Take from the manual of monsters
Painted with three crude beasts, that sheet
On which I enumerated his stats once,
And spread it so as to cover his face.
If his bag remains, rifle his hoard
To see who gets his precious +6 sword.
Light the lamp to run away faster.
The only emperor is the dungeon master.

{ after Wallace Stevens }

GameKit uses BlueTooth networking; that lets it work where there’s no WiFi, but it also limits the range. BlueTooth covers just a few meters, whereas a WiFi network connected to an Ethernet subnet can easily cover a whole floor of a building.

My MYNetwork framework seems like a good way to bridge that gap. The TCP connection classes provide the Bonjour discovery and makes point-to-point connections, and the BLIP protocol lets you send data blobs over those connections.

It should be pretty straightforward to build some classes that are plug-compatible with the GameKit network classes but use MYNetwork. Then iPhone apps could easily support both protocols, and compatible Mac apps could be developed. Anyone want to try it?

[Note: I’m only referring to information that was publicly discussed at Apple’s press event yesterday. I’ve read through the APIs, but I won’t go into details about them here in public.]

iGo is pretty good, for $2.99. It supports board sizes from 7×7 to 19×9, and several levels of AI strength in addition to a customizable handicap. There’s even Undo, so I can back-pedal on my lamest moves and try again.

The only things I can say against it are:

• For some reason its hit-detection is too high, so it places a stone on the space above the one tapped.
• You don’t get a chance to confirm your move, so if you tapped the wrong space [see above] the AI immediately replies, so you have to open the drawer and press the Undo button.
• When starting a new game, the first thing it does is make you type in a name for it. I have no idea what I’d call a particular Go game, so I go “Duhhh…” and type in something random. It could at least fill this in with the date and time, by default.

(Also, totally off the topic of games, I love the Amazon and OpenTable apps. Each of them is so much faster and smoother than navigating their respective websites.)

Hexy

I’m happy to say there’s now an excellent implementation of Hex for the iPhone, named Hexy. I’m sure my recent call for more diversity in iPhone board games was entirely responsible for this, even though the authors claim it’s been in development for months.

Hex dates from the 1940s. Two players alternate playing stones on a diamond-shaped grid of hexagons; one is trying to build a connection between the left and right edges, the other between the top and bottom. That’s it. Despite the trivial rules, the gameplay is fun and interesting. You’ll quickly discover basic principles like “bridges” and “ladders”, but there’s a lot more strategy to learn.

(An interesting factoid about Hex is that it was proved early on that there is an infallible winning strategy for the first player; but the proof says nothing about what that strategy is! Small board sizes have been solved, but at the sizes that people typically play, starting at 11×11, no sure-fire strategy is known, so the game is still interesting to play.)

Hexy lets you play solo against an AI, or against another human either on the same iPhone or over a local network. I’ve played three games against the AI, and won two; as I’m a rank novice, this indicates the AI may not be that strong. On the other hand, it was nice not to be crushed like a bug! And I haven’t tried the larger boards, which are supposed to be more difficult.

The presentation is quite elegant. The graphics are subtle but pretty, with a very legible board, and some subliminal translucent hexagons floating by behind it. But every once in a while a cartoon bee flies by, which I find sort of distracting. My only real wish is that the board could be rotated slightly so it would fit better onto the iPhone screen, making scrolling or zooming less necessary.

Hexy costs $3.99, which is a bit more than many iPhone games, but if you’ve already got an Attax game, and are bored of checkers and tic-tac-toe, I think it’s one of your best options for another solid strategy game.

Red November

Board games have common, overused themes, just like their video cousins. There are any number of games about ancient Egypt, about Renaissance Italian merchants, about railroads or zombies or space empires. Some of these are excellent games, but it gets to the point where you wish designers would show more originality.

Bruno Faidutti had the highly original, if macabre, idea of making a board game based on the Kursk disaster, in which a Russian nuclear submarine sank to the bottom of the sea after an onboard explosion, and the whole crew died before rescuers could arrive. It would be a cooperative game, where the players work together to repair damage, put out fires, and try to stay alive for a specified number of turns.

Unfortunately, all the publishers he showed his prototype to turned it down, saying the theme was too depressing. (Frankly, I agree.) So in another brilliant move, he re-spun it slightly: the game, retitled Red November (BGG), is now about Soviet gnomes. Alcoholic Soviet gnomes, who need a shot of vodka to fortify themselves to attack leaks or fires, but then need to make saving rolls against passing out on the floor. Plus, an added hazard is a giant Kraken that must be shot from outside the submarine (good luck finding the aqualung.)

It’s actually a lot of fun. The silliness (which is reflected in the artwork) keeps you from thinking about “Das Boot” so much; even my kids are fine with it. The game keeps on throwing new randomized emergencies at you every turn, as rooms catch fire or flood, hatches jam, and the reactor overheats. There’s a very interesting time-keeping mechanism that allows the characters to run around ‘simultaneously’, fixing the problems, though the players are really still taking turns. We’ve won both games we’ve played—i.e. we survived till the end of the time track—though I did tweak a few rules to make things a bit easier for us, to avoid turning the kids against the game ;-)

The game is pretty cheap (around $20), and comes in a small box the size of a fat paperback, which is impressively densely packed with bits. Getting the box shut again after a game is a strategic exercise in itself! The rules are medium in complexity—more than Monopoly, but less than D&D. My kids and I found it easy to pick up the basics, but there are some details, like the specific effects of flooded rooms, that take some memorization. All in all, it’s one of the best board games I’ve bought in a while, definitely recommended (for the non-claustrophobic.)

Decktet News

The Decktet is this new deck of cards I first wrote about a few months ago while I was making my own copy. It combines an interesting new mechanic (multiple suits per card) that’s fertile ground for designing games, and whimsical but enigmatic illustrations that have a Tarot-like symbolism.

Since then,

• Its designer, P.D. Magnus, has added four new optional cards that have three suits each (I like them but haven’t yet printed out copies to add to my deck).
• A limited number of professionally-printed decks are available for sale for $15 postpaid.
• There’s now an official Decktet wiki. It includes rules for the existing games, as well as for games still being designed, and has a discussion forum.
• I’ve written down preliminary, partial rules for a game I’m designing, under the working title “Epic”. Its goal is to make use of the allegorical meanings of the cards, by having the gameplay represent a fantasy adventure or quest.

Rogue for iPhone

Finally: Rogue. For. iPhone. Dude! This game ruled my 1982 (along with Tutankham).

Especially if you then filter out the many duplicates. For example, I’m surprised at how many versions of Ataxx there are. Ataxx is a fairly obscure game (at least I thought it was!) but there are at least four different clones of it on the store, including a new one called Spoilage that just showed up. Why is that? Don’t get me wrong, Ataxx is a really good game, with simple but unusual mechanics, and good tactical difficulty despite its short play time. I’ve played it online and I have iBacteria on my iPhone.

But why are so many developers picking the same game? With a better-known game like chess, checkers, Go or Othello/Reversi, I can understand going for the name recognition. But those wanting to develop different abstract strategy games have literally thousands to choose from. Don’t believe me? Peruse my

Big List Of Abstract Board Games You Should Implement And Sell Me:

• Dieter Stein’s games Accasta, Abande and Attangle form a trilogy, as they have similar mechanics and can be played on the same board (your choice of hexagonal or square). Of these, Abande is my favorite, and one of my favorite abstract board games overall.
• Cameron Browne has designed dozens of brain-twisting games with a topological flavor—Truchet is a great example, with a really cool looking board.
• Dutch mathematician Christian Freeling has developed many very interesting games, which are described on his MindSports website.
• Arimaa is a fairly new chess-like game with some very strange mechanics, where pieces can push and pull opposing pieces into holes to defeat them.
• Mark Steere has a good-sized collection of board games too.
• Phutball, aka “Philosopher’s Football” is an interesting game with a loose soccer theme, invented by eminent mathematicians Elwyn Berlekamp, John Horton Conway, and Richard Guy.
• Board Game Design Competition Winners from boardgames.about.com. (My favorite of these is Symbio.)
• The Piecepack game system has a ton of games written for it.
• …and if those aren’t enough, there’s the World Of Abstract Games website, which compiles literally hundreds of games, old and new, neatly categorized.

So please! Go develop some of these, and sell them on the App Store, and I’ll buy them! (Especially Abande. I really want a patient Abande opponent to help me improve my play!)

Even if you’re not a game developer, most of these games are easy to play with boards you either have already or can print out. (And if you have access to a laser-cutter, so much the better…)

Footnote: I haven’t mentioned Go. I really like Go, although I’m miserable at it, and every time a Go-related app comes out I read its description eagerly; but so far none of them have AI play. They either let two humans play each other, or they merely play back saved Go matches to study. I suspect there’s a technical problem here: Go is notoriously difficult to program AI for, and the only readily available implementation I know of is GNU Go. But this is GPL-licensed, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the GPL were fundamentally incompatible with the iPhone’s application model, since it’s impossible to modify or recompile other people’s apps. Anyone know for sure?

Footnote 2: And WTF is up with all the tic-tac-toe apps? News flash, everyone: Tic-Tac-Toe has been solved! No one ever wins a game if played correctly, and anyone with the brains to operate an iPhone should be able to play correctly. So what’s the appeal? Are parents buying it as an easy way to win against their four-year-old kids?

Then I came home and wrote down the rules … Give it a try! (Don’t believe a word of the historical background, though! I just made it up, and stole the great nonsense word “quäsenbö” from an old Roz Chast cartoon.)

The only problem is that the cards still have a faint sickly-sweet stink of toluene and acetone (from the plastic coating) even after I left them spread out on the floor for a few days. It’s quite unpleasant, not like the nice smell of new books, cars or boardgames.

Is this the papercraft equivalent of Code Smell?

Ever since I saw P. D. Magnus’s Decktet—a whimsical yet mysterious deck of cards for games or divination—I wanted one of my own. However, the Decktet is currently only available as a PDF, so any physical manifestation has to be of a DIY nature.

The deck has 36 cards (plus the optional “The Excuse”), of six suits, and its most unusual feature is that the number cards each have two suits. (There are also single-suited Aces and Kings.) This obviously adds a lot of interesting possibilities for games.

Magnus has given each suit a symbolic meaning, as well as a color, and done a good job integrating them into each card. For example, the Penitent (see above) combines the green color and violent connotations of the Wyrms suit with the orange and “decisive action and clarity of purpose” of Suns; while the Market combines Wood’s “gift of the earth … raw materials and food products” with Knots’ “craft, skill … commerce and money”.

(I should add that I am not a believer in the supernatural. I love tarot cards, and own the rare Hello Kitty deck as well as the usual Rider-Waite-Smith ; but I see these as a combination of objets d’art and Rorschach blots. They’re lovely and spooky and meaningful, but what you get out of them is coming from the depths of your own mind, which is I think just as mysterious as any Astral Plane.)

How To Do It

Fortunately I already knew where to get printable blank playing cards. I ordered the both-sides-blank variety and the magic coating spray. While waiting for the package, I adapted the Decktet PDF into the right layout for these cards, which was kind of a pain (does anyone know of a tool for cutting/pasting/cropping parts of PDFs?)

• Printable PDF Decktet for PlainCards
• The same, in original iWork format

Then after the mail came, I carefully printed out each sheet of cards (the plain-paper setting worked best), fed them back in upside-down to print the backs, then held my breath while spraying sickly-sweet poisonous volatile plastic vapor over the sheets.

After an hour or so to dry, the cards were ready to punch out. The paper is micro-perforated (like those Avery business card sheets) so the edges come out very cleanly after you bend the perforations back and forth a few times. And voila…

The Cards!

Just like real playing cards! I love coding, but you can’t hold a set of methods in your hand like that.

The cards are shiny, and slippery enough to shuffle well, though they’re not as slick as a new pack of commercial cards. The edges are a little bit rough from the perforations, but not unpleasantly so. A few of the edges got a little bent while being detached. The cloying smell of toluene and acetone is dissipating.

Now I can use my Decktet! Should I tell my fortune first, or play a game of Window ?

To test Your Move you need to

• Have Mac OS X 10.5.
• Enjoy playing board games … in particular, Go and/or American checkers, as those are the main games it knows so far.
• Have at least one friend who will play board games with you (I’ll do in a pinch, but I don’t have time to play against everyone. Plus, ironically, I suck at Go and checkers.)
• Be willing to tolerate bugs, and committed to sending in bug reports, crash logs and such.

If you’re interested, please

1. Register an account on the Mooseyard projects website ; then
2. Email me at “jens” c/o this domain and tell me your username, so I can give you access to the project.

Thanks!