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GAME PIE FOR GOURMETS
A modest menu of my published games
Twenty-five pieces (five each of five different colours) are drawn at random from a box or bag. The first four go in each of the four corners. Each piece subsequently drawn must be placed next to one already in position. You win by so placing all 25 that no two of the same colour are next to each other, whether horizontally, vertically or diagonally. At left is a successful solution for one particular sequence of colours. Published in 1982 by Skirrid International it is no longer available, but you can play it now (if you can run Java applets) by clicking on the image. Eric Solomon wrote the program. Thanks, Eric!
As above - but this time the 25 pieces consist of five different shapes in five different colours of each shape, making 25 uniquely different pieces in all. Now the aim is to finish with no two pieces of the same shape or of the same colour next to each other. There is always a solution, regardless of what order the pieces are placed in - but consider yourself brilliant if you manage to get 23 of them legally positioned! Java applet by Eric Solomon.
I wouldn't go out of my way to invent a card game relating to football, which is undoubtedly my least favourite game of all time. But when in 2007 Ravensburger published a card game based on the fourth of a popular series of films about a team of fantasy football players known as Die Wilden Kerle (The Wild Kids), I could not resist their invitation to supply a mechanism for it...
I've always been fascinated by games for three players, and this is my most successful attempt at devising a strategic board-game for that number. The aim is to be the first to get all the pieces of your own colour together in a single connected group. It was published in 1975 by Intellect Games, who named it after a now long-forgotten television series about suffragettes. I privately renamed it "Solidarnosc" and subsequently "Mob Rule".
Waddingtons Games made a surprisingly nice production of this authentic translation into cubes of a game normally played with spherical objects (balls to you). It was promoted in 1981 by six-times world Snooker champion Ray Reardon, who probably made more out of it than I ever did.
The late Spears Games commissioned me to revise their Junior version of Scrabble, which was previously played with unnumbered tiles on a rather plain board. Basically, my revision consisted in colouring the letter squares and devising a scoring system that didn't depend upon individual letter values.
A card game for 2 to 5 players based on characters from the planet Gnüm, recently discovered by German astronauts. (This bears little relation to my original prototype, which was called "Hunt the Dinosaur".) Published by Amigo Games, with an English-language edition from Rio Grande Games. It was awarded a Certificate of Merit (right) at the 2001 Vienna Mixed Games Festival.
A card game for 2 to 6 players published in 2000 under the title Alles für die Katz by Amigo Games. It was originally called "Chimpanzoo" when I invented it donkeys' years ago. Players build up a "zoo" in which no two of the same animal may occupy the same row or column of enclosures - apart from black cats, which count against you. It gets trickier as you go along. (Why cats? They were supposed to be black mambas. Maybe Amigo didn't think snakes were sexy enough. The German phrase means something like "Trust the cat to come out best".) Also published in English as Zoo Party by Rio Grande Games and as 7Safari from Gamewrights (with hyenas replacing mambas).
