Blog and Updates

29 August: There were 12 entrants for the World Championship Hare & Tortoise Tournament at the 2010 Mind Sports Olympiad in London on this date. Gold went to Dario di Toffoli (Italy, pictured here). The silver was won by Natasha Regan and bronze by James Heppell.

22 August: Revised Hare & Tortoise pages. The new 2010 English-language edition (pictured below) is now available and will be used in the Hare & Tortoise world championship at the 14th Mind Sports Olympiad.

1 July: Redesigned home page.

27 April: Volcanic ash-clouds notwithstanding, have just returned from the latest Board Game Studies Colloquium held in Paris, followed by a trip to Munich to see the proposed new site for the Bavarian National Games Archive. At the Colloquium I presented a paper on abstraction and representation in games and am currently polishing it up for publication.

February 21 - Having just discovered the Libel Reform Campaign I've signed the petition and added this message to its Pledge Wall: "People who sue for libel are invariably villainous and should not be encouraged by our ridiculous libel laws."

February 2010 - Made a few minor tweaks, including a revised three-player version of Calypso. At the moment I'm working on a paper for the 13th Board Game Studies Colloquium to be held in Paris in April.

December 2009 - I recently took part in recordings of two TV programmes done or the Christmas season. In a "season of programming celebrating the act of play", BBC Four showed a three-part series entitled Games Britannia, whose contributors included me and some of my friends and colleagues in the Board Game Studies Association, notably Irving Finkel, Caroline Goodfellow, and Bruce Whitehill. I was also one of four people playing and being interviewed about Scrabble in a programme devoted to the game made by BBC Scotland, but unfortunately was dropped on the cutting-room floor.

November 2009. Revised and redesigned the complete listing of books by David Parlett. A new English-langauge edition of Hare & Tortoise is to be published by Gibsons Games in 2010. Also in 2010 my translations from the Carmina Burana will be republished as an e-book by Penguin Books UK.

I had an email from Andy Lewicki of Nebraska seeking clarification of a rule of my card game Caterpillar, and asking why it appears in the latest Penguin Book of Card Games but not on my website. Since I couldn't think of a good answer, I've added it to the collection. Thanks, Andy.

October: Added a three-player card game called Hamlet, and Flashpoint, a four-player partnership game.

Updated Bax music pages following first performance of his unfinished Concertino, completed and orchestrated by my brother Graham, at Stratford-on-Avon on 3 July.

Added an article on Calypso to my Historic Card Games section (17 May).

On 4 May I attended a concert in the Civic Centre at Stratford on Avon for the first performance of a work for strings that Arnold Bax left unfinished, in short score, around 1911, and which my brother Graham has now fully scored and completed under the title Serenade for Strings. It was performed by the Orchestra of the Swan under David Curtis, together with works by Elgar, Holst, and a new and exciting Viola Concerto by Joseph Cutler. The Bax piece has since been recorded by the strings of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under Martin Yates, together with works by Stephen Dodgson and the recently deceased Richard Arnell, and will be issued by Dutton in due course.

Before the concert we looked round an art exhibition at the Civic Hall and, unusually, I could not resist making a purchase. It was one of many striking watercolours by Rod Perkins, whose sense of landscape seems to match my own. It's about 30 cm square and is entitled Autumn Glow.

In the penultimate week of April I attended the 12th annual Colloquium of the Board Game Studies Association and presented a paper on the History of Oriental Games (De Ludis Orientalibus) by the 17th-century orientalist Thomas Hyde. This Colloquium took place at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem; next year's will be in Paris, followed by Bruges in 2011 and probably Elblag, Poland, in 2012. (Semicolon by courtesy of the Semicolon Appreciation and Preservation Society of Great Britain.)