Othello was not a Swede

After I added GSReversi 1.22 (an Amiga game) to Download Central yesterday, I noticed with some astonishment that it was the first Swedish Othello in my list. Why astonishment?

Well, on the one hand Othello has always been very popular with programmers. There are certainly many more Tetris clones than Othello games, but we’re talking similar dimensions here. On the other hand there are lots of computer games from Sweden, more than from many countries with a larger population, and Swedish games are often implementations of standard concepts. That these two large sets should have such a small intersection is astonishing.

When I looked closer I found a few more interesting details. Currently the Othello list contains only one game each for the other two Scandinavian countries (both Mac games BTW). It contains only one from the Netherlands, and none at all from Finland.

Like many other game concepts, Othello is popular mainly in a few specific countries: USA, UK, France, Italy. But since most of these countries have quite a large output of computer games in general, it’s less obvious than with other concepts.

The mysterious Fia med knuff

In one point I was wrong in my cross and circle games overview: Fia med knuff is not the equivalent of Mensch ärgere Dich nicht, but it could be considered a variant of the latter. Let me list the actual facts:

• But for one element the boards of the two games are functionally equivalent.
• This one element is the center: While in Mensch ärgere Dich nicht, the goal is to place all four tokens on the ladder, in Fia med knuff the goal is to put them into the center field.
• Apart from the functional equivalence, the boards are very similar in the graphics too. While all earlier Pachisi derivates had angular fields, Mensch ärgere Dich nicht had circles connected with lines. Fia med knuff has circles too, though usually not connected.
• Another small visual difference is that Mensch ärgere Dich nicht has four colored circles per player where the pawns are placed on at the beginning of the game, while Fia med knuff has only one large circle.
• There are some other rule differences: Players can leave the jail on rolling six or one, cannot overtake their own pawns, do not have to capture those of their contrahents.

Everything else is rather mysterious. It starts with the name. The name of the game is Fia, med knuff is just an add-on meaning with push, referring to pushing your adversaries’ pawns off the board. But what does Fia mean? Acoording to one manufacturer, Namnet Fia kommer från det latinska ordet fiat som betyder gång. Google translates gång as time, but fiat actually means let there be or let it be done, which makes no sense in connection with the game.

I get the impression that Fia med knuff is not anyone’s trademark, and that it is generally used more as a name for the concept than for a specific game with a specific look and feel (as is the case with Mensch ärgere Dich nicht).

There are two scenarios I can think of. One is that some Swedish publisher saw the success of Mensch ärgere Dich nicht in the 1920s and brought out a very similar game under a different name.

The other is that Fia med knuff is actually older, and was what inspired Schmidt to his game. It is remarkable that where the two games are different, Fia med knuff is often more similar to the older Ludo. Of course this theory wouldn’t go well with the Germans, who consider Mensch ärgere Dich nicht as one of their 50 greatest inventions, along with aspirin, the thermos flask, and the theory of relativity.

An interesting Ludo – in pewter!

After finishing the last entry, I did some idle googling and came across this interesting Ludo. It was designed by Alberto Tabellini and is made of pewter. I especially liked the pieces, they seem to be made of brass, and since they all have the same color, each player has a shape of his own. You find the same solution in older monochrome computer games, for example H.A.B. Smals’ Mens erger je niet on Hercules and CGA.

And of course, the pun potential of pewter and computer did not completely escape my notice either.

Cross and circle games, an overview

I’m trying to get an overview over the variants that exist of the Pachisi/Ludo concept. I’m not interested in the moment in the traditional games (Pachisi, Chaupar, Yut) but the imports into Europe and the Americas. And of course I’m especially interested in the computer implementations.

Mandavoshka, the Russian Ludo

This is something I just came across and don’t know much about yet: There is a specifically Russian version of Pachisi/Ludo (cross-and-circle, if you prefer the more generic term) called Mandavoshka. The Russian Wikipedia has no article about it, just a subsection on the Parchís page. According to that, it is usually played with two dice and five tokens per player, but rules vary locally.

The name is a bit strange. According to the Alternative Russian Dictionary, мандавошка is a genital louse, but the word is often used to name any unknown insect. A google search brings all kinds of weird results, obviously some people use it as a screen name too.

Sorry!

Sorry! is a game of the Pachisi/Ludo family, at least in the board layout it differs more from Pachisi than any other variant. It was designed by William Henry Storey of Southend-on-Sea in the 1920s, and has been produced by Parker Brothers since 1934. In the United States, it is the most popular Ludo variant.

There are not many PC implementations of Sorry! So far I have found four from the 20th century:

• By Joe Glockner (Texas), 1988, DOS/EGA. It is sometimes known by its file name, EGASORRY.
• By Anil Rhemtulla (Canada), 1993, OS/2.
• Slippery Ludo by Nigel Rigby (UK), 1998, Windows 9x. The author does not actually refer to Sorry!, but the board has a very similar layout.
• An official conversion by Third-i Productions, published by Hasbro on CD-ROM for Windows in 1998. The illustration at the top of this entry is taken from this game.

Joe Glockner’s Sorry! is the oldest PC implementation of a Ludo game I currently know, one year older than George Leotti’s Pachisi or H.A.B. Smals’ Mens erger je niet.

In der Zwickmühle

A couple of days I uploaded Carl von Blixen’s Nine Men’s Morris. It occurred to me that this is the only implementation of this board game that I remember coming across. It seems to be surprisingly unpopular with programmers.

Nine Men’s Morris is quite an old game. It is well documented since the twelth century. It is mentioned in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and boards can be found carved into the cloister seats of English cathedrals. The strange name seems to be peculiar to English, in most other European languages it is known simply as Mill, probably because the board somewhat resembles a windmill.

Until around 1800, it was more popular than chess. Since then, its popularity may have declined more in the English speaking world than it did on the European continent, especially in Germany, where it is usually bundled with checkers, since both games use the same stones. The board will have checkers on one side and Nine Men’s Morris (Mühle) on the other. The German language even has a special term for the (usually) winning configuration where one player can shuttle one piece back and forth between two mills, taking one of the opponent’s stones with each turn. It’s called Zwickmühle (literally, pinching mill).

American board games

There are lots of computer games, especially, but by no means only on 16-bit Windows, that are implementations of simple parlor games: board games, dice games, the like. Such games are usually freeware or shareware, and they have been made both by American and by European developers (for the rest of the world, I have too few samples to make a relevant statement), but there’s one big difference.

  

The American games of this kind very often emulate some game produced by Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers or some other company in this business. In some cases the designers go to great length to come as close to the look and feel of the original as possible. Some favorites are Black Box and Yahtzee. Games that have never been published by a company are significantly less attractive for American developers.

  

In Europe, the situation is exactly the other way round. Generic concepts are more popular here, pen and paper games that kids play at school often are the inspiration of the developers. Atoms, a concept similar to board games but born on 8-bit computers, seems to have been popular only in Europe. With Battleship, the American implementations stay closer to the Milton Bradley game, while European implementations either sport a pen and paper look or a fanciful artistic interpretation.

There’s a reason for that: designer board games, published by companies, patented or otherwise protected as IP, are an American invention. Milton Bradley was the pioneer, founded in 1860. Parker Brothers came in 1883. In Europe, there have been game publishers too for quite a while, Ravensburger in Germany is as old as Parker Brothers. But even though they may have claimed trademarks on this or that, their games have never been identified with them in the same way. They have always been seen like the manufacturers of playing cards or chess boards, to produce the physical means, but not the games themselves.