Where do I even begin?

Holy crap, it's been an eventful time since my last post. The only way to relate everything is incoherently, so try to follow along....

Oust - a 2-1/2 year old game that laid dormant for its first two years, with nobody, least of all me, realizing it was any good. For me it was just a concept game. I wanted to do something really different, so I looked at the overall structure of the game. I didn't (and still don't, except for Oust) know of any games that start with an empty board and end with tokens only of one color on the board. That being the goal, the details of the game worked themselves out. With barely enough play testing on tiny boards to make sure Oust was a solid concept, I released it and pretty much forgot about it.

A few months ago, a lady named Christina recommended Oust to Daniel Savarese, proprietor of igfip, who then implemented Oust - all unbeknownst to me. Some time later I stumbled onto it and began playing Daniel who had already developed a strong interest in Oust. Soon I developed a strong interest in Oust as well. It's a world class game. There's tactics, strategy, and consistent tension. There's a constant "walking the plank" sensation in this game of annihilation.

I recommended Oust to Arty, founder of iggc, who also added it. At some point I realized that, if both players cooperate in filling up the Go board with black and white stones interspersed in a checkerboard pattern, the game will end in a draw. At first I was distressed by this, but this is the only type of draw that can occur and it requires an extreme level of cooperation between the two players. A draw couldn't possibly occur in Oust between two competing players.

While I was distressed though, I released a hexagonal version of Oust with identical rules except played on a hex hex board. Even cooperating players can't create a draw in hex hex Oust. I'm glad all this happened because Hex Oust (as it's called on iggc) seems like a better game to me.

Moving on... Oust totally exploded on iggc. It was the number one game for days. Now it's died down and only a handful of people still play including me, but we're real enthusiastic about it.

Flume - new game in January 2010. Flume is, architecturally at least, a very interesting game. In Dots and Boxes you have two types of "tokens", so to speak. You have short line segments connecting the dots and you have initials filling the squares. And occasionally you have multi-move turns. Flume is uncannily similar to Dots and Boxes except instead of lines and initials you have two different color sets of stones. Stones serve as both the walls of the tunnels and what eventually fills the tunnels.

The exact sequence of events is fuzzy at this point but I'll relate it the best I can. I ordered a book on Dots and Boxes by Elwyn Berlekamp. This lead to Mathematical Ways, and then someone recommended Lessons in Play by Richard Nowakowski and two other guys. I contacted Nowakowski about Flume and he said he'd already heard of it, found it interesting, and would study it after finishing the vacation he was on, in particular how Dots and Boxes theory would relate to Flume. Even though Flume gameplay is very similar to that of Dots and Boxes, the two games end up being fundamentally different and there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap in tactical principles between the two.

So Nowakowsi was looking at my game and I was looking at his book. All (or most) of the games in Lessons are so-called combinatorial games. One requirement of cg's is that the object must be to have the last move of the game. I.e. if you don't have a move available, you lose. A combinatorial game typically ends with tokens of both colors scattered all over the board, a real mess. Normally I'd never release such a game on aesthetic grounds, but since I was getting hyped up about combinatorial games, I decided I needed to design one of my own.

After a few weeks of messing around with the Checkers set I came out with three combinatorial games in March, within days of each other: Jostle, Colonnade, and Mad Bishops.

Going back in time a little: Flume started as a hex hex game. I just happened to be messing around with a hex hex board and came up with Flume. I was playing Arty in the sandbox at iggc (a generic game board where you can use whatever rules you want). While we were playing, the notion of square Flume occurred to me and I started messing around with some Go stones on the Go board I keep on a table next to my office chair. Square Flume is a simpler game and it's the only version that's programmed at iggc.

So I wrote and released the Flume rule sheet that night, and the next morning I get an email from none other than Wayne Schmittberger, senior editor of Games magazine. He had a question about an earlier game of mine that had seemed interesting. I had to inform him that that particular game turned out to be a dud, but that I had a new game he might be interested in, Flume. A few short weeks later, boom, a three page spread in Games magazine for Flume - both the square and hex hex versions.

I ended up playing a student of Nowakowski, Neil McKay, who absolutely can't lose when playing combinatorial games. It was really something to behold. McKay was someone who worked extensively on the book, Lessons in Play. McKay described some basic principles to observe when playing Flume and it was like the book come to life. Hearing McKay talk about Flume was exactly like reading a missing sub-chapter from Lessons.