Games

As COVID-19 spreads around the world, confining millions of people indoors, online chess has exploded in popularity and provided much-needed social connections for longtime players and newcomers alike. Chess.com, the most-visited global website for online chess play, expects 10 years worth of site growth to occur within the next few months. It has gained more than 700,000 members over the past three weeks, according to figures provided to Sporting News, and last weekend elevated to 9.1 million games played per day. The company is asking its engineering team to work overtime to keep its servers stable. Bernard Shaw despised it. "Chess," he said, "is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time." HG Wells took a similar line. "The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world," he wrote in an essay. "It annihilates a man." Raymond Chandler was just as rude, calling it "as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency". I prefer the view of the German-born Siegbert Tarrasch, the best player in the world in the 1890s, though never world champion (the official title had only been instituted in 1886). "Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy," he wrote in the preface to The Game of Chess, which was published in 1931, three years before his death. The more you know about the game, the more limitless it seems. Thirty-two pieces and pawns on a 64-square board, yet more possible game variants than there are atoms in the universe. We all differ in our abilities to solve problems, learn, think rationally, acquire new knowledge and integrate existing and new ideas.

Ludus Duodecim Scriptorum – Duodecim Scripta – The Game of Twelve Inscriptions From ancient games.com Ludus Duodecim Scriptorum, or Duodecim Scripta, is an ancient Roman game, which combined elements of luck and strategy. It is somewhat similar to Backgammon, in the fact that each player has 15 pieces, and the pieces stack and move on and off the board in a similar fashion. The name Ludus Duodecim Scriptorum in Latin, means The Game of Twelve Inscriptions, and refers to the fact that many Duodecim Scripta boards had a Latin letter written for each cell, instead of just circles. There is a theory that the reason letters were used and not circles or squares is because the game was used for gambling, which was prohibited during the later years of the Roman empire, and so the writing on the boards was used as an excuse to call them “inscriptions”, instead of gambling devices, thus preventing the users from being arrested and the boards confiscated. I emphasize that this is just a theory, because some of the inscriptions are so specific to gaming and gambling that it is really hard to believe that somehow the inscription would conceal the gambling aspect of the game. The three large rosettes or circles in the center of the boards were markers where the players would put the coins that were being gambled on. https://www.ancientgames.org/ludus-duodecim-scriptorum-duodecim-scripta-the-game-of-twelve-inscriptions/ we are going to try to make a board like this stellar one from https://www.ignitedartsdesign.com/listing/735295503/ludus-duodecim-scriptorum-an-ancient

our handmade Senet board, pieces and dice sticks Ancient Games, Senet Senet is a race game dating back to ancient egyptian times, and it is thought that it may be the ancestor of modern day backgammon (Soubeyrand (1995)). We know of this game today due to discoveries made through the excavation of ancient tombs. The original rules of Senet (The Game of Passing) are unknown. There are no records of the rules ever having been discovered, however many have attempted to reconstruct the rules using knowledge gathered through excavations in which images have been found on ancient tomb walls, as well as through Senet related artifacts. Two of the most well known versions of the games rules have been created by T. Kendall and RC Bell. In this version of Senet the rules known as Kendall's rules will be used, which are the work of Timothy Kendall (1978). The rules state that the game is played on a rectangular board with with three rows of ten squares called "houses", as shown in Figure 1. Fig 1. At the beginning of the game the seven counters (per player) are placed next to each other, alternating along the first fourteen squares, as shown in Figure 1. The starting square is the fifteenth square on the board, starting from top left and following a backward ‘S’ shape, as shown in Figure 2.  Fig 2.  The players take turns moving the counters according to the throw of sticks, or one or two astragals. After the astragals/sticks are thrown the counters are moved a number of squares equal to the number of points ‘rolled’. Pieces move along the board in a backward ‘S’ shaped pattern. When a counter lands on a square already occupied by

Frisbee Golf is all the rage now, it’s inexpensive and fun. https://www.pdga.com/introduction

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