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zests | 4 years ago

I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.

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legitster|4 years ago

Richard Garfield (mathematician and designer of Magic the Gathering and others) used to give a talk about randomness in games.

He talked about the history of chess, and how there used to be a lot more variants of the game (some even being a 4 player game with dice!), and over time competitive players naturally will want to remove random elements from the game.

But on the other hand, some amount of wild unpredictability is important to attract players - there's a softening of skill gaps.

mod|4 years ago

In some of my own pursuits, I've seen things that make me agree.

Pool has little randomness, and therefore it is very difficult to beat a player who is better than you. The best players want to eliminate the possibility of that happening by making longer races, racking their own balls, winner breaks, things like that. Pool is dying for it.

Meanwhile poker has a large amount of short term variance (luck) and it keeps bad players interested for years and years. The worst player in the world can sit and beat the best players in the world at any given moment. Poker is still going as strong as ever-- maybe more strongly than ever at this point. People are coming out of the woodwork this year itching to play.

I think most of the greatest, longest- lived games in the modern era will need a high amount of randomness, because of computers doing analysis. Even more, with the absent of solvers and the like, many poker variants cannot be solved in real time and all-encompassing strategies cannot be developed. More computational power could change that in the future, I guess.

mcguire|4 years ago

Greg Costikyan's book Uncertainty in Games is another good source.

And this topic frequently comes up in wargaming circles (frequently enough to be annoying :-)). Some feel that nondeterminism is a crutch for the low-skilled while others feel that it is the only reasonable way to handle a low-fidelity model of reality or that it teaches the valuable skill of how to deal with the bag of rotten lemons that the universe periodically hands you.

da_chicken|4 years ago

You can see his lecture on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/dSg408i-eKw

You can tell he's going a little from memory, but the points are all still there. His arguments that skill and luck are not opposite sides of the same spectrum is quite good.

mikepurvis|4 years ago

In many games, it's pretty clearly part of the design that the random elements are there to provide rubber-banding— particularly in games with more than 2 players, where sometimes you try to win without looking too much like it, so you avoid getting ganged up on (think: the robber in Settlers).

floren|4 years ago

This is why I really like cribbage. There's a major element of randomness based on the cards you're dealt, but lots of opportunities for strategy in how you play them. New players have a chance but more experienced players tend to make better choices with what they have.

Andrew_nenakhov|4 years ago

Yeah, add health to pieces and use dice to determine what happens when pawn takes the queen: roll 5 and your queen wins, but with 1/3 health.

That would really suck.

btilly|4 years ago

It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years.

Medieval chess was a very different game. For the most stark example, the queen did not get her modern move until around 1450.

The game has since been stable for about 500.

And yet something as basic as, "white moves first" was first suggested in 1857.

lupire|4 years ago

"white moves first" is an arbitrary/aesthetic/logistic choice, that doesn't affect gameplay logic.

Left-handed players may prefer Black goes first.

QuercusMax|4 years ago

Does "white moves first" actually affect the game, though? It's just a convention.

JohnJamesRambo|4 years ago

What did the queen do before then?

primus202|4 years ago

I read "It's All a Game" by Tristan Donovan and the chapter on chess was definitely one of the most fascinating. There are so many little bits of human history frozen in amber by the rules.

I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance. The rooks used to be war elephants hence how they "charge" across the board in straight lines (they were adapted into rooks as the game was Europeanized). Also the reason you never capture the king, which used to be the shah, and resign instead is because killing a rival shah was a big no-no!

So many interesting tidbits in that book. Highly recommend.

satchlj|4 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation - I will check it out.

In "Do Dice Play God", another great book, I learned that the earliest dice (probably used initially for diving the future and only later for gambling) had rectangular sides instead of square ones.

I wonder if (a) that was because their creators didn't understand even the very basics of probability, or (b) if the idea of fairness and each number being rolled with equal frequency just wasn't important to them. Not sure.

anthk|4 years ago

In Spanish some piece names are different.

Rook = tower. Knight = horse. Bishop = alfil, maybe from Arabic for "elephant".

satchlj|4 years ago

Just bought "It's All a Game" - looking forward to reading it!

6gvONxR4sf7o|4 years ago

> The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants…

It’s going to be fascinating to see. I can imagine games getting “frozen” with hard coded rules and clear Official Rules too. I expect that to happen to word spellings, for example, with most everything we write having a layer of autocorrect in the loop. Digital games could do the same, when you can’t make house rules without programming your own variant.

dragonwriter|4 years ago

> Digital games could do the same, when you can’t make house rules without programming your own variant.

Or go the other way, as low-/no-code customization tools and online distribution make it easier to make and share variants than it is to do so at any scale with physical games, subject to the openness (both in design and social factors like IP status) of the base game.

zentiggr|4 years ago

I love the idea of "Bad Chess"... such a wild concept on top of an otherwise very structured ruleset.

goblinux|4 years ago

Very Bad Chess by Zach Gage is the best I’ve seen of this. It’s on the iOS App Store, might be on google play. Worth a look if you like “bad chess”

failrate|4 years ago

I enjoy thr Royal Game of Ur and even made my own board. One recommendation I'm trying to propagate is to use 4 "2-sided" randomizers instead of a 4-sided randomized for purposes of more strategic play (normal distribution versus flat). I usually play with a reroll 0s option or my ultimate house rule: 0s get you maximum 1 free reroll token.

joemi|4 years ago

I highly recommend Xiangqi and Shogi. They both feel very chess-like but also very different. They're a little tricky to learn to play if you're not familiar with Chinese characters (Xiangqi) or Japanese characters (Shogi), but once you get familiar with the characters used in the games, it's easy enough.

Shogi is really neat in that captured pieces can be returned to the board by the capturer. You don't have different colored pieces, but directional pieces to show which side they belong to.

Xiangqi is my favorite of the two. To me, it feels like a better depiction of war than Chess. The equivalent of Chess's king stays in a small area, there's a river separating the two sides of the board which some pieces can't cross, there's a catapult for interesting ranged attacks. Maybe I've just grown a bit bored of Chess over all the years and Xiangqi is just relatively newer to me, but Xiangqi feels a lot more fun to play, IMO.

colordrops|4 years ago

It has less pieces and is a faster game than chess, which makes it a more "casual" game than western chess, which could be what makes it fun.

sellyme|4 years ago

> The game has since been stable for about 500.

There were a few patches to chess in the mid to late 20th century that disallowed promoting a pawn to an enemy piece (this was useful for forcing a smothered mate), and to prevent vertically castling to a pawn that had been promoted into a rook on the 8th rank (notated as 0-0-0-0-0-0).

Not exactly fundamental changes, but still amusing that they needed to be made after so many centuries.

shusaku|4 years ago

It seems like an AI can now be trained just by encoding the rules and having it play itself (no database required to bootstrap). This should be great for variants (assuming enough processing power) since you will always be able to find a partner.

toxik|4 years ago

I think paying an AI won’t be very satisfying, though. You can’t do sneaky things to a player that is essentially statistics on steroids - even if you pull it off, it’s likely not that you were sneaky that gave you the win, you just found a pattern it didn’t know. It’s dead, cold, calculating. Beating a human will always be more interesting, because you can talk about it, “ha, you could’ve mated me then in two moves,” etc.

Humans will never be replaced by anything less than humans.

andrepd|4 years ago

The Royal Game of Ur is another very very very old game.