One reason I haven’t been posting much to LJ this year is that I’ve been spending far too much time on line surfing BoardGameGeek. I don’t have anywhere near the level of sheer obsession displayed by many BGG regulars, who boast of owning over 500 games and post pictures of entire rooms devoted to storing their collections. Nonetheless, I enjoy ( Read more... )

When I was little we had a simple dice game called Bowl and Score. The game comprises ten six-sided dice with a bowling printed on one face of each. The dice are treated like bowling pins: roll the ten dice, and those with the pin side up are “left” after the first ball. These are thrown a second time for the spare shot. The dice are thrown in ( Read more... )

Oh, goody-more Set!

For a moment I thought I’d discovered something beautiful and profound about Set, but it turns out I was off by a small but rapidly increasing amount. While working this out, I found out some other neat things about the game by accident. (To avoid repeating myself too much I’ll assume that you’ve read my previous two posts ( Read more... )

My Set obsession is still going strong. Set (in case you haven’t already seen it) is a simple pattern-matching game in which players try to identify sets (or “SETs”) of three cards that are either all the same or all different in each of four attributes: color (red, green, purple), shape (diamonds, pills, tildes), shading (open, hatched or solid ( Read more... )

I joined a Meetup group who play different kinds of board games every Tuesday evening. Originally I joined because the group specialized in Scrabble; and for several months that’s just about all we played. But as the group slowly grew, we began to diversify. These days we usually get enough people that we have three or four games going ( Read more... )

I don’t normally do memes, but I wish I’d done one I saw a long time ago. The meme was to ask readers to choose one of your interests, and you'd explain the story behind it. I would have participated if I were sure that someone would ask me about catac. The meme went extinct long ago, but I still want to tell the story of catac, since the word’s ( Read more... )

The other day I was thinking of my distant youth, and overcome by a fit of nostalgia, I searched the Web for evidence of some of the bizarre games we used to play when I was a tyke. I got pictures and everything-isn't the Internet great? And it was brought home to me just how trippy these old games were. But living in the late 60s and early 70s ( Read more... )