Strip Games
by Jeff
Image text: HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF STRIP GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR?
Agricola is a board game in which you start out as a farmer with a spouse. It is a turn-based game in which you have two possible movements for each character you possess. Sounds enthralling...
Jumanji is the game played in the movie by the same name.
Poohsticks is a game played in the Winnie the Pooh books in which two "players" each drop sticks from a bridge and the first stick to make it to the end wins. Sounds enthralling as a strip competition...
Podracing is the type of racing featured in Star Wars Episode I.
Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is a problem in game theory. It is the case that if two prisoners are taken into jail, but kept separate. If both choose to remain silent, they are given 6 months jail time. If they both accuses the other, they both will do 5 years in prison. If one accuses the other while the other stays silent, one goes to jail for 10 years and the other gets away scot free. When it is iterated, it is played over and over again.
Chess by Mail is just what it sounds like... and very slow.
Conway's Game of Life is a zero-player game and played by cells and here are the rules from Wikipedia:
- Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by underpopulation.
- Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
- Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
- Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell.
February 3rd, 2010
The Image text refers to the film “Wargames” where David L. Lightman unknowingly hacks the Supercomputer of the US’ military, ‘playing’ thermonuclear war with the URSS.
February 6th, 2010
After accidentally starting the supercomputer’s thermonuclear war routines, they convince it to start playing tic-tac-toe instead. It plays the game faster and faster and realizes it’s impossible for either player to win. Then it realizes, based on that, that thermonuclear war is equally impossible for either ‘player’ to win. Having determined the pointlessness of the ‘game,’ it stops ‘playing’ (before any missiles of any sort were actually fired, of course) and asks “HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS.”
February 10th, 2010
Agricola actually has been the highest rated game on boardgamegeek.com for some time (recently swapping between 1-2). It’s an outstanding game, and certainly incorrect to say there are only two options per piece (I think you may be confusing the fact that having two family members gives you two actions).
February 10th, 2010
As PlainWalker says, Agricola is a highly-regarded game of great subtlety and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in strategic boardgames. You start with two family members, which each can perform one action per turn out of a choice of about 12 to 16 options (depending on the number of players and what game options are in use), for 16 turns. You can theoretically end up with a family of up to 5 (although 3 is more common and I’ve rarely seen even 4) who can each perform an action in a turn. And yes, it is enthralling, you really have little idea who’s winning until points are counted up at the end.
Poohsticks actually involves dropping a stick into a stream on the upstream side of a bridge, and running over to the downstream side (not “to the end”, whatever that means) to see whose stick appears from under the bridge first.