beige

Commissioned originally by a paint company for voice-over artist Ken Nordine to write and perform radio spots in the style of signature his “word jazz” albums (also long-time WBEZ Chicago public radio host of the programme of the same name), the work expanded by 1967 into a full recording of some thirty tracks, personifying a different colour each, kind of like Eighty-Eight Lines about Forty-Four Women. Covered hues include Puce, Chartreuse, Ecru and Mauve. The reverse of the sleeve and liner-notes included byzantine instructions for a board game and make a finger-painting based on the order prescribed and scoring was self-apparent.

6x6

seven minutes of terror: Perseverance lands on Mars, beginning its search for signs of past life  

cyborg tomato: AI Weirdness (previously) generates its own mascot—plus others  

polar flare: examining every map projection and how it distorts our world view at once—see previously  

simon says: a vast archives of electronic handheld and table-top games and consoles from decades past—via Swiss Miss  

fabian society: capitalism coexists with constructivism in Czech city of Zlín  

hello world: the newest Martian probe beams back its first images

six wedges

On this evening back in 1979, over a game of Scrabble two newspaper editors, Chris Haney and Scott Abbott—unable to locate all their letter tiles, decided to make up their own game, establishing the basic concept for what would become Trivial Pursuit—the board game commercially released in 1981.

disrupted chess

Via the always excellent Nag on the Lake, we are introduced to the range of multi-sensory board games—fluxchess sets—conceived and crafted by studio artist (see previously) Takako Saito to question the primacy of vision to play and in the artistic aesthetic in general by tethering experience to higher planes through the richness of perception and incorporating all the senses.

In addition to the pictured version where players have to ascertain each phial-piece’s rank and range of motion by sampling the liquor it contains, there is also spice chess with the chessmen identical and distinguished into one of the six by its scent and more tactile and acoustic games. Much more to explore at the source link up top.

truly, madly, deeply

Via Things Magazine, we very much enjoyed this bit of lockdown spelunking into the fantasy worlds that people are creating in their basements and for what it lacks for in photographs of the interlocutors’ sub-levels and rumpus-rooms, I consider it more than making amends by recalling us to the fact that Barbara Streisand has a whole town in her cellar with boutique stores to display her wardrobe. Do you have a little nook of your own to escape to or project on? Much more to explore at the links above.

park place and pall mall

With a long layover and an afternoon to wander Londontown, markets consultant Dan Barker (via Kottke’s Quick Links) used his time to document the properties on that city’s version of the game Monopoly (previously) and provide a bit of history and context for each as he moves around the board with the capital’s streets and stations still in the grips of quarantine and social distancing. Real estate costs have increased significantly as compared to Atlantic City.

8x8

expansion pack: kit and ideas for remixing new board games by combining pieces and platforms of classic games one already owns—via Kottke’s Quick Links

video phone: the teleconferencing tool that’s being forced on many of us is a privacy and security nightmare whose long-term liabilities far outweigh the benefits of seeing colleagues in pyjamas

razliv haystack: a look into how the mythos of Lenin fuelled the early Soviet tourism industry

stay sane, stay safe: a graphic design community’s rapid response to promote positivity

at home everywhere: with at least a quarter of the world’s population under at least partial lockdown, a design duo has turned national flags into houses

utica club: beer steins Schultz and Dooley (voiced by Jonathan Winters) advertise Matt Brewery’s flagship beverage

tossed dallas: Tuna Antipasto and assorted silliness—see previously

mashrabiya and mezzanine: a celebration of balconies

15 x 15

Delightfully, some eight decades after it was first prototyped and trialled in the basement of a Methodist church in the neighbourhood of Queens, the board game Scrabble, still enduring and having gone multi-lingual, has earned a semi-official historic marker in the form of this street sign.
In 1938, out of work architect Alfred Mosher Butts (*1899 – †1993) came up with the concept of play and conducted a frequency analysis on letters, assigning values to the tiles. The street sign may not be a high-scoring hand and was originally probably an homage of an enthusiastic Scrabble club but the city’s department of public works have dutifully replaced the modified marker when it was inevitably pilfered.

tafl top

Our gratitude to TYWKIWDBI for the introduction to the family of Nordic and Celtic strategy board games played out on a grid with asymmetrical armies with the player on the defensive clustered at the centre of the board—protecting a king or castle from capture.
Known as hnefatafl (fist-table—I guess for pounding the table and upsetting the pieces out of frustration over losing) or Viking chess, variants were played in the British Isles and Scandinavia for centuries—with the received rules written down by natural philosopher Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, but so rife with errors and mistranslations that the rules needed to be re-written and the original form of play was lost. Trying to reconstruct this ancient game, however, and watching it evolve has proven to be a fun and fertile activity. Learn more at the link up top.

rent gap and rehabilitation

Via the always brilliant Nag on the Lake, we are invited to play an unauthorised edition of the board game Monopoly whose rules and scoring invoke the spirit of the original version of “The Landlord’s Game” far better than the Parker Brothers’ interpretation or regional variants.
The art collective Chinatown Soup’s Chinatown edition features anchoring shops and local businesses rather than more or less desirable properties for development and poses challenges to players to save neighbourhoods from the blight of gentrification rather than be rewarded for it as a virtue and promotes socially responsible growth. One has to rehouse, for example, displaced residents priced-out of their homes—another reason that the board is not given addresses owing to the amorphous nature of gentrification that’s not bounded by certain streets or districts and people are moved to the margins. Learn more about the collective’s activities and activism at the link above.

game of optional goals

Had I not learned otherwise, I would have thought that this alternative reality version, meritocratic of the board game Monopoly was some sort of commission from some No Such Agency to communicate with its field agents but Careers from Parker Brothers was introduced in 1955. In addition to the outer track, there are several internal loops, career paths to try and many more regular opportunities to draw cards of chance and a rather involved scoring system (recorded on a Magic Slate Paper Saver pad) to monitor progress and achieve a sort of work-life balance with a Success Formula of money, fame and happiness. Designed by sociologist, ethnographer and author James Cooke Brown (*1921 - †2000), players could aspire to be an astronaut, farmer or a uranium prospector among other things and landing on the same square as another knocked the first player to “the park bench”—intimating that they were out of work and fallen on hard times. Later versions of the game were adapted to better reflect the cultural milieu.

tabletop

TYWKIWDBI directs our attention to the ultimate, extended Monopoly board—which was apparently prototyped, with the rules of play laid out here but was never put into production due to (ironically) copyright issues. The discussion at the source thread is a pretty interesting one on how most game play is conducted according to house-rules and most never bother with the formal instructions. Would you like to play this Inception-version of the game? Maybe an enterprising designer could pull it off and successfully pitch it to the company.

7x7

gloomy sunday: a neural network could teach humans a thing or two about art appreciation and seeing beauty in the mundane

civil engineering: experiment with urban transportation and infrastructure planning, via Kottke

orders of magnitude: the quantity of user data scraped by malicious actors grows

tabletop: British Museum Mesopotamian artefacts curator works out the playbook for an ancient board

methuselah-ness: the defining trait of a tree might be in their immortality (lack of senescence) rather than height or woodiness, via Kottke

legend of the overfiend: a nostalgic screening and a look at the spread of anime and manga

thanatosis: a longer version of mongoose horse-play with explanations of their behaviour

curiouser and curiouser or hit or miss

Writer and logistician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll (previously), concluded his 1886 The Game of Logic—which challenged readers in an engaging way to parse out Boolean inferences and propositions by means of a table top game that the book instructed players to make—with a chapter subtitled “Thou canst not hit it, hit it, hit it,/Thou canst not hit it, my good man.” Ninety one pairings of seemingly logical premises ensue but there’s no key or solutions to be found, so one is expected to draw his or her own conclusions. Though these aphorisms might be debated at the Mad Hatter’s table, they are also quite poetic and enigmatic. Be sure to check out Futility Closet at the link above to browse the whole list and nominate your favourite.
Some oysters are silent;
No silent creatures are amusing.

No frogs write books;
Some people use ink in writing books.

His songs never last an hour;
A song, that lasts an hour, is tedious.

Some mountains are insurmountable;
All stiles can be surmounted.

All wasps are unfriendly;
No puppies are unfriendly.

All owls are satisfactory;
Some excuses are unsatisfactory.

Caterpillars are not eloquent;
Jones is eloquent.

boardwalk empire

Messy Nessy Chic USA correspondent Luke Spencer explores the mothballed resorts and casinos of Atlantic City, New Jersey—a city (previously) with an economy briefly revived by world-class shyster Donald J Trump, whose spelunking serves as a vital illustration of how an opportunistic, rentier business model enriches no one but the syndicate itself.

zero-player game

Conceived in 1970, the Game of Life is a demonstration of iterative arrays from British polymath and professor John Horton Conway. Categorised as a zero-player game, human involvement or volition only takes place at the initial state, seeding the game’s grid universe, which determines how the board evolves over subsequent generations. Each grid square or cell can be either populated or unpopulated—on or off—and interacts with the eight other cells that frame it according to four basic protocols: an isolated cell perishing from underpopulation, a cell with the right amount of neighbours thrives, a cell with too many neighbours dies from overcrowding, and an unpopulated cell with a precise amount of neighbours becomes populated—as if by reproduction.
Cellular automata such as these have practical applications in encryption and security, owing the unpredictable nature of the outcome though the world and conditions can be fully known, but also produces interesting, stable algorithmic organisms that oscillate and creep across the board. Of course these creatures only evolve by analogy, sort of like how artificial intelligence is an approximation of cognition through pattern-recognition and exploitation, but is a useful tool for visualising how computational routines work and a way to comprehend how machines learn and behave in novel and unexpected ways.

monte carlo method

Notwithstanding the adage that only God can generate truly random numbers—that is outcomes not contingent on some inscrutable or traceable series of prior actions—or the pronouncement that God does not play dice, in 1955 (and reprinted to the playful derision of critics in 2001) the RAND Corporation published its big book of random numbers, one of the last in the genre, under the title A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. Made obsolete by the ability of computers to generate serviceably pseudo-random numbers (much like logarithmic tables), such endeavours, made with a roulette wheel and a computer, were important and foundational brokers in cryptography and security ciphers.

tabletop

The curatorial staff over at Hyperallergic feature an absolutely amazing collection of board games acquired by ardent collectors Ellen and Arthur Liman that reach back to the conception of the evening’s entertainment in the early nineteenth century. A spinoff from advances in printing technologies, as ephemera, the topics emphasised and values signalled (here are a few other examples of select messaging) offer a rather unique glimpse at the popular imagination of people the UK of Georgian and Victorian eras. Be sure to visit the link up top to peruse a whole gallery of wholesome pastimes and to learn more about the collection’s recent compilation in book form.

aeroplanette

Though popularity and thus signalled acceptance for the concept of heavier than air propulsion as a viable and reliable form of conveyance took some time to cement itself in the minds’ of the public—as told through product tie-ins—was more gradual than, say, the appetite for all things space related. Nonetheless by 1912, there was a parlour game, a version of roulette, which in this variation had a tethered propeller-powered plane that was wound up and stayed aloft for around thirty circuits. The winner of the wager was the player who choose the correct world capital that the craft would touch down in. In the illustration, it looks to me like a dispute is about to ensue with the plane landing exactly on the line between Berlin and Wien.

pottersville or to the manor born

Via Waxy, we learn that much like the business model of American retail giants that wouldn’t have been able to destroy independent, small shops without the government subsidising the income of those in their employ (through welfare and food-stamp programmes that appear to be going away as well), Number One Daughter’s husband was more than willing to ascribe to the same strategy in becoming a slum-lord.
At least part of that real estate kingdom now twained to Dear Leader’s includes the management of several public housing estates housing tenants whose rent is in part or fully disbursed by government monies. This sort of corporate welfare is despicable enough, but ever the classy one, he goes one further in order to exploit those serfs unfortunate enough to have ended up in one of these complexes with litigation and intimidation should they contemplate moving out and hitting renters with escalating late fees should they fall behind a day or two on payments. Upon learning the identity of their landlord, residents were absolutely awed by the avarice demonstrated by chasing after such relatively small change and having such atrocious accommodations associated with the family enterprise.