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Ropecon 2024
Ropecon 2024 was a great experience for games. We played lots of good games, demoed Asian games and met nice people.
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Gaming Year 2012
Another year gone. Good years keep on rolling – I rather enjoyed 2011, and have no complaints about 2012. My kids continued to be good playing company. My son is now six and half, and is ready for some proper family games. I started introducing him to card games, as well, and that worked well.…
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Glen More and John Silver
Yesterday we had our weekly meeting, and I’m raporting it today! How fast is that! While waiting for another player to arrive, the other Mikko and I played a quick match of 13×13 Go on his iPad. It was nice! I’ve been thinking about getting an iPad, mostly for gaming, but I’ve had some reservations…
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Definition of skill in games
Dutch professor Ben van der Genugten has created a formula for calculating the skill level of a game. He has used it in Dutch courts to help determine that fantasy sports games are games of skill and now he’s using it to argue that poker is a game of skill, too. (See Leading Professor Rekindles…
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Year metric
I’ve been a fan of Matthew Gray’s month metric. Now I happened unto his Every year 2007 update, focusing on the year metric. I haven’t been bothering with that, believing I wouldn’t have many high-scoring games. Well, I thought, why not — it’s a simple thing to add to my game stats package. I was…
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Teaching Go
Way of teaching Go is an instructional article describing a method of teaching Go to children (guess why I’m blogging this). The article suggests playing Atari-Go (or Ponnuki-Go), which seems to be the recommended method of teaching Go to beginners. That is, play the simple capture game where the only goal is to capture one…
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Through the Desert vs Go
There’s a long rant at the Game Table about Through the Desert vs Go, where he goes to show that Through the Desert has absolutely nothing to do with Go, and thus the games shouldn’t be compared. I agree — his analysis makes sense. In the ways he describes, Go and Through the Desert have…
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Games and artificial intelligence
Yesterday I watched a bit of a documentary about Garry Kasparov and how he lost a match to IBM’s Deep Blue. As the story goes, Deep Blue pulled an untypical move in the second game, causing Kasparov to lose. After that, he lost his concentration and failed to win the match. Kasparov, naturally, accused IBM…
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Little Golem
I recently registered at Little Golem. It’s a play-by-web site featuring a selection of games. StreetSoccer should be of interest to some (looks like Iain tried it), I’m there mostly to play Go. The interface is inferior to my regular haunt, Dragon Go Server, but Little Golem has something Dragon still hasn’t: well-organised tournaments. Little…
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Monday game session
Typical Monday session: we played Go. Juho kicked my butt twice, partially thanks to some rather grueling mistakes I made. However, by then Ari had joined us and I was finally able to test out my Black Vienna deck. It worked well and the game was fun. Ari was the first one to make a…