right kind of handicap for this game would be to allow Blue, the second player, to stake out one, two, or three squares on an 11x11 board before Red moves, which will be permanently Blue (although they will not have influence on the ownership of adjacent squares).  Or using the “pie rule” (one person cuts the pie into two pieces, the other chooses his portion from between them) to ensure fairness, one player could designate a selection of squares to be permanently Blue, and the other player would then choose to play either Red (and move first) or Blue.

Another change that might improve the game would be to use a board based on a more complex tesselation.  On another page I propose a variant on my favorite tiling, called the Cairo Bead Game.

Questions, corrections, comments:  Send me e-mail at  markthom@flash.net