Anyone else know about senet from the Rick Riordan series The Kane Chronicles?
Senet
41–50 of 123 posts
Re: Senet
#42I remember as a kid having a shareware sampler that had some very nicely done videogame versions of Senet, Hnefatafl, the Royal Game of Ur, and some sort of a Pueblo board game . Peak late 90s skeumorphism, complete with little rendered win/loss cutscenes. Unless I can find that CD, it's probably gone forever though
The Internet Archive has a collection of those shareware samplers, maybe yours is there? https://archive.org/details/cdbbsarchive
Re: Senet
#43I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.
It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years.
Medieval chess was a very different game. For the most stark example, the queen did not get her modern move until around 1450.
The game has since been stable for about 500.
And yet something as basic as, "white moves first" was first suggested in 1857.
Re: Senet
#44I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.
I love the idea of "Bad Chess"... such a wild concept on top of an otherwise very structured ruleset.
Very Bad Chess by Zach Gage is the best I’ve seen of this. It’s on the iOS App Store, might be on google play. Worth a look if you like “bad chess”
Re: Senet
#45> Espen Aarseth asked if the game Senet could be said to still exist, given that the rules were unknown. In response, Alexander de Voogt of the American Museum of Natural History pointed out that games did not have a fixed set of rules, but rules varied over time and from place to place. The game is the rules. Those people played different games. If you can do anything you want with it, it's a toy, not a game. If eve…
The rules are what matters, yes, but the naming of games is a classification problem over sets of rules. This is most obvious with competitive video games, which have complex rules that are tweaked often - each balance patch changes the rules a little, but it's still the same game. The boundaries are fuzzy, and even the players may disagree about what constitutes enough change to be a different game. With Senet, we d…
Here is the reference wikipedia gives for the two historians who have tried reconstructing the rules[0].
It seems that only "tomb images" and some game boards and pieces are used in the reconstruction. The article doesn't suggest that any rules have a basis in history. What rules we have are fabricated from nothing but the pieces, like reconstructing the English language from nothing but the alphabet.
Re: Senet
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rules are what matters, yes, but the naming of games is a classification problem over sets of rules. This is most obvious with competitive video games, which have complex rules that are tweaked often - each balance patch changes the rules a little, but it's still the same game. The boundaries are fuzzy, and even the players may disagree about what constitutes enough change to be a different game. With Senet, we d…
A video game with two hundred thousand lines of code doesn't seem like an apt comparison to a board game.
Pretty close to a physical sport, if we assume that most of that code is involved in simulating something resembling physics, or in running simple robot players.
Like, how much of a basketball game is concerned with the actual Rules Of Basketball vs. simulating a bunch of people playing basketball? And if you made Space Basketball with characters with superpowers who kept getting balance tweaks as the player community figured out holes in the rules, most of that simulation code would stay the same, as the tiny percentage of rules code evolved.
Re: Senet
#47I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.
Richard Garfield (mathematician and designer of Magic the Gathering and others) used to give a talk about randomness in games.
He talked about the history of chess, and how there used to be a lot more variants of the game (some even being a 4 player game with dice!), and over time competitive players naturally will want to remove random elements from the game.
But on the other hand, some amount of wild unpredictability is important to attract players - there's a softening of skill gaps.
Re: Senet
#48I remember as a kid having a shareware sampler that had some very nicely done videogame versions of Senet, Hnefatafl, the Royal Game of Ur, and some sort of a Pueblo board game . Peak late 90s skeumorphism, complete with little rendered win/loss cutscenes. Unless I can find that CD, it's probably gone forever though
There are a lot of people out there who remember shareware CDs. I'm always surprised by that particular aspect of software nostalgia. Same with things like ads in computer magazines; lots of people remember extremely well. Did the game happen to be one of these? https://archive.org/search.php?query=senet%20shareware
I think it is the Steve Neeley one, actually
Re: Senet
#49I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.
The Royal Game of Ur is another very very very old game.
Re: Senet
#50I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.
Richard Garfield (mathematician and designer of Magic the Gathering and others) used to give a talk about randomness in games. He talked about the history of chess, and how there used to be a lot more variants of the game (some even being a 4 player game with dice!), and over time competitive players naturally will want to remove random elements from the game. But on the other hand, some amount of wild unpredictabili…
In some of my own pursuits, I've seen things that make me agree.
Pool has little randomness, and therefore it is very difficult to beat a player who is better than you. The best players want to eliminate the possibility of that happening by making longer races, racking their own balls, winner breaks, things like that. Pool is dying for it.
Meanwhile poker has a large amount of short term variance (luck) and it keeps bad players interested for years and years. The worst player in the world can sit and beat the best players in the world at any given moment. Poker is still going as strong as ever-- maybe more strongly than ever at this point. People are coming out of the woodwork this year itching to play.
I think most of the greatest, longest- lived games in the modern era will need a high amount of randomness, because of computers doing analysis. Even more, with the absent of solvers and the like, many poker variants cannot be solved in real time and all-encompassing strategies cannot be developed. More computational power could change that in the future, I guess.