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.

Germany, Russia, Italy, Sweden

I’ve always been interested in where games come from, and I’ve listed the games I write about or offer for download by country for years. Now I looked at the Download Central stats to see from which country listings people actually click through. The results were not what I was expecting. There’s a steep curve, each entry in the following list has about half as many clicks as the one above it:

1. Germany
2. Russia
3. Italy
4. Sweden

All the other country listings create so few click-throughs that the numbers are hardly relevant and might well be a product of chance.

Of course I cannot say how relevant these numbers are at all. I do not know if people come to these pages because they are interested in games from that country, or if the page just turned up in the search for a game they were looking for. But it’s interesting.

One thing that baffles me is that there is absolutely no relation between the number of games I have from a certain country and the number of clicks. UK, France and Canada for example are very long lists, longer than anything except Germany. I’m especially astonished that there was not a single click from the Finland listing, since this is quite a long list as well and one of the few countries with a distinct game culture of its own.

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).