We spanned the ages from 5 to 85 at our Family Event. We welcomed four people who had not previously been to our club, which definitely made it feel like a success.

We played some abstract strategy games from around the world: Picaria, Five Field Kono and Nine Men’s Morris. We also played some modern games: Stay Alive, the marble dropping game we have played at the after school club; Joggle, a game played on a 8 x 8 board where the winner is the first to make a 2 x 3 rectangle of their coloured marbles (black or white), and the board is indented with four colours (red, blue, green and yellow) with a dice throw determining which colour your marble is placed on, and if the die lands on a ‘joggle’ you get to choose any colour for your marble; and Dig In!, a colour and pattern recognition game requiring quick eyes and quick hands: a bowl is filled with 128 coloured pieces (32 objects in four colours – red, blue, green and yellow) and each player has 15 seconds to find the 6 items on their card, followed by a final round where all players dig in at the same time but can only use one hand. There are two options: the easier one where the 6 items on the card are in grey, and the harder one where the 6 items are in specific colours and must be correctly matched.

We also had our first game of Othello. This game was invented as Reversi in 1883 by either Lewis Waterman or John W. Mollet, with each claiming the other a fraud. Although as Wikipedia puts it, it might have been invented “perhaps earlier by someone else entirely”. The game is played on a 8 x 8 board, and the 64 pieces are black on one side and white on the other. You capture a piece by trapping it between your own colour pieces, one at each end of a line which can be in any direction. A trapped piece is then flipped to become your own colour. Pieces will be flipped many times during the game. The winner is the player with the most pieces of their colour when no more pieces can be played.  In 1971 a Japanese salesman, Goro Hasegawa, changed the way the game starts and renamed it Othello, after Shakespeare’s play. In Reversi the players choose where in the centre of the board to put their first two pieces each; in Othello four pieces are placed in a standard diagonal pattern and then the game begins. This is a game we will definitely be bringing back so that we can explore some of the strategies used to win.

If anyone is blaming the heavy downpour of rain at 10:00 am as their reason for not coming along, we plan to run a similar event during the February 2019 half term.

This week we played Halma, a game invented in 1883-1884 by an American surgeon called George Howard Monks. The name comes from the Greek work meaning to jump.

We played a four-player game, with each player having 13 pieces. The winner is the first player to move all their pieces from their home “camp” to the opposite “camp”. Movement is either by step or by jump. A step is from one square to an adjacent square in any direction. A jump can be over your own piece or your opponent’s piece, to an empty square beyond; multiple jumps are allowed; steps and jumps cannot be combined. We explained the strategy of building ladders so the children could move their pieces quickly across the board. We also showed them the trick of zigzagging along a straight line of pieces.

The game had not finished by the time our hour was up! This was not something I was expecting, as I had packed Chinese Chequers and Five Field Kono, other replacement games, in my bag. We had to call a halt to the game, giving our judgment on who had done well. One child had got six of their 13 pieces to the opposite camp, but still had a few pieces left in their own camp. Another child had fewer pieces in their opposite camp, but overall had got more of their pieces across the board, as well as setting up some good ladders and using the zigzagging trick. As we were packing up the children said they wanted to play this game again next time. This is something I have observed: if you ask them what their favourite game is they will often say it is the game they have just played. I’m not sure this is really true, but it does show the capacity of children to live in the present moment, something we could all benefit from trying.

This week at our adult’s club we played Chinese Chequers. This is not a game which can be traced back to Ancient China: it was invented in 1893 in Germany. It was originally called ‘Stern-Halma’ as a variation on the older American game of Halma. ‘Stern’ means ‘Star’ as the game board looks like a six-point star, and ‘Halma’ comes from the Greek word to ‘jump’. In 1928 a marketing scheme in the USA saw ‘Stern-Halma’ renamed as Chinese Checkers. In the UK we use the spelling Chequers.

We played a two-player game, although the game can be played by up to 6. The winner is the first player to move all their pieces from their home point to the opposite point of the star. Movement is either by step or by jump. A step is from one point to the next point along a line. A jump is along a line, and can be over your own pieces or your opponent’s pieces. Steps and jumps cannot be combined. The strategy is to build ladders so you can move your pieces quickly across the board. We also discovered a nice way of zigzagging along a straight line of pieces.

We followed this game with Five Field Kono, a lovely replacement game from Korea. As with Chinese Chequers the winner is the first player to move all their pieces from their side to the opposite side of the board.  There is no jumping over or capturing, just pure movement in space as each player moves one piece from an intersection to the next empty intersection. Players can move forwards and backwards, and will at some point have to move backwards when the other player blocks their path.

We had a few minutes left at the end, so we played Brainline, a 4 in a row game, and Picaria, a 3 in a row game.

There is a game of deduction called Battleships which many people have heard of, but the connotations of war and destruction make me uncomfortable. Today we played a game called Zone X (Invicta, 1975) which has been described as “pacifist Battleships”.

The player taking the role of the Zone Maker chooses a target square on a grid e.g. G9; they draw two straight lines through this target, which creates four zones; each zone is given a colour (blue, red, green and yellow). The Zone Breaker then calls out a square e.g. H4. The Zone Maker says which colour zone H4 is in e.g. green (which means their guess was too high) and the Zone Breaker puts a green peg on their search board. The Zone Breaker tries to find the target using as few pegs as possible. We found the children did need watching quite closely to make sure they were giving out accurate information when naming the colour zone, and they also needed some guidance in understanding that if they already had a green peg in their search board their next guess should be lower down.

The next game was Black Box (Waddingtons, 1977). One player chooses four targets on a 8×8 grid; the other player tries to deduce the positions of the targets by shooting ‘rays’ into the grid and seeing how they bounce around. The actual rules are so fiendishly complicated you need a PhD to understand them. Oh stop, Anna has a PhD. On well, we are not people to be deterred (or more importantly to think we have wasted any money), so we made up our own rules and the children were our guinea pigs. With our rules, the deducer probably relies a bit too much on luck to work out where the targets are, which makes the game less satisfying than using pure strategic thought. Hopefully this won’t be a game which ends up at the back of the cupboard.

We ended with a quick round of Stay Alive, the popular marble dropping game from three weeks ago.  Next week we will play Halma, a replacement game where jumps are allowed and ladders need to be built.

Mancala: a game so good we played it twice. There were some people who could not make it last week, so we bought back Mancala to introduce them to this fascinating redistribution and capture game. See last week’s blog for the game’s history and an overview of the rules.

This was the first week we had a paying customer who wasn’t someone we already knew! Thanks for coming Sylvia: we hope we made you feel welcome and we hope to  see you again next week. I introduced Sylvia to some 3 in a row games: 3D Noughts and Crosses, and Picaria. Another table played Score Four (Lakeside, 1978), a 3D 4 in a row game. One of the plastic pins in Score Four was missing when I bought it, so I fashioned a replacement out of a bamboo skewer. I am so proud of this I feel the need to tell everyone about it.