111–120 of 258 posts
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Do you play on BBO? Always looking for good partners, especially those interested in playing weird stuff, which I have a feeling you might...
My BBO name is ckane, but I haven't found much time nowdays. Feel free to add me and maybe we'll catch each other.
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Off the top of my head, if you're looking for deep two-player strategy with zero chance element, besides Go there's Othello (Reversi), Hive, Checkers, and Khet. If you're willing to put up with some chance, Backgammon and Battle Line can be very satisfying. For more than two players, take a look at Puerto Rico (finite but negligible chance) and Diplomacy.
Quoridor is a great abstract strategy game that doesn't seem to have beecome very widely known. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoridor A lot of the subtlety comes in because of the rule that you can never completely obstruct the opponent's path to the goal, but you can try to make it as convoluted as possible. Hence people try to multiply the opponent's options (so that they can be closed off at the last minute) and…
Does anyone know some good alternatives to chess, as a game that mixes deep thought and aesthetic variety? I tried Go, but found it somewhat boring compared to chess, because of its uniformity (which, on the other hand, has the advantage of beautiful simplicity and symmetry.) On another note: it is unfortunate, in my opinion, that chess has a special standing among board games. I would love to see some more variety i…
I think Hive is the best chess "alternative". It feels lighter, but plays deeply and is never boring. It has an interesting geometric component. And there are annual championships. (Get the Hive Carbon edition, it's much nicer looking) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hive_(game)
Magnus seems more like a guy I could invite over for a couple of beers. No offense on Anand he seem to be more like a KOOL-AID type of kid and always a boy scout but a douche!
Its 2013, I think by now we should all be smart enough to realize that the desire to drink alcohol doesn't really have anything to do with masculinity.
This is actually a good example of why I'm not particularly interested in chess anymore-- a game that's that heavy on draws and where so many of the situations are adaptations of well-known positions simply isn't that thrilling. I really enjoyed chess when I was a kid, but the better I became and the more I learned about it the less I found it a compelling game.
Does anyone know some good alternatives to chess, as a game that mixes deep thought and aesthetic variety? I tried Go, but found it somewhat boring compared to chess, because of its uniformity (which, on the other hand, has the advantage of beautiful simplicity and symmetry.) On another note: it is unfortunate, in my opinion, that chess has a special standing among board games. I would love to see some more variety i…
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Not a board game, but Bridge. Backgammon is also very rich also, although there is a random element there which, depending on your preferences, is either a good or bad thing.
The random element in backgammon is inconsequential: a good player will always beat inferior players over several games. What makes good players good is not that they know how to win when they have a good roll but the fact that with regular throws, each of their move is optimal, which guarantees a win over the duration of the entire game. The same could be said of poker, where the element of chance appears to be huge…
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In some ways, the internet ruined games like MTG. I still like to play, but the widespread availability of tournament decklists stifles creativity. There are still formats where you see a wide variety of decks, but T2 play normally involves picking one of maybe 5 or 6 viable options.
The netdeck argument is probably for a different site, but I strongly believe that MTG as a tournament format benefits enormously from widely available top-performing decklists, video and text coverage, and articles on deck strategy as well game tactics with particular decks or deck archetypes.
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I think this is actually based on subjective measures. An annotated game[0] will have ?!, ?, and ?? added by human commentators to indicate varying levels of mistakes. A computer analysis can make use of these subjective move evaluations within an annotated game to easily measure which players cause their opponents to make mistakes at a significantly greater frequency than their normal rate of mistakes. [0] http://en…
Since computers play chess (better than humans) by looking at moves and ranking them as advantageous or disadvantageous, I would think it would be relatively straightforward to use a computer to decide whether a move is a mistake or not.