Good Abstract Games

Before choosing to come to Wittenberg University, I got in touch with the school's role-playing group. I had recently started playing the recent edition of D&D back in Boston and was hoping to find a new group. I was assured there would be a campaign starting up after I got there. Sweet!

I went to the group's opening meeting a few weeks back, even though I had already figured out who I was going to be playing with. Once there I realized that this is actually a full-fledged gaming group, not just focused on role-playing. In particular, the club is proud of the number of board games they have amassed! Every Saturday night, they hold an open gaming night, where most people play some board games.

I will likely be showing up this week, bringing Atropos and Tsuro with. I am curious, though, which good board games people know of that are interesting theoretically---either because they have difficult strategies not overwhelmed by randomness, or they look more like abstract combinatorial games. I know that there are already well-known games like this (Chess, Go, etc) but which lesser-known games fit into this category?

Let me know and I will have them ready for Saturday!

As a note: I have been getting plenty of emails about topics mentioned in these posts. I will try to address everything and will post my own thoughts in comments... when I have a chance. I love getting the emails, but please consider posting a comment directly to the blog. :)

A CGT course for undergrads

I am again curious to hear from people who have taught CGT courses. After starting this blog, I got a lot of comments about potential topics, tools and plans for teaching a graduate-level course in combinatorial games.

At Wittenberg University, however, we do not have graduate students in Math and CS (the "University" comes from our graduate education program, I believe). Also, we sadly do not have enough upper-level CS majors right now to effectively teach a separate course aimed at that audience. We do have two senior-level majors who might be able to take such a course, but it's unclear whether we would actually have any students in it.

It turns out that I have two real options for the near future:

A) I could teach a mid-level combinatorial game theory course aimed at Math and CS students who have completed some form of discrete-math-ish course. This would at least let me assume the students have been exposed to induction and partial ordering and would let me get somewhat deep into the subject.

B) I could teach a freshman-only board game course as a part of our "WittSem" series here. This would be some sort of combination of a class and an introduction tool along with defining an initial advising group. Incoming students have to take exactly one WittSem the fall of their freshman year. Here I think I would be able to have a lot of fun and perhaps draw people into the Math/CS department, but we likely wouldn't be able to get deep into the actual material. I would have to be cautious to avoid a course where we just play a lot of board games and don't do anything academic.

Are there any suggestions out there? I would love to hear experienced and inexperienced advice on these two, or perhaps some completely different options that I haven't considered.

When do we actually play?

One of the best things I discovered when I arrived at Wittenberg a few months ago was that someone in the geology department had a laminating machine. Wittenberg being an extremely friendly place, they were more than happy to let me use it right away.

What did I want? Some nice game boards I could leave on my desk. Perhaps I could "force" visitors to my office to play with me. I've often found there was no better way to begin research on a game than to actually play with people. It doesn't necessarily matter whether your opponent is a novice or a master; facing someone who doesn't share your mind and watching the game play out is an extremely helpful tool. Between unexpected moves and the ability to focus on just one side of the game (and perhaps some other psychological things I'm unaware of) I often am looking for opponents for my games. (Sometimes playing against yourself is useful and necessary also: it is easy to "implement" one player to follow a certain strategy and then see if the other half of you can beat it.)

Finding actual opponents is difficult, though. Consider the following exchange:

Me: "Hey, do you want to try out a new game with me? I get the feeling it's really really hard to play well."

You: "Uhhhh...."

The readers of this blog might be inclined, but it's easy to see that people wouldn't jump at this chance. Now consider the added dialogue when impartial games are concerned:

Me: "You're still waffling... I wanna let you know this game is really cool. It's impartial!"

You: "What does that mean?"

Me: "It means we don't have our own pieces. Good boards for me and good boards for you look exactly the same!"

And Zoom! They're off. This is even harder when I add that explaining the rules to a game such as Dictator (a voting game) will take over ten minutes. See ya!

It was great to go to GenCon a few weeks back, but even then I think I may wind up spending more time studying games such as Tsuro than actually playing them.

This line has often actually been used in part of my "academic profile". On the web site from my Asprey lecture at Vassar:

When not teaching, he creates combinatorial games and analyzes their computational complexity. This, unfortunately, does not leave him enough time to actually play them.

As it is, I barely have enough time to spend even analyzing games.

... maybe the best plan is to just print and laminate more game boards :)

Games and Teaching

Here at Wittenberg we start early: Monday is the first day of classes, meaning we will have six school days before September even starts!

It also means that the incoming freshman class is moving in to campus this weekend, trying to learn how to be college students before they get into their courses and trying to figure out what they might want to do here. At the time, I was excited about doing creative writing, which I wouldn't be allowed to do until my sophomore year due to over-demand. Before then I would take four math classes and one cs class: my path quickly shifted to a math-cs double major that sophomore year.

What it means now is that today we will have department information sessions, in which each department will do their best to lure students into trying classes in their discipline. We expect to see students who already know they want to succeed in Math and CS (we have a join department here) but what about students like myself who had a weird senior year as far as math was concerned (another story for another day) and had never taken a serious CS course? My hope today is to help attract those students with games. I found a laminating machine here in my first week and have a nice Atropos board, complete with poker chips and even some cards. (Sadly I left my Atropos dice at home! Oops!)

I'm psyched to use games as both an attention grabber and a teaching tool. Although it might be too late to use today, does anyone have any advice for brief comments that tie CGT and math or cs together. Usually I try to talk about the complexity side of things, but it's not always easy to field follow-up questions while avoiding actually naming complexity classes.

We'll see how I do today... :)