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.

Scopa Scopone

Scopa is, along with Tressette and Briscola, one of the national card games of Italy. It is played with the Italian playing cards that you see above. Both the design of the cards and the rules of Scopa is subject to local variations. Scopone is just one of them.

Scopa has been translated as Clean Sweep. Scopare is Italian for to sweep, and some computer implementations feature a broom in the icon. Incidentally, scopare can also be used for another activity that involves rhythmic movement, and as a standalone swearword. A google image search for scopare turned up precious few brooms, but lots of other things.

Computer implementations: I found four, Windows games all of them, and uploaded them all today. Unsurprisingly, three of them are from Italy, the fourth, while from the USA, has an author with a definitely Italian name. That all four are Windows games did not astonish me either (compare Windows 3.x card games).

Dopewars, the first PC game

This occurred to me only after I published the previous post: Dopewars was the first game concept to be born on the PC. When John E. Dell wrote his Drug Wars, all the PC games came from somewhere else, mainframes, arcade machines, the various 8-bit home computers. Drug Wars was a PC game and nothing else.

It seems that Dopewars mostly remained a PC concept as well. There’s a Dope Wars X for Mac that goes back well into the times of the classic systems. There is a DopeWars for Amiga by Mark Gare (here and here) from 1999/2000. There is a Dopewars for Atari ST, also from 2000, when the concept was already 15 years old. I found no 8-bit versions at all.

The Dopewars story

I’m planning a bigger update on Download Central within the next few days, involving various versions of the Dopewars concept. There are still some logistics to solve, so far I’ve done some research, and found some interesting things, especially a page on the BBS Documentary which dates back to 2001 and has some information not found elsewhere.

Shut the Box

There are lots of traditional games whose history is very little known. This is one of them. The best that I could find out is that it was popular among sailors of Normandy in the late 19th century (according to David Parlett, The Oxford History of Board Games), and that it was brought to England from the Channel Islands in 1958 (according to Timothy Finn, Pub Games of England). It is usually played with two dice and a special box that has tiles with the numbers from one to nine. Wikipedia describes the game thus:

During each round, a player repeatedly throws the dice to cover the tiles of the box. The round ends when no tile can be covered on a throw and the player counts each successfully covered number as a point for his score. If, for example you put down the numbers 3, 5, and 9, you get three points. The goal is to cover all numbers, that is, shut the box, which finishes that game. Play continues until each player has completed three rounds, at which time scores are compared and a winner is declared.

Targ, Attack Force, Crossfire

Some time ago I uploaded a Windows arcade game, Alien Force. It was among the first Windows 3.0 games and very popular in its time, you found it on most shareware CDs. Today I uploaded a similar, but far less known game, ZoneGame from Outer-Space. In spite of the obvious similarities, the two games claim to be remakes of two different 8-bit games: Attack Force on the TRS-80 resp. Crossfire on the Apple ][. That got me interested, and I researched a bit.

3D Tic-Tac-Toe

Unlike standard Tic-Tac-Toe, the 3D variety, played in a 4×4×4 cube, is a serious game. It is not necessarily a well-balanced game, giving the first player a huge advantage, but it is easy to lose against a well-designed AI. While it is theoretically possible to play it on paper, if you draw four 4×4 squares side by side, I rather think that it originated as a computer game. As such, the first instance I know about is 1978 in David H. Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games.

Punkti, Punkti, Strichi, Strichi

A couple of days ago I wrote in American board games that American shareware developers prefer to emulate commercial board games, while European developers more often take traditional board games and pen-and-paper games as a model. Meanwhile I noticed that there are two pen-and-paper games that seem to be predominantly American. There are not many implementations of them, far fewer than of the commercial board games, so what I wrote in the previous article holds true nevertheless.

  

The first is known as Dots. It is played on a grid of exactly that. Each turn the players connect two neighboring dots with a vertical or horizontal line. The goal is to close as many squares as possible. The player who has closed more squares has won. A famous implementation of this concept is William Soleau’s Dotso. Three that I have put up are Computer Dots by John E. Thayer and Dots for Windows by Ralph W. Whitfield, Jr, which go exactly by the aforementioned rules, and Linx by Arkady Elterman, which allows diagonal lines as well and calculates the exact area instead of just counting squares.

 

For the other game, I know no name. It, too, is played on a grid of dots, but a different grid, the dots are aligned diagonally. Again the players connect two dots each turn with a horizontal or vertical line, but the goal is different. One player tries to connect the left side of the playing field with the right side in an uninterrupted line, the other player tries to do the same with the top and bottom side. The one who succeeds wins, the two goals are mutually exclusive. Two implementations are Span-It! and Fences.

Curt Johnson started writing a game of this type in 1990, but never finished it.

German arcade puzzles

This is a curious type of game that’s mostly popular in Germany, or maybe I should say the German-speaking world, for a few examples are Austrian. From their gameplay, these games are puzzle games, relying on logic and contemplation. But additionally, there are arcade concepts like lives and time limits on the levels.

Strictly speaking, these type of game is not a German invention, but a Japanese one. The two earliest instances that I know are two arcade machines, Puzznic and Shisen-Sho Joshiryo-Hen, both from 1989. But these are coin-ops, they have to have these arcade elements or they wouldn’t make their proprietors any money. Japanese puzzle games for home computers (Sokoban, SameGame) are free of them. Germans seem to love this concept as an end in itself.

The two abovementioned arcade machines found followers, and clone makers, mainly and for a while even exclusively in Germany. Puzznic got only few clones and look-alikes, the most remarkable one probably Michael Riedel’s Brix. But there are lots of Shisen-sho games—nearly all of them from Germany, and, as an added curiosity, mainly on Atari platforms.

But new games of this type were created as well. The most remarkable is, I think, Nibbly. It gave a new twist to the Snake/Nibbler concept. In Nibbler, the snake moves through a maze and is therefore in more danger to block its own way. In Nibbly, the maze is completely filled with fruits, the snake will thus grow much faster. You will have to spend a lot of thought on how the maze can be solved. But, even though it was never an arcade machine, time limits and lives are still in place.

Nibbly is an Austrian invention, created by the demo group Cosmos Designs. It started out as a Commodore 64 game, Nibbly ’92. The next year the group ported it, with many enhancements, to Amiga and PC as Super Nibbly. A few years later, it found a shareware clone in Nibbly’96, which is how I came to know and love-hate it.

For as good as any of these games might be, I never understood the idea behind the concept. If you don’t have to keep the player inserting quarters into your machine, why limit his time? Why force him to repeat already solved levels because his lives ran out?

The myth of the Captain’s Mistress

The story goes that Captain James Cook took a Connect Four on his exploration voyages and became so engrossed with it during the long periods at sea that his crew gave it the name Captain’s Mistress, a name that has remained till today. This is most likely baloney.

Apart from this anecdote, there is absolutely no evidence that Connect Four existed in any form before it was published 1974 by Milton Bradley. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that it did.

Why?

Because it’s far too complicated, not complicated to play, but complicated to make. Traditional games have always been very simple in their physical form. One of the reasons that Mancala is so popular is no doubt that it can be played anywhere, with anything, starting with six holes in the ground, with coins, in an egg carton.

A game that needs a relatively complex contraption for playing makes sense only if you want people to be only able to play that game if they buy that contraption from you. That was definitely the Milton Bradley’s reasoning in 1974, but nobody’s at the times of Captain Cook.