There's a starman waiting in the sky
You may have heard about this. My giddy enthusiasm is somewhat tempered by the suspicion that this game will probably not come out until 2009, if at all. Although from what I hear, it is mostly done (although in that case I wish they'd preview more than just the Protoss, cool and lasery though they may be), so maybe Blizzard has learned from its mistakes?
I wrote up a really nice entry about chicken, but I'll post it some other time because right now I feel like talking about backgammon. Simon and I recently played a game of backgammon as part of a very entertaining competition, and having not played it in basically a thousand years, I was reminded that it is both fun and fairly unique.
In particular, the spirit of the game feels very different from most. I may just totally be projecting here, but it seems like the fundamental point of it is to make the most of one's bad luck. If players consistently got the right rolls, their pieces would simply progress more-or-less pairwise right off the board, and the winner would be the one who rolled slightly higher numbers. What keeps the game interesting the fact that players will, sooner or later, roll the dice in a way that forces them to leave one or more pieces vulnerable. The rest of the game, then, is all about finessing the situation in order to minimize the potential risk to your pieces, and maximize it to your opponent's. I find this sort of pessimism really refreshing. Most board games, like chess, scrabble, monopoly, checkers (to an extent) are proactive and creative; the point is to amass your strength more successfully than the other player. (Card games are also a lot like this, with some exceptions, such as hearts, though the scoring and gameplay are a lot more abstract than in a game in which you're running your pieces through a gauntlet.) More ambiguous cases include Othello and possibly Go, but the difference there is that they're deterministic. Whereas in backgammon the players are competing as much against chance as against each other, though at the same time they are agents of chance, conscripted by means of a zero-sum game into directing its vagaries and thereby effecting certain outcomes to the best of their ability.
Or maybe I'm making way too much of this.
I wrote up a really nice entry about chicken, but I'll post it some other time because right now I feel like talking about backgammon. Simon and I recently played a game of backgammon as part of a very entertaining competition, and having not played it in basically a thousand years, I was reminded that it is both fun and fairly unique.
In particular, the spirit of the game feels very different from most. I may just totally be projecting here, but it seems like the fundamental point of it is to make the most of one's bad luck. If players consistently got the right rolls, their pieces would simply progress more-or-less pairwise right off the board, and the winner would be the one who rolled slightly higher numbers. What keeps the game interesting the fact that players will, sooner or later, roll the dice in a way that forces them to leave one or more pieces vulnerable. The rest of the game, then, is all about finessing the situation in order to minimize the potential risk to your pieces, and maximize it to your opponent's. I find this sort of pessimism really refreshing. Most board games, like chess, scrabble, monopoly, checkers (to an extent) are proactive and creative; the point is to amass your strength more successfully than the other player. (Card games are also a lot like this, with some exceptions, such as hearts, though the scoring and gameplay are a lot more abstract than in a game in which you're running your pieces through a gauntlet.) More ambiguous cases include Othello and possibly Go, but the difference there is that they're deterministic. Whereas in backgammon the players are competing as much against chance as against each other, though at the same time they are agents of chance, conscripted by means of a zero-sum game into directing its vagaries and thereby effecting certain outcomes to the best of their ability.
Or maybe I'm making way too much of this.
posted by Evan at 4:41 PM
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