The Andes Flight Disaster of 1972 is infamous for the part about the cannibalism. On October 13th, a chartered Fairchild FH-227D crashed on the spine of the Andes between Chile and Argentina. A search was conducted for just over a week, leaving the team stranded. After two months of starvation, fros
An hour into our interview, Isaac Vega is still brimming with energy, gesturing and talking about his next project with all the verve of a life coach or an eager teenager. Vega’s a lead designer for Plaid Hat Games, who have published the board games Dead of Winter (2014) and Summoner Wars (2009). I
The Earth has seen her fair share of revolutions in the last decade. We have watched them on our televisions, followed them on Twitter, witnessed them both in our hometowns and impossibly far away. In such a tumultuous period they often seem inescapable, but unless they were brought directly to your
Though many people might think that board games are a relatively modern phenomenon, the likes of Trouble (1965) and The Game of Life (1960) were actually preceded by years and years of table-based entertainment, flung as far and wide as Egypt, India, and ancient China. A brief glimpse into this long
During the awards ceremony at the International Cannes Games Festival, three men walked onto the stage with Cuban hats, throwing fake money to the audience. They were the ones behind Mafia de Cuba, an intrigue and deception board game set in La Habana during the Cuban revolution. The game was one of
In the world of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, books have been outlawed and are burned en masse by the state, only kept in small collections by the occasional revolutionary. Instead of reading, the majority of people spend their free time in “entertainment parlors,” rooms lined with massi
Every time I unbox a board game it feels as though I’m ‘starting something’. There’s a secure rhythm in drawing out components, shuffling decks, placing pieces; it feels significant in the same way that the placement and positioning of elements in communion or offering feels holy. Mats are laid out,
When adapting a game from tabletop to computer, emphasis is often placed on reducing abstraction. Objects, characters, and events only representable by cards, markers, or dice in the physical world can instead be fully realized by digital artists in a videogame. But Gordon Calleja, game designer at
Google’s stream of the 5-game Go series between DeepMind’s AlphaGo and Lee Sedol was odd. It put little vector-graphic landmarks from Seoul opposite little vector-graphic landmarks from London. But I never once heard it suggested that this was a battle between Korea and the UK. Maybe it would have b
In Tang dynasty China, Go was one of the skills socially required of a certain class of educated elite—along with calligraphy, painting, and the ability to play the stringed guqin, it was part of a kind of artistic quadrivium. The art and beauty of the game are present in the way it is played, but a
“2015 is the year of the board game,” I told everyone I knew. I wrote it out in emails. I typed the words out in text messages. I casually said it over the phone. If friends or family wanted to get me something for my birthday, a PlayStation gift card would not do: I had a manicured Amazon wish list
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Chesh (iOS) Damian Sommer It seems nothing is safe from the dubstep-happy clutches of remix culture, not even the ancient and tried game of chess. Damian Sommer’s new iOS game Chesh can be tho
When one thinks of the tombs plundered by videogame heroine Lara Croft, or even legendary adventure film archaeologist Indiana Jones, untold treasures and riches typically await them. During a 2004 excavation in China of first emperor of the Qin dynasty Qin Shi Huangdi’s self-constructed, terracotta
The First World War is often referred to as The Great War, due to its immense scope, as it incited all the world’s national powers and resulted in a devastating death toll. Set within this war is the tabletop game The Grizzled, which makes no attempt to capture such scale, and instead hones in on a
Even in board game form, games by Studio Oleomingus are simply mesmerizing. The team behind Somewhere, a surreal stealth game set in an alternate world version of colonial India, have started work on an unnamed historical project about running a Portugese colony in 17th century Goa. In a recent post
We are in the midst of a board game boom, and FiveThirtyEight has figured out why: Kickstarter. You should read the whole story, but here’s the crux of Oliver Roeder’s analysis: “Since [2009], pledges to board and card game projects on the site have totaled $196 million, according to the company. Ni
“Football is a simple game,” the onetime England striker and fulltime milquetoast TV personality Gary Lineker once explained. “Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.” Alternately, football is an incredibly complicated tactical exercise at the end of which
