board games

“Scrabble isn’t a word game. It’s an area-control game with 150,000 rules to define legal placement for your resources. Some of those rules have mnemonics in the form of words you know.”

The origin of this fair description of Scrabble is traced in a recent Hacker News discussion of the game, prompted by Oliver Roeder’s 2022 article On the Insanity of Being a Scrabble Enthusiast.

Over the last couple of years I have been introduced to two card games with a similar theme - co-operating to play numbered cards in an increasing sequence - but with very different approaches. This article considers The Mind, a game of group rapport and intuition, where players must sense the right moment to play their cards. Hanabi, described in Part 1 of this series, is a game of deduction.

Over the last couple of years I have been introduced to two card games with a similar theme - co-operating to play numbered cards in an increasing sequence - but with very different approaches. Hanabi, described in this article (Part 1), is a game of deduction - it echoes classic puzzles featuring multiple logicians reasoning not only about what they know themselves, but what they can deduce about what the others know based on what they say or do. The Mind, on the other hand, is a game of group rapport and intuition, and will be discussed in Part 2 of this article.

Imagine signing up, along with 9 friends, to play a game which will could take 10 years to complete — and those years dealing with quirky, complex rules and finicky calculations. That is what Richard Berg’s 1979 WWII board wargame published by SPI, “The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940–43”, demands — as I learned from Luke Winkie’s article The Notorious Board Game That Takes 1,500 Hours To Complete.