Who is David Parlett? He is a games scholar who has studied card and board games as well as publishing many popular books:
The Oxford Guide to Card Games and The Oxford History Board Games.
He is also an inventor of many board games, his most successful being Hare and Tortoise. His German edition won the most prised "Spiel des Jahres" (Game of the Year) in 1979.
David Parlett visited out university where he gave a talk. He asked us a question as he began:
What is a race game? What defines a race?
Idea's were thrown around the group. 2 or more players in a game competing against each other was one point mentioned but the main thing that defines a race game is Start and Finish. With that in mind, can Cribbage or Chess be defined as a race game seeing as players must get to a certain point on the board before their opponent? It's an interesting question and one with multiple answers.
He also spoke about other aspects of board games: How do players move, how many players?
He then challenged us to make our own game. Sam, Matt and I started throwing around idea's about what we could do and ended up with a 3 player board game. Each player had their own start point and four playing pieces. The object of the game was to get all four of their pieces around the board and to the finish. One the trio of triangles on the board were an addition three triangles coloured black. If a player landed on this board they could heavily impact the progress of another player by resetting one of their pieces back to their initial start point.
No comments:
Post a Comment