As a professor of literature, a writer, and a lover of all sorts of artistic enterprises I enjoy acts of self-expression above all else. Creativity astounds me. So though I play games because they are fun, I think I collect games because, like books or films or paintings, they seem to express something by one or more artists. Modern board games are also referred to as “designer games” precisely because of this element of self-expression. Unlike classic games like chess or mahjong, the designer of a modern strategy game or wargame is known by name. Although the designer might have been inspired by other games, he or she is still responsible for the creation of the game and, thus, is able to express a certain worldview or a design aesthetic through the game and its rules. As a collector, this means I can get excited about the next game from a favorite designer in the same way I would be excited by a new book by my favorite author or a new film by my favorite director.

However, this element of self-expression is not restricted to designer games. Because many classic games are in the public domain, any company can create their own version. So although the rules of your backgammon set are no different from the rules of someone else’s set, there are a seemingly infinite number of design possibilities available to the manufacturers. This means that an artist can express him or herself through the aesthetics of the set and the consumer can express him or herself through style or colors they choose. An interesting blog post discusses the inspiration that goes into creating a beautiful chess set, the same sort of inspiration one would associate with great works of sculpture or painting.

Of course, the self-expression doesn’t end when you purchase the game. We players also get to express ourselves. We express ourselves through the contents of our collections. Someone who collects a wide variety of games is saying something different that someone who collects games by a certain designer who also says something different from someone who collects hundreds of varieties of dice or dominoes. We can also express ourselves as we play: aggressive or defensive, quick or contemplative, prudent or risky. When playing almost any game with my regular game group I can connect most moves that are made to the various players’ personalities.

So, in a sense, my collection allows me to learn a little about the brilliant minds who designed the games, a little about the cultures in which these games were produced, a little about the people I play with and a little about myself as well.

He recently got a new board. I don’t know what kind it was but it was a very smooth board, I really liked it. We set everything up and got ready to play and I noticed he had some teenie tiny generic doubling cube. It wasn’t right. You can’t have a nice board and some miniscule junk cube, it really takes away from the game in a small way.

You need a doubling cube with some bulk to it. You want one that you don’t have to hunt and fumble around for when you’re trying to cube and one that spectators can see when they’re watching. It also makes it feel more like a sport than ‘just some game’ if you have the proper equipment. Let me relate another Vegas story from this year’s tournament.

It was near after the tournament was over and I’d met some people during my stay there being there a week in all. One of them had recently moved to Vegas and she had a bar she loved to go to called The Hammer that was a short cab ride from the strip. So a couple nights before I left I went to meet her out there. The bar was nice, had a pool table, darts, even a folded up ping pong table in the side room. I got there pretty early and my friend knew the owner so we started talking and soon enough talking shit. For those of you that know me I’m anything but modest so when we got into talking about pool and ping pong I let him know where he stood. He eventually asked why I was in Vegas and I told him for a backgammon tournament. He said he had a set and wanted to play later on.

I played of course. I love to play backgammon with anyone and everyone. His set was what you might expect at a bar or under your grandparents’ couch. A small cheap set but I could tell he was very enthusiastic about the game. He would probably be able to play in the intermediate directly if he ever decided to show up at a tournament and I could just tell he really liked the game so the next night when I showed up I brought along my Dal Negro board. It looked like I was carrying a suitcase and when he saw the board he was somewhat mesmerized. A larger board with great checkers that move around seamlessly really showed him this was more than just a game. He was sold on getting a better board for the bar even though he only plays random locals who are probably weaker than himself. I imagine if he does get a nice board more people will become interested when they see it, a properly sized and equipped backgammon board, than something that looks like it should be hidden under furniture.

Since the cell phone has caught on and everyone over 13 years old has one (and probably half the kids under 13 too) the phone has lost one major function for me personally…the angry hang up. If I get aggravated by someone and need to let off a little steam while hanging up on them or at the end of a conversation all I can do now is punch a button. That’s weak sauce. I missed the days when I could slam it back onto the receiver. Believe it or not, this reminds me of playing with miniscule doubling cubes. When I cube I want to grab on to a solid cube and maybe even put it down with a little force if I want to. If the doubling cube is one of those gimpy ones that’s not possible. You have to fidget to even pick it up and it comes with no intimidation value whatsoever. Playing with Matt I used his board, his dice, his cups because all of those items were nice. I swapped out the doubling cube though to use one of my own.

What do I mean by this? Let’s return to the premium chess set. Whether you purchase the set because of your passion for the game or because you admire the look of the board with all the pieces in their starting position, you are buying the set, in part, because of the rules that govern how those pieces move. After all, a chess set is not just a collection of colors, materials, and carvings. Chess is a game with a long history and with connections to genius, strategy, and creative thinking. If the rules for chess did not exist, would we be so eager to purchase beautiful little statues or a square piece of marble with alternating colors? One does not even have to actually play with their chess set to find value in the rules and history of the game. The value of the rules is inherent in the set. Ask yourself if it would be worth quite as much to you if the exact same materials were transformed into an equally beautiful set of pieces that had no rules or notable history. Although no one person added this value to the game or profits from it, we all evaluate the pieces differently because we share this universal set of rules about what a chess set is for and what it means.

With this idea in mind, I’d like to look at a very simple game – dominoes. Unlike chess, there is a little more leeway in what is included in a set of dominoes. Namely, the number of dominoes can differ from set to set. Imagine if there were different versions of chess, each with a different number of pawns! Dominoes, like chess pieces, can be made from a variety of materials and with an unlimited potential for design flourishes. Yet, part of what is valuable about a set of dominoes is the sheer number of games that can be played with them. With the same set of numbered tiles a variety of games are available, each with their own history and strategy.

One of the most familiar forms of dominoes is a simple blocking game in which the goal is to play all your tiles before your opponent plays hers. In such a game your focus is on playing your dominoes in the order that will allow you to always have another move available. Playing with a Double 6 set you can usually look at the board and guess or know what your opponent holds, allowing you the option of blocking her next move. Since scores are determined by the number of pips left in your hand at the end you also need to think of ways to play your highest tiles quickly.

In a scoring game of dominoes, however, you will follow the same basic actions (placing dominoes so their ends match the tile on the table) but now with a completely new strategy. A popular British version of the game scores for multiples of five or three. In such a game the double 6 domino is no more valuable or dangerous than a double 1 – it all depends on what other tiles have been played.

In other versions of dominoes you might not be able to block your opponent or you might need to focus on collecting groups of the same family to play together. Whether or not the rules allow you to play the tiles side-to-side rather than end-to-end also drastically changes the game.

So the next set of dominoes you purchase will not only contain choice tiles and a beautiful box, but centuries of history and millions of hours of creative thinking by people all over the world who spread the popularity of the game and created their own versions to play. And this is part of what I love about games. You can customize them and make them your own, but a deck of playing cards or a pair of dice are also communal objects that we have given meaning to as a society.

Discovery is the thrill of finding something new and figuring out how the game’s systems work together.  For me the pleasure of discovery begins when I first read the rules of a new game.  As I go through the list of rules I visualize the future conflicts and decisions that will arise.  I think about how my goals will be thwarted by my opponent’s moves and what actions I can take to do the same to her.  The intellectual stimulation of discovery comes from learning something new, from experiencing something different, or from being creative yourself.  Often with new games I will enhance the pleasure of discovery by making winning a subsidiary goal to exploring the game itself.  In other words if I have to choose between a move that seems like a good move and a move that will make things happen, I choose the latter.

In general, discovery promotes re-playing games that are either very complex or have a large variety of experiences.  Chess is a very complex game that allows for creative thinking even though the game is setup exactly the same every time.  Trivial Pursuit, on the other hand, is a very simple game, but it too creates a sense of discovery thanks to the sheer number of questions one might have to answer.  Other games, such as Perudo or Cluedo or Scrabble, encourage creative discovery by creating very different game states from play to play.  A game of Scrabble that starts with a two-letter word might be very different than one that starts with an eight-letter word.  Although you can learn the rules to Cluedo in a few minutes each game will require you to reset your thinking and try to discover the answer all over again.  As long as these games keep presenting us new challenges or decisions or opportunities to learn, we keep playing them.

Players who enjoy the excitement of discovery will tend to play a wide variety of games.  There is a rate of diminishing return each time you play the same game, so that the tenth time you play the game might only give you a small portion of the pleasure of the first time.  This is where mastery comes into play.  The thrill of mastery is in exhaustively exploring every nook and cranny in a game’s design.  Although learning one more obscure word for Scrabble might not give a player much of a feeling of discovery, it can give a player a strong sense of mastery, a sense that they are getting closer and closer to maximizing their skills.

As one might expect, the pleasure of mastery requires one to play the same game hundreds or thousands of times.  Unlike discovery, which can wane with each play, the pleasure of mastery only gets stronger with each small improvement in your skills.  Chess players memorize every opening possible so that they have a strategy prepared for each opponent.  Scrabble players scour their dictionaries for words to maximize their scores.  A fan of the Rubik’s Cube will memorize the series of twists necessary to move each square to the point they can solve a cube almost instinctively.

An appetite for discovery and an appetite for mastery are not often found in the same person.  Creatively trying new ideas and relentlessly pursuing a goal aren’t easy to combine into a cohesive personality.  Yet, together they can give a board game endless replayability.  When the player feels most unsure about his skills he can enjoy the process of discovery and as the game starts to become familiar and predictable, the player can find pleasure and pride in mastering the game.

When debating the merits of various board games, often one of the worst criticisms to make of a game is that the game plays you instead of you playing the game. If your decisions aren’t meaningful or you have little control over the outcome then the game almost ceases to be a game. Yet, millions of people spend untold hours playing Bingo or pulling slots in a casino each year and other than some level of mental endurance and ability to withstand monotony, there isn’t any skill to either of these games. The chance for large prizes is obviously the main draw of lottery type games, yet there must be more to it than that. After all, if the only point was to buy a ticket and hope to win a prize then that could be accomplished much more efficiently. Why spend an entire evening in a Bingo Hall marking squares? Why pull a slot arm a thousand times when you could just have a computer spit out a thousand results in a matter of seconds? I think there is something fundamentally familiar and uplifting about these sorts of luck-based “games.”

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking once said “the universe is a great casino, where dice are thrown, and roulette wheels spin on every occasion.” In other words, chance is at the core of our existence. Whether we ascribe this power over our lives to a deity, some nebulous thing called Fate, or to the unpredictability of subatomic particles, being a human inevitably means living in a world that is not fair or is beyond our control. As I suggested in a previous blog post, one of the appealing things about board games is that they offer the player a great deal more control over their “fate” than they would normally experience. Every chess player knows that he or she will win or lose based solely on the choices they and their opponent make.

On the other hand, games can approach this problem from the opposite direction. Rather than eliminate randomness and luck from the game, the game can embrace it. And there’s something appealing about this as well. The woman who has played Bingo every Sunday for the past 40 years has no better chance of winning than the child playing his first game. As the ping pong balls bounce or the dice tumble or the roulette wheel spins, every one of us is equal. Yet, even in these games an illusion is maintained that we have some control. We pick our “lucky” numbers for the lottery. We mark our Bingo cards. We place our bets on the roulette wheel. Although most of us know that nothing we do during these games matters, we feel gratified by the sense that we our somehow participating in our fate rather than being buffeted about as we are in our daily lives. Yes, instead of playing Bingo all night we could just buy a handful of tickets, claim any prizes and go home, but then we wouldn’t be playing a game and, strangely, that’s almost as important as any prize.

One of the most common roles dice play is to limit a player’s options. In Chess, at any given moment a player might have dozens of legal moves to choose from. One can sit there and analyze each move available in the hope of finding the best one. Hence the need for chess clocks. Imagine if the same freedom was available in a party game such as Trivial Pursuit! If on your turn you were free to move to any one of a dozen different spaces you might spend several minutes each turn deciding on the best possible spot to move to, thus dragging the game to a halt. But this doesn’t mean that dice are only useful for making a game less complicated. In Backgammon the limitations on movement created by the dice is precisely what makes the game interesting. How can you best use your limited number of pips to push your checkers toward your goal? Limited choices can therefore reduce complexity but also encourage creativity.

Dice are also often used to simulate odds. This is particularly true in wargames. If an event has a 50/50 chance of occurring then you simply need to roll a 4 or better. Events that are more difficult to achieve might require a 6. When a second die is added to the mix all sorts of new possibilities open up. We find a very simple version of two dice interacting in Monopoly where a roll of doubles gets you another turn, but the various possible results of rolling two dice and the odds of any of those results appearing allows for the simulation of a number of semi-random events.

Since ancient times dice have become more sophisticated, with meticulous production techniques that have transformed simple dice made of bone or ivory into the precision dice of today. Ironically, I think that the strive for perfectly weighted dice remains connected to their most primitive function – representing a player’s fate. Ancient dice were used to tell people’s fortunes or to determine the will of the gods. If you rolled poorly it meant something. Precision dice and dice cups and towers seem like modern devices but the goal is not that different from that of ancient dice players – to make sure that the person rolling the die can’t influence the result. This also explains the importance, and pleasure, of feeling the dice in your hand and actually rolling them. Though we may no longer believe that dice are controlled by spirits, we still curse our luck when they don’t roll the way we want them to and we still feel personally connected to their results even if we know that the dice themselves don’t care who is doing the rolling.

In short, dice remain important because they create the narrative of our games. They give us obstacles to work against, simulate the world of the game, and connect us personally to that moment in time as they tumble out of our hands.

The Original Trivial Pursuit

Pat Garrett. I don’t know how many people who aren’t at least 35 years old have a chance of knowing that one. Even over 35 the pickings are still slim I imagine. It was a random question from what I believe to be the original Trivial Pursuit game.

Trivia, much like Scrabble like games that I mentioned in a previous blog, has made a splash lately. I don’t know when it started getting big at bars or restaurant/bars with their trivia games but it has to be over a decade ago. It is a great way of people getting together and having a good time showing the world just what they (don’t) know.

I, myself, have been attending trivia nearly every Wednesday night for probably the last 3 or so years at a local restaurant/bar. I’m average at best as far as trivia buffs go. The limited amount of knowledge I have on file in my head isn’t often useful for bar trivia. If I could swap out my knowledge of backgammon, cards, and tennis to know everything about the Kardashians, current pop music, and college sports I’d be a much greater asset to my team. Still, I probably enjoy trivia night as much as anyone even when I am unable to recall what beer Brewery Laverne & Shirley worked for.

It all kicks back to the original Trivial Pursuit pictured above. It was so much simpler back then. There was no internet and the onslaught of daily information didn’t exist. Two trays of cards was entertainment for years. We have many variations of Trivial Pursuit in our house now from Genus (original, 1981) spanning through some of these editions. I still enjoy playing the original because I still miss a ton of questions and there are other questions where the answers has changed over time and you have to try to put yourself in 1981 to find the right response.

The 1981 Genus edition is the only one that I know what the categories mean without having to look at a card. I remember I was pretty strong at the orange questions, SL, or Sports & Leisure whereas if I had a modern version with modern sports questions I would fail completely. Science and Nature, or SN, was a good fallback because it often coughed up a multiple choice question and I could do reasonably well in the big G, Geography. The rest were total hit or miss for me and to this day it’s still a great way to pass what seems like too much time if I can get anyone to play. You’d think I would have learned more over the years.

Life is full of twists and turns

There are many reasons why someone might enjoy playing a board game.  Some like the pure competition of a game like Chess.  Some find a game of Trivial Pursuit with friends a relaxing way to structure an evening and inspire conversation.  Some play Poker and other games for money, thrilling at the high stakes of each card flip.  Some might enjoy the physicality of sturdy game pieces and the sociality of sharing a gaming space with an opponent as opposed to playing a video game or watching a movie.  Although all of these apply to me to some degree or another, I find that the main reason I enjoy playing board games so much is the opportunity they present to make decisions that matter.

Now I am an educated adult who has chosen to get married and is now raising two children so, obviously, I make decisions that affect my life and my family’s lives every day.  Certainly these decisions matter in the sense that they will have repercussions for our lives, but there are so many such decisions each day and their effects are spread out over years and years that it’s hard to evaluate each one.  Should I set rules about how much TV my children should watch?  Is it time to change careers?  What should I make for dinner?  I may never know whether any of these choices were good or bad or how they influenced later choices.  The system that my choices exist within (the world) is simply too complex and multifaceted for anyone to track the effects of a single choice.  Chaos theory suggests that small changes can have unpredictably large effects.  This is epitomized by the famous image of a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world and causing a hurricane somewhere else.

What does this have to do with board games?  Although when we buy a board game we are buying a set of cards or dice or tiles, what we are really purchasing is a set of rules.  The rules of a board game structure its reality, limit what choices we have each turn, and govern how those choices affect who wins or loses.  Although dice rolls can be unpredictable and card distribution is not guaranteed to be fair, the world of a board game is circumscribed enough that a player can evaluate each of his choices at the end of the game.  And, unlike in real life, if I make a poor choice in a board game I get to start over and play again and see how things would have turned out differently.

The choices I make in a board game are clearly not as important as the ones I make in my real life, but because the choices I make in my real life are often made with imperfect information, unclear rules, and within the context of billions of other decisions made by other people,  it is very invigorating and satisfying to spend an hour or two simply trying to choose between one card and another and then watching the effects of my decisions unfold right before my eyes.

Inadvertently, my parents hooked me on card games for life. I was young, maybe around 6 years old, and they were playing a card game called Euchre. I asked how it was played and was basically waived off and told it was too complicated. At that point I remember watching and figuring it out for myself and one day proclaiming I was ready to play. Everyone was in shock since none of them had explained it to me but I had sat and watched and eventually figured it out for myself. If you want to hook your kid on something, try the ‘you won’t understand it tactic’!

Many of you reading this may not even know what it is, it’s a very midwest game. Most dismiss it as a skillless card game to play while drinking. It’s not. While most people play it as such, it was the first card game where I spent any significant amount of time trying to understand it. I would continue this through my life playing a lot of poker hands with myself when my dad wasn’t around to play. After high school when I no longer had a local poker game to keep me occupied I drifted towards another
gambling game, blackjack.

Even though I hadn’t really been to Vegas yet because I was too young I was still fascinated that a game existed and was offered where if approached correctly I could guarantee myself winning in the long run. I devoured all there was out at the time on blackjack starting with Edward O’Thorpe and his Beat the Dealer to Revere’s count systems through Wong and his halves and settling on Bryce Carleson’s level II system. To this day I still pick up the occasional new blackjack release but not much has changed.

Unfortunately modern Vegas is more or less a bust to your blackjack counter. Not saying you can’t beat the game but the amount of work you have to put in nowadays makes this too much like a job for my pleasure. Still, from time to time I come across a blackjack game where I can sit down and not worry about a pit boss or an eye in the sky. These games pop up at festivals that also sometimes have other parlour games. Also from time to time at my home games when we get bored of all the crazy poker variations we’ve been playing someone will suggest blackjack. Yes, 1 deck blackjack. I either deal or am dealt to, either way I get a real kick out of using what I know.

To say the ~6 months I spent on blackjack in the beginning was a waste of time would be quite unfair. It helps me even today. For example, when I started keeping a running pip count in the game of backgammon it was very easy for me. It wasn’t an absolute count I was keeping, but a plus/minus system very similar to what one does when counting cards in blackjack. Knowing the pip count at all times is critical in backgammon. All of this stems from telling a kid he wouldn’t understand something…the best reverse psychology move my parents could have made, whether they meant to do it or not, thank you.

The comparison to novels or films is a bit tricky, however, since board games have already been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and certain games, such as Chess, have been widely accepted as adult activities before the 20^th century, let alone the 21^st.  Yet, I think a case can be made for board games as a form of art.

First, they have an aesthetic quality.  You could play chess with a hand-drawn board and some rocks, but it’s not the same experience as a hand-carved set of Staunton pieces on a fine wood board.  Beauty, as always, is in the eye of the beholder, but a stylishly designed set of game pieces can be as exquisite as a finely bound book or beautifully shot close-up.

Second, they are collected.  Now human beings can, and do, collect almost anything so simply being part of a collection does not grant an object the status of art.  Games can be collected based on the manufacturer – Dal Negro games share certain qualities, as do games by Deuce or Geoffrey Parker – but modern strategy games can also be collected based on the designer.  Just as you might love the common elements in a certain author or director’s work, the board games of a certain designer might all explore a certain mechanism or have a certain thematic interest.  Games can also be collected like fine wines, stocking your collection with the perfect game for every occasion, or like modern paintings, chosen for their color, material, size, and mood to complement a particular room in your home.

Third, they say something about our culture.  This is the point where the “just entertainment” accusation often gets thrown in.  Movies were described as just entertainment until film scholars pointed out how much we could learn about our society by analyzing our popular films.  It’s already common for anthropologists to examine ancient societies by the games they chose to play, so why couldn’t the same be done with our society?  The game that inspired what we now call Monopoly was created to criticize the power landlords had over their tenants.  Likewise it is significant that the modern version of Monopoly gained popularity in the midst of the Great Depression.  If nothing else, the distribution of letters and points in a Scrabble set says something about the English language.  And Trivial Pursuit reveals a great deal about our culture in the 1980s – a time prior to the internet and the easy access to information we all now enjoy, but after the establishment of popular culture as a topic worthy of study and discussion.  When you start to also include war simulations or strategy games based in historical eras then it is even more difficult to ignore that games, just like novels or painting or films, can both represent and criticize the cultures in which they are born.

Finally, I’d like to add what I think makes games unique as an art form, though also a characteristic that often will get used against them.  Games are interactive.  Books sometimes address the reader and filmmakers use various techniques to make the audience identify with the main character, but none of these other art forms allows the “audience” to participate in quite the way games do.  Each time you play a game you are not only admiring the fine pieces and the carefully designed rules, you are telling your own story about you and your opponent.  Famous chess matches are recorded move by move for future generations to admire, but even we amateurs can sometimes remember our most intense battles on the board for years and years.  Because the “author” of the game does not have complete control over our experience, board games often get excluded from consideration as art, but, on the contrary, it is precisely this interaction between the players, the designer, and the manufacturer that I believe makes board games such an interesting object to study.