On Saturday I attended the London Chessboxing Championship, which was more or less what it said on the tin. For those unfamiliar with the emergent hybrid sport, there is chess, and there is boxing. Every bout alternates between successive rounds of speed chess and boxing until one of the contenders secures a checkmate on the board or a knockout in the ring (along with the usual victory conditions for resignation or time).

It should be no surprise that chessboxing’s promoters sell it as a perfect biathlon of mind and body. Chess has an ancient mystique of intellect about it even among those who barely know the game, and boxing is far and away the most story-rich of sports. Both activities stand as cultural paragons of some indefinite struggle of individual mastery. And the combination is hardly arbitrary: the boxing forces the chess to be played under conditions of high adrenaline and extreme physical fatigue, imposing a test of mental stamina quite unlike any other.

Not so clear is whether the chess takes a toll on the boxing. Andrea Kuszewski has argued that the most cognitively taxing part of the game is the rapid task-switching, which demands superb emotional control; indeed, chessboxing may prove to be exceptionally well suited to training one’s aggression management. In theory, a good chessboxer has to box with the ability to play chess very shortly in mind. (In practice, as we will see, this is not necessarily the case.)

The London event at the Scala was reportedly the world’s biggest night of chessboxing to date, with five bouts on the card drawing a capacity crowd of 1000. Before the first match, my own estimate was 400-500 spectators on the floor with many more in the balcony and VIP lounge, but the audience swelled as the night wore on and the official count became more plausible. One of the organizers called it the largest live audience on record for a game of chess, though I believe Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky drew similar numbers in the Piatigorsky Cup (Santa Monica, 1966), and that’s only the record in the United States.

Nevertheless, the sport shows signs of rapid expansion, filling a former cinema palace kitty-corner to King’s Cross that doubled the capacity of its previous venue in Tufnell Park. There are rumblings that talks have begun to bring chessboxing to Royal Albert Hall next year, presumably to catch some of the Olympic spillover, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Pressboxing

All of this you can already gather from the press—and for years now, there has been a lot of press. The Guardian covered chessboxing as early as 2005, when the sport was not too far removed from its inauspicious modern beginnings as a novelty act by the Berlin performance artist Iepe Rubingh, who just so happened to win his own inaugural world championship in 2003. The London club was founded in 2008 with an initial membership of seven, although it is now arguably the most prominent of the multiple international clubs that have sprung up outside of Berlin. London, too, handed its first title of British Heavyweight Chessboxing Champion to the club’s founder, Tim Woolgar.

Put this way, one might come away thinking the whole activity’s integrity was suspect—and a few observers have said as much. Justin Horton, who writes for the Streatham & Brixton Chess Blog (which, incidentally, is running an outstanding series of posts on tracking down the chess players in a 19th-century painting), has repeatedly taken journalists to task for reproducing the promotional claims around chessboxing without further corroborating research. Horton calls chessboxing a “circus” and a “swindle”, marking as his prime targets the sport’s alleged popularity and the chess competence of the predominantly unrated participants. Private Eye has similarly attacked the coverage of chessboxing as a case of media hacks being suckered by a small-time carnival-standard affair.

So one does have to be careful not to overstate chessboxing’s reach. It undeniably has a bit of a weird-news appeal that makes every event a renewable story, but this also means that in every article, quite a lot of space is wasted on gawking over the novelty of the affair (or treating it with prepared derision) instead of seeing it for what it is.

My impression was of a sport where the growth of spectator interest is far outstripping that of participation—and it shows. It is indeed impressive that Saturday’s event drew the audience it did when only three years ago, the London club boasted of attracting the highest turnout for a chess match in the United Kingdom since Kramnik/Kasparov in 2000—an estimated crowd of 150. That is a clear promotional success. But good publicity and a firm conceptual foundation aren’t enough for a game to thrive; the players and their tactics have to be interesting enough to be worth following long-term, or there’s no incentive for a one-time curiosity seeker to return. There needs to be a recognizable sense of expertise, of nuances open to appreciation—and that depends on a base of participation vast enough to propel the standard of competition skyward.

If chessboxing is like any other competitive club activity I’ve seen, be it Scrabble or parliamentary debate, doubtless there’s a great deal of involvement behind the scenes that never makes it into the ring in front of a paying audience—trainees and casual fighters who fall back to logistics when it comes to the big events. (Kat Sark’s report on the Berlin/London chessboxing summit in June, which cast an eye on gender equality, suggests this is the case.) This is normal and expected, but until there is a deeper competitive pool, I doubt we will see a true escalation of skill towards the game’s natural ceiling—which, it must be said, looks very high.

But enough of the ringside theory. Let’s have a look at the fights.

The fight card

1. Chris Levy (white) vs. Mike Botteley (black)

The opening bout on the undercard was advertised as having the strongest combined Elo rating in a chessboxing match. (Justin Horton has found this to refer not to the FIDE Elo, but the ECF equivalent; I think the term ‘Elo’ has been sufficiently genericized to include Elo-like rating systems that the implicit conversion is fair.) Despite an interesting start from the Réti Opening, Levy fell far behind on the clock, exiting round 3 of chess down by a knight with 1:13 remaining. Unable to secure a knockout in the boxing round, Levy whittled the endgame down to a dance between king and king-pawn until he ran out of time. (The endgame itself was difficult for the audience to follow, as the display board couldn’t keep up with the action.) Win for Botteley in chess round 4.

2. Emma Richardson vs. Kath Dodson

Billed as the first women’s chessboxing match, this was a bout where the boxing clearly took its toll on the chess, with plenty of material thrown away on both sides. The decisive moment came when Richardson gave up her queen in the third round of chess, after which Dodson missed a mate but quickly recovered to trap the white king. Richardson couldn’t find a way out of the impending mate and ran out the clock. Win for Dodson in chess round 3.

3. Ben Robinson vs. Richard Kavanagh

As a fellow spectator next to me exclaimed, “They’re not even the same size!” Kavanagh replaced Mark Lech on the ticket at the last minute and surely set a new record for the most heavily tattooed figure to grace a board. The chess turned out to be a formality: after Robinson spent much of the first boxing round looking well out of his weight class—at one point Kavanagh picked him up off the ground with one arm before the referee waved off the hold—he landed a devastating right hook from the corner that knocked his opponent down flat, scoring an unexpected TKO. Win for Robinson in boxing round 1.

4. Andrew McGregor vs. Hubert van Melick

For the heavyweight main event, the time constraints on the chess were relaxed to 12 minutes per player from the 7:30 that was allotted to the preceding bouts, and the audience was told to expect up to 11 rounds of chess and boxing apiece. There was an audible hush as the 6’11″ bearded ‘Man Mountain’ McGregor strode into the ring, draped in a scarlet cape and looking like he’d just come back from lugging Harry Potter off to school.

The match opened into the Italian Game and a defensive pawn structure on both sides, suggesting a more measured game than the others, but this never came to fruition. The first round of boxing was by far the most ferocious of the night, and van Melick chased McGregor around the ring until McGregor’s cornerman threw in the towel. The disappointed audience erupted in boos as Tim Woolgar and the other officials took the stage to award van Melick the Bobby Fischer Belt. (Yes, there was a gaudy championship belt emblazoned with the image of Bobby Fischer. Fischer, who felt exploited by something as innocent as the title of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer, would have been furious.)

Keith Kolb, who fought in the final match (and who, like McGregor, flew over from Los Angeles to compete), later revealed that McGregor had only met his cornerman that night and was very upset with the call. He was on the back foot and van Melick was driving him into the corner, yes, but the letdown of seeing the main event end so abruptly cast an unfortunate shadow over the whole evening.

5. Charlie Hayter vs. Keith Kolb

The final bout, which wasn’t listed in the original advertising and was no doubt added late, followed a course that paralleled the main event: once again, the chess looked to be one of the more promising and defensive games of the day, and once again, we never got to see the middlegame owing to an early knockdown by Hayter. Kolb’s cornerman threw in the towel, only this time it was clearly the appropriate call. Win for Hayter in boxing round 1.

Check, please

With three of the bouts finishing before we could see the boxing’s effect on the chess, it’s safe to say that the London Chessboxing Championship fell short of exhibiting the promise of the game. This was apparently anomalous; the summaries of the last event in March suggest that matches do tend to go longer, one of them (the middleweight fight between Svein Clouston and Alan Riley) being decided on points after the full 11 rounds.

I’m not sure what can be done to ensure more consistently entertaining bouts, but one possibility is to have the fighters wear headgear, which Andrew McGregor already requires at his club in California. Purists will say this takes away from the visceral pleasure of boxing—nobody ever imagines it with headgear—but it could have the effect of being more welcoming to new competitors as well as limiting the risk of an early exit in the boxing segment. A quick and dramatic knockout is fun to watch in boxing, but in chessboxing it trivializes the chess completely. (Then again, nobody complained when Robinson landed his hit on Kavanagh—easily the boxing highlight of the show.)

Less tractable is the problem that the sport favours boxers new to chess over chess players new to boxing. Unless you fall into an obvious opening trap, it’s much easier for a neophyte chess player to survive four minutes of chess than it is for an inexperienced boxer to make it through the first round of boxing, even when the opponents are well matched. The skill curve in chess rises astronomically at the higher levels of play, but its minimum standard of fitness isn’t nearly as stringent as that of the boxing half. Furthermore, chessboxing is by its very nature designed to produce poor play on the board, full of mishaps that are visible to the audience but not so perceptible to someone who has just shaken off the gloves. It may never be a game that is open to producing quality chess, which limits its appeal to audiences that don’t take the game seriously either. But in another way this flaw may be an asset: the liability of the players to make mistakes encourages them to wriggle out of theoretically lost positions and play their games through to the bitter end.

Going by what I saw on Saturday, there is a lot of minor tidying that can be done with the production. Aside from the problem of the computer display of the board, which was not ideal for tracking endgame patterns at blazing speeds, the audio for the chess commentary was not very clear. As such, the chess was difficult to follow. It didn’t help, either, that much of the commentary was aimed at an elementary crowd. The commentator was International Master Malcolm Pein, chess columnist for The Telegraph and the voice of Fritz, who indisputably had the knowledge and experience for the job; but from the moment he announced 1. e4 as “Bobby Fischer’s move! That’s Bobby Fischer’s move!” it was clear I wasn’t the target audience—and I’m someone who hasn’t held down a tournament rating since junior.

I’m not saying that the commentary should dive into book jargon without much in the way of explanation, but I would have liked more insight into the positions and their strategic shapes. Commentary has the power to add exceptional spectator value for audiences with only a passing idea of tactics and strategy without talking down to their level. Witness this video of a blitz game from 1994 between Vassily Ivanchuk and the current World Chess Champion, Viswanathan Anand.

This is perhaps a bit hopeful. Bundled with an awkward breakdancing pre-show, Frankensteinian mimes, and a frustrated hula dancer whose music kept cutting off, chessboxing was first and foremost packaged as a grand night out in London. And yes, while entertainment is where all spectator sports begin, I do feel as though the tackiness of the packaging underserves the game itself. For one thing, it sets the audience apart from the competitors like visitors from animals at the zoo: one is there for the detached amusement of the other. It’s worth remembering that for all the titanic reputation of Muhammad Ali or Lennox Lewis, boxing has always made for great stories because it creates such identifiable struggles. It’s the everyman’s sport, the same sweet science that gave us Terry Malloy.

As someone whose favourite spectator sport happens to be StarCraft II, and who recently joined thirty others to watch a professional tournament broadcast in a 19th-century pub (along with a hundred thousand others worldwide, hundreds of them in bars), the concept of chessboxing wasn’t outlandish to me at all; besides, I’d been aware of it for years. I’m certainly not one to judge a sport that, past its novelty, has the genuine potential to be great. What was alienating was everything surrounding it, this mysterious metropolitan ‘nightlife’ I’d heard of only in the urban legendarium. But when Iepe Rubingh brought chessboxing to the fore eight years ago, the game picked its target audience and committed to its peculiar cultural veneer. I’d say the strategy is working out pretty well, but I’m not so sure it’s ideal for inviting new contenders into the ring.

(The photographs in this post come from galleries of the event by James Bartosik and Ray Morris-Hill.)

Civilization veteran Soren Johnson, one of the foremost designers of strategy games and AI today and certainly one of the best writers on the subject, often remarks that the theme of a game is not to be confused with its meaning (slides here). Diplomacy may cast its players as the great powers of pre-1914 Europe, but it’s about simultaneity. StarCraft may put you in charge of Heinlein-esque space marines and alien civilizations, but it’s about asymmetry. If the theme and mechanics harmoniously cohere, then the mechanics can shed light on the theme in the way that art sheds light on the world. Pre-war Europe is an intriguing setting for Diplomacy because in all their backroom double-dealing, the empires didn’t take turns. Aliens are a good fit for StarCraft because you can map anything onto aliens, be it the collectivist swarm-by-numbers ethos of the Zerg or the judicious high-tech investment of the Protoss.

I am partial to this view, predominantly for reasons of aesthetics. If we are to conceive of game design as an art form, it does not suffice to decompose games into the artistry of constituent parts—the music, the models and sprites, the cinematic sequences, on rare occasion the writing. The aesthetics have to come from the specific properties that make something a game, whether it is played with a board and dice, a deck of cards, or a mouse and keyboard—and those properties come from the mechanics.

But that’s neither here nor there; I won’t elaborate today. Instead I want to turn to my favourite of Johnson’s examples: the evolution game. For your fill of Darwinian game mechanics, look not to Spore (which Johnson worked on), a game that is nominally about evolution from microbe to intergalactic juggernaut, but is actually about special creation. Back when I first played it, I wrote, perhaps a tad generously:

Let’s not bury our heads in the sand: by placing creature design into the player’s hands instead of leaving it up to random mutation, Spore inherently owes a lot to intelligent design. There’s still room for a real game about evolution in the Darwinian sense, where you set certain environmental constraints and preconditions, let a species run loose, and see if it survives in an ecosystem full of other models—kind of like how some engineers pit robots in mortal battle, but with adaptation.

Spore is a lot more creationistic than I gave it credit for; consider that the functional components of your custom-made species—the mouths, the horns, the flagella—are interchangeable parts from a specified, modular set, which is precisely what we would expect from a designing agent but not at all what we would expect from natural selection. But never mind all that. The evolution game exists, says Johnson, and it’s called World of Warcraft.

I would contend, however, that the Darwinian features Johnson ascribes to WoW are equally prevalent in most games with competitive and highly interactive player populations, provided there is sufficient strategic depth worth talking about. WoW is an evolution game because its core mechanic is community. Where there is a community of players and a developed metagame of optimal practices, strategic decisions are memes that compete for survival. Let’s call them strategemes.

Strategemes include everything from chess openings to Scrabble vocabulary: they are transmissible units of knowledge that players learn, study, and adopt—and crucially, copy. Copying them is not seen as unfair, but as an advantageous and often essential behaviour. They leave room for mutation, and we can perceive a frequency distribution of variations over a population of players and games.

But where does natural selection come into play? Let’s look at the exemplar we get from Johnson: the WoW talent tree.

World of Sporecraft

Every player in World of Warcraft belongs to one of ten character classes—Mages, Warriors, Priests, and so on—and every class has a range of “talents” (bonuses and special abilities) that fall into three specializations. As players rise in level, they gain points that they can allocate to configure their characters however they like.

Here’s the rub: all but the most basic talents are only available once you have already assigned points to the same specialization tree. To make your character as powerful as you can, the strategy is to allocate most of your talent points in one tree and distribute a few residual points in the other two; otherwise you will be a jack of all trades and a master of none.

The ramifications of specializing are most pronounced in classes like the Paladin, which can perform all three of the major roles in the game’s group-oriented content: healing, “tanking” (damage absorption), and dealing damage to enemies. For Paladins, these correspond to the Restoration, Protection, and Retribution trees. Within these trees, you can further allocate points in a manner optimized for the content you are playing through, be it fighting other players or raiding (killing bosses in coordinated groups of up to 25 people).

Who determines what is optimal? Not the game’s designers at Blizzard Entertainment, but the players themselves. Every few months the designers shift a few percentage points around to address balance issues, and the players involved in the game’s most challenging content scramble to adjust.

So far, this doesn’t sound evolutionary in the least. There is no heredity at work, and players can change their specializations at any point for a fee in the game’s virtual currency. Consider the following comment-box response to this article about Johnson’s recent theme-versus-mechanics presentation at the Game Developers Conference:

Soren Johnson knows nothing about evolution and [should] probably just never talk about it until he’s taken a biology course. His “Paladin Natural Selection” is completely off the mark. What he is describing is much closer to variable phenotypic expression where certain traits are expressed in an individual based on [its] immediate environment.

The commenter’s objection would be absolutely right were we to speak of the player characters themselves as individually evolving organisms. From this point of view, WoW characters do not evolve any more than an Englishman living in Boston evolves by speaking in a Bostonian accent. But it still makes sense to think of the English language as evolving, and look at traits of regional accents and dialects as they statistically appear in a population. Similarly, in WoW we can look at the player population as a whole and, with the aid of tools like Armory Data Mining, observe measurable changes in the frequency of talent allocations.

The underlying reason for this is in the way that talent choices spread. If you think WoW’s talent system gives players considerable freedom to customize their personal experience, you would be wrong. In reality, whenever the game is rebalanced, a few expert players proficient in mathematics run simulations and tests to crunch the numbers and figure out the best theoretical allocations under ideal circumstances. (Very few boss encounters present ideal circumstances, and almost no players have the ideal weapons and armour; but for the range of players serious enough to keep abreast of the theory, these findings usually suffice.) The experts debate about the data on discussion forums, update their FAQs, and release new versions of their simulation spreadsheets. Over time, more and more players adjust their characters to account for the theoretical recommendations. Players trying out a new character class will often model their choices after high-performance players whom they respect without comprehending the underlying rationale.

Talent trees can be replicated with perfect fidelity: a player can copy them point for point. They are unambiguously quantifiable, and it makes sense to think of them as genotypes. But they are only optimal provided the player behaves in certain patterns and within particular constraints, using their abilities in specific sequences. There we see phenotypic variation, which sometimes feeds back into talent-tree mutations within a tolerance of a few points; some character classes are inflexible while others are less rigidly specified.

Critically, a “cookie-cutter” talent setup is not necessarily what is best for every encounter, or even every player of that class and specialization. The fitness of talent choices—their capacity to replicate throughout the population—depends on social factors as well. Players copy talent choices that correlate strongly with success. This is observably the case for player-versus-player combat in arenas and battlegrounds, which involves considerable improvisation and is less susceptible to accurate mathematical modelling. As for raids, to adopt a theoretically endorsed talent allocation is to demonstrate that you stay informed, and minimize the risk introduced by your inclusion on the team. The raiding guilds that tackle even mildly challenging content will not invite players who deviate from the prescribed talents unless they provide an expert justification for why their modifications make sense.

In short, certain sets of talent choices have survival advantages over others. The fitter variations spread throughout the population while the frequencies of unfit ones decline. Players that do not adopt the most frequent choices are excluded from much of the high-level group content, and they (along with their decisions) are less likely to remain active in the game.

In this respect, World of Warcraft differs significantly from most video games. What does it matter what other people think, so long as you are having fun? When I play Super Mario Bros. I don’t care if the speediest route through the game is via the Warp Zones in Worlds 1-2 and 4-2; I can take the long road and clear every stage if I want. When I play Civilization I don’t care if early global conquest yields the highest scores; I like to win by constructing a spaceship to Alpha Centauri without ever building a city beyond my first. In adventure games like The Legend of Zelda the pleasure lies in figuring out the puzzles yourself; to look up the solutions in a guide is to admit defeat and cheat, and is held in lower regard.

Or look at Spore. In Spore there is abundant community interaction through an online portal where players can share their creations and randomly “seed” them on the worlds of others. Players can choose to preserve the creations they like, and the game tracks the most popular ones—which, for a time, was a roster headed by a model of Charles Darwin. In one sense this would appear to set up a competition to make the most creative and amusing models: the better your creature, the likelier it is to attain a high rate of incidence on other worlds. Why not consider the Darwin model a strategeme as well? Because the fittest creatures in the online community are not the ones that lead to the greatest mechanical success in the game itself. There is no selective pressure directed towards accomplishing objectives in the game, so players continue to make their in-game decisions independent of everyone else.

Granted, some WoW players ignore selective pressure as well: they impose various challenges on themselves and configure their characters specifically for the task. This can involve everything from controlling multiple characters at once to defeating high-level challenges in entry-level equipment. (Lisa Poisso’s 15 Minutes of Fame column routinely puts the spotlight on some of the most fascinating specimens.) But these activities are usually individual—rarely do they take place in large groups—and the special strategic decisions they involve do not tend to spread. From the population’s point of view, these innovations die out.

The dominant culture in WoW is one where copying strategic templates is not regarded as cheating, but is an expected precondition for accessing most of the game’s group content at all. This is not limited to individual characters and talent points, but extends to the behaviour of a raiding guild—who does what and who stands where. For all but the very best players, the raiding game is an exercise in fine-tuning locally appropriate variations on top of a broadly established strategy copied from somewhere else. Here, too, we see strategemes competing for dominance: successful variations spread to other guilds, and the most widespread ones become part of the orthodox strategic package that much of the player base comes to adopt.

World of Warcraft is an evolution game as a consequence of being a community game. But not all games with communities lead to evolutionary trends. What makes my concept of a strategeme unique among memes is that it applies to games where social learning, often in the form of direct imitation, is advantageous to the pursuit of absolute objectives embedded in the game’s design—so overwhelmingly advantageous, in fact, that it affects one’s inclusiveness in a community and the accessibility of the game’s content. There is feedback from the game mechanics that tells you if one set of choices is performing better than another. In WoW it may be your binary pass/fail success in defeating an encounter, or a metric of your damage or healing output. In chess it is your ability to win games (perhaps further broken down into your success as white or black, against certain opening lines, or facing various strata of opponents); this also generates social feedback as expressed in your Elo rating, which estimates your chances against other rated players and unlocks your access to upper echelons of competition.

Putting it generally, we see evolutionary change occur in games when the benefits of copying others far outweigh the qualitative value of making your own choices from scratch. This is a jarring philosophy of play when you consider that figuring things out for yourself is the central pleasure of games and puzzles that are free of social selective pressure—which includes most of the games people play in their ordinary experience. A game with no predesigned capacity for strategic evolution quickly develops one with the emergence of a community, so long as the mechanics are deep enough to reward the exploration of an immense variety of choices. An evolutionary account gives us the tools to explain how a player population prunes those choices, favouring some for widespread imitation while others are left behind.

The rest of the story

In future instalments, I will be looking at some other games that cultivate different kinds of strategemes, anticipate some reasonable objections to using analogies from biological evolution, and look at what strategemes may tell us about life outside of games (if such a thing exists). Depending on interest, I may also provide a technical supplement to this first part for readers who are comfortable with World of Warcraft‘s esoteric lingo and want to see some specific examples and hard data; I do have those at the ready.

In brief: The book’s alternate subtitle—”How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science, and the Human Brain”—offers a hint of Shenk’s scope of thought. Full of colourful stories and painstaking research, this thoroughly accessible work probes into the mystery of how chess has endured for 1400 years and why it delights us still. Shenk guides us on a tour through everything from the intrigue of warring nations to the play-by-play thrill of a historic game, and muses as much about how chess has shaped humanity as how humanity has shaped chess. A must-read for hobbyists and serious players alike.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Immortal Game, keep reading below.)

The Immortal Game is a book so bubbly with intellectual excitement that it can’t seem to decide what to be about. I say this as a compliment. There’s an old Indian proverb that chess is an ocean where a gnat may drink and an elephant bathe (or drown—I’ve seen it rendered both ways, and both make sense for different reasons). To boil it down to one thesis, or one narrative thread, would fail to capture the bottomless complexity at the core of the game’s appeal.

Not for lack of trying, though. There’s a paragraph four chapters into the book where the author, David Shenk, attempts to bind his entire project together into a single statement. It’s a pretty long statement:

How could one game symbolize so many different entities, structures, relationships, notions? It largely came down to the fact that chess had been designed as a symbol to begin with. Out of the box, it came furnished with a wide variety of generic attributes that lent themselves to an even wider variety of metaphorical applications: chess was a battle between two groups, each stratified by social ranking, contesting for dominance over a finite piece of geography, interacting in a dynamic so complex it seemed to take on a life of its own, each army manipulated by a player, battling each other with wits rather than brawn, employing both tactics (short-term planning) and strategy (long-term planning), in a game that could never truly be mastered.

This passage provides a decent summary of what The Immortal Game tries to do. It isn’t a history of chess in a dry, chronological sense. Rather, it asks why chess has recognizably survived for over fourteen centuries, why it has evolved into its current standardized form with respect to game mechanics as well as strategic wisdom, and why it has repeatedly taken a central role as the exemplary specimen in studies of the mind (as the fruit fly is to genetics)—and answers these questions by placing chess in the context of not only its own history, but the intellectual history of human civilization.

Why is chess special? It incontrovertibly is, but why? To answer this, it is not sufficient to look at the appeal of chess on its own, or its relevance to the world outside the board—the thinking skills Benjamin Franklin identified as foresight, circumspection, and caution in “The Morals of Chess”, his lesson in gentlemanly chess etiquette (reproduced in full in The Immortal Game‘s appendices). One must show why chess has inspired the human imagination in countless ways while other board games have not: not checkers, despite its game-theoretic similarities and the likeness of the board; not Go, which is mathematically on a whole other plane of complexity; not backgammon, the prototype of which (nard) was contemporaneous with chess’s Persian ancestor, shatranj.

Shenk rises to the challenge, and his answers are often inventive on top of being sensible. There is more to chess, we learn, than its nature as a deterministic abstraction—a bloodless battlefield with no dice and no rotting corpses, no fates to answer to but the aims of sparring minds. It also possesses the qualities of representational art. (This is very interesting as chess spreads via the Islamic Renaissance, given Islam’s prohibition on representational imagery; the solution, in those times, was to carve pieces that were almost abstract but not quite.) The class stratification of the pieces—a king that must be protected, pawns that are weak by themselves but powerful as a structured whole, knights that hop around and do their own thing to throw everyone off—is a reflection of our society. The pieces work collectively towards a common goal, but they do it with their own unique abilities.

No wonder chess is a wellspring of political and literary rhetoric: the game is directly a metaphor for war, and indirectly a metaphor for life. One may object that chess players don’t really imagine themselves as generals commanding armies on the other side of Alice’s looking-glass: they see positions and geometries, not romantic battles, right? But as Shenk shows us in one colourful anecdote after another, they often do. A French ambassador used chess to advise Elizabeth I of the political threat from the Stuarts. Benjamin Franklin’s chess games in England segued into last-ditch diplomatic talks to avoid the Revolutionary War. Nazi Germany trained its children on sets with the pieces replaced by modern artillery, and hired the Russian legend Alexander Alekhine to write anti-Semitic tracts on the cowardice of Jewish chess strategy.

Shenk tells these stories so vividly that one is inclined to disbelieve them. This says more about his gift as a writer than it does about his research, which is extensively corroborated. His presentation of how computers have tackled the game is a superb introduction to minimax algorithms, better than the explanations in many computing science texts.

As a responsible journalist, Shenk is judicious about consulting multiple professional opinions from different fields. Heaven knows he has a stunning range of sources to draw upon. In one of The Immortal Game‘s most compelling chapters, Shenk confronts the uncomfortable but undeniable quandary of the high incidence of mental illness among serious chess players. The Freudians, quaint as they seem now, regarded chess as an outlet for the patricidal impulse of the Oedipus complex. A short story by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig links the simulation of games against oneself to a “self-produced schizophrenia”. As for the delusional paranoia best known to us through the story of Bobby Fischer, literature professor and United States Chess Federation past president Tim Redman offers this choice quotation:

“A chess tournament is, by definition, an activity in which you spend many hours each day, using your best intellectual and imaginative abilities to figure out how the other player is out to get you.”

In between chapters, Shenk tells the story of one of chess’s most iconic moments, the game between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzsky known as the Immortal Game, from which the book takes its title. There is something here for everyone. A novice player is likely unable to distinguish a good chess game from a bad one, but will still be able to appreciate the drama of every thrust, the excitement of every parry, as fortunes reverse this way and that. A developing player, familiar with rules and tactics but unable or unwilling to rise to the next level with hundreds of hours of study, will have fun stepping through the game and predicting every move, only to have Anderssen and Kieseritzsky shatter all expectations. An expert player will have seen it all before and may even be frustrated at the finer strategic minutiae that Shenk’s annotation omits, but should appreciate the uniqueness of this game all the more—especially given the way Shenk contextualizes it as the definitive example of the daring Romantic style.

Shenk is of that second class of player, thrilled with the game but intimidated by the thought of being straitjacketed into a regimen of study. (There is a personal attraction there too: Shenk is a direct descendant of the nineteenth-century master Samuel Rosenthal.) Like most disciplines in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the wealth of accumulated expertise in chess raised the bar of entry to seemingly insurmountable heights. One can no longer be a Benjamin Franklin these days, dabbling here and there; not in medicine, physics, and diplomacy, and not in chess.

In Shenk’s words, here’s the truth of it—the truth I, for one, had begrudgingly learned about too many of my own exploits to name:

Playing well requires study—period. There are more and less sophisticated ways to play the game, and those unwilling to face up to the reality of chess knowledge will be consigned forever to be ineffective, ignorant underachievers.

[...]

One learns from past play; one does not start from scratch. Every notable game is entered into the historical record, studied by humans—and now computers—until it becomes an essential part of the foundation of knowledge that future games will be built on. In not wanting to study openings, I was the equivalent of an unenlightened medieval cleric ranting against intellectual discovery.

Humbling, to be sure. But, to be honest, that still didn’t make me want to study opening theory.

Which is the central problem of human creativity, isn’t it: the search for something new when it seems like everything has already been done. We all get into the business hoping to innovate, but without an extensive literacy in the form—which, in chess, is an art form with evolutions and revolutions in aesthetic thought, from the Romantic to the Scientific era, from the Hypermodern school to the New Dynamism—you’re just wanking. And therein lies the constant struggle of our finite existences: to find that elusive balance between the desire to improve and the reluctance to give up one’s life.

Then again, you could always surrender to your limitations and write a good book instead—a book like The Immortal Game.

This caught my attention:

In 2006, Brian Reynolds, a founder of Maryland software company Big Huge Games and the programmer who developed the AI behind the addictive computer classic Sid Meier’s Civilization II, set out to make an Xbox 360 version of Settlers. To help programmers develop the game’s AI, Teuber spent months exploring the mathematics of his most famous creation, charting the probability of every event in the game. The odds of a six or eight being rolled are almost 1 in 3 for example, while the chance of a four being rolled is 1 in 12. There is a 2-in-25 chance of drawing a Year of Plenty development card. Teuber created elaborate logic chains and probability matrices in a complex Excel spreadsheet so the videogame developers could see how every possible move and roll of the dice—from the impact of the Robber to the odds of getting wheat in a given scenario—compared. The end result was a sort of blueprint for the game that gave Big Huge Games a head start and showed just how complex the underlying math was. “It was the biggest, gnarliest spreadsheet I had ever seen,” Reynolds says.

I want to see this.

One of the best things that happened to the Civilization series was how in Civilization IV, lead designer Soren Johnson laid the mathematics and AI bare for everyone to see, expanding on a series tradition in the Sid Meier games to make all the data easily accessible (and therefore modifiable).

Settlers is elegant enough that I’m sure people have already figured out the math through a spot of reverse engineering; it’s really not that hard. But I’d love to see Teuber’s spreadsheet for its immense historical value as a design document alone. Surely there was a calculated rationale to everything from the fifteen-road limit to the assignment of three ore/brick hexes instead of four—and I often wonder if the perpetual endgame glut of sheep is here as an intentional crimp.

Casablanca is one of those films that nobody really falls in love with the first time through, even if they think otherwise. Most of its enduring power emanates from multiple viewings, when the film truly demonstrates its uncanny ability to resonate with almost every conceivable romantic trauma, especially those of a triangular geometry (which is to say, practically all of them). You go through life-as-such and every time, there’s always a handful of scenes that you’ll never look at in the same way again.

I haven’t watched the film in months—I only pull it out once a year as a routine, emergencies notwithstanding—but I already expect to encounter these transformative moments with respect to two scenes in particular: a) when Victor Laszlo leads Rick’s Café in a stirring rendition of “La Marseillaise” (for reasons I’m not even going to bother explaining), and b) the first time we see Rick, brooding over a chessboard by himself.

So here’s the mystery du jour: why is Rick playing chess?

The simple trivia-page answer: Humphrey Bogart was an excellent player by amateur standards, and made a living hustling chess in the Depression before he broke into gangster pictures. That Rick would be a drunken chess player was Bogie’s own suggestion.

But we don’t do trivia-page answers here at Nick’s. That’s why everybody comes to Nick’s. The question I posed is a literary one—and I’m not talking about that strangely allegorical continuity error where a knight appears in one shot and not in the next.

What makes Casablanca click, after all, is layer after layer of ambiguity and misunderstanding, most of it a result of people lying to one another this way and that without an especial intent to do any harm. For instance, we never do find out why Rick can’t return to his country:

RENAULT: I’ve often speculated why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with a Senator’s wife? I like to think that you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.

RICK: It was a combination of all three.

Along the same lines, I’ll always wonder why he’s fiddling with the pieces in his game of solitaire.

Like everything else about Rick, maybe it’s a manifestation of something he regrets. Let’s back up a few steps, shall I, and see if I would have stood a chance if it weren’t for that colossal oversight. Let’s play a hypothetical endgame where I didn’t have to be the guy standing on a station platform in the rain with a comical look on his face because his insides have been kicked out. Let’s convince myself that she would have stayed with me from Paris to Marseilles if it weren’t for that goddamned bishop.

Because the way I like to tell it, you haven’t lived and died until you’ve duelled for the love of a woman over a chessboard in a faraway land.

But here’s the thing about duels: it doesn’t matter a lick if you win or lose. It’s all rigged. The dice are loaded, and it isn’t even a game of chance. You can play your rival to an improbable stalemate or two and it won’t make a smidgen of a difference. The lady made up her mind before you put the pieces on the board, and it isn’t of any consequence if you castle queenside or kingside when she’s married to the nearest underground revolutionary and no gambit you make is going to stop him from skewering his way out of that concentration camp. Knight takes queen, and leaves.

So why drown in your champagne and your checkmate puzzle, my dear Ricky? For the same reason anybody duels his way to a pre-ordained catastrophe and relives it over and over as if he had a choice: to claim a sense of responsibility. To fool yourself into believing that somewhere, there was a wrong move that could have been right. To pretend that her honour was ever yours to defend.

And that’s being optimistic, because, well, mercy be upon you if you never even had Paris.

It’s pleasant to shuffle your pawns around and imagine you ever had a say, though you’ll often find there was no way to win. It wouldn’t be Casablanca if Ilsa didn’t get on that plane with Victor, and it sucks to be Rick, but that’s how it’s going to be and everybody else seems to like it that way. So you tell her that you’re no good at being noble, but that it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

We have a name for that sort of behaviour: lying through your teeth.

And that, mes amis, is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Regrettably, the mainstream press saw fit to stop at the level of goals, objectives and the roleplay element, and did not appear to find the game mechanics themselves to be newsworthy. This is understandable, given that the representational level of “Bomb London for 100 points” is probably of more interest to historians than the question of how exactly one goes about conducting such a blitz.

My philosophy with respect to the vast and undefinable realm of “board games” (including some diversions that involve no boards at all, which I would refer to as “hobby games” if I were so rash as to claim that they were no more than hobbies) parallels my attitude towards video games: the game mechanics are often as important to the “meaning” of the game experience as the “story” that exists from without.

To draw on an example from the more abstract end of the board game spectrum: when a detective testified that interviewing disgraced former astronaut Lisa Nowak was “like a chess game,” he didn’t mean he felt like a plodding monarch commanding an imposing army on a battlefield opposite a symmetrically positioned opponent. The “story” that a chess game represents lies in the strategy and tactics that arise from the rules that govern how the pieces move: “chess” connotes a semantic field chock full of concepts like stalemate, entrapment and genius.

Then again, that’s only one interpretation. It’s always possible to turn things around and look at them Through the Looking-Glass, as Alice did, and enter a world where chess really is about knights and bishops traipsing about the countryside and endangering pawns on a quest for promotion (along with the occasional Humpty Dumpty).

In the case of games of war, conquest or economic supremacy—and I think that encompasses the lion’s share of the popular non-abstract board games that don’t involve trivia questions—there is a very clear narrative that arises from the setting and object of the game. Players are quite actively encouraged to identify as characters in the game world. No matter how it is you go about moving the pieces in Bomber über England, or how interchangeable the mechanics are with variant boards set in other countries, the fact that the game is about bombing British cities says to the player, “You are the Luftwaffe.” Bring glory to the Fatherland. That’s the story.

The existence of Nazi propaganda games shouldn’t turn any sufficiently educated heads. It should be no surprise to anyone that themed board games have some kind of social or political function in any age, be it the Second World War or the present day. But I think the role of the game mechanics in defining that function is often less obvious.

If you look at Diplomacy, a game that (on the standard map) is about upsetting the balance of power in pre-WWI Europe, the elements that distinguish the way the game plays out—the backroom deals and backstabs—necessarily arise from the two key principles of the overall design: 1) all moves are simultaneous, and 2) all armies are equal. There is nothing in the rules that insists you negotiate or break agreements in order to escape the deadlock: it just happens because there is no plausible alternative. If there is a message here, it is that diplomacy works or fails as a method of international engagement depending on how you assess the other actors, who inevitably keep their intentions and agreements concealed.

Similarly, if there is a social message to Settlers of Catan beyond the idea that virgin lands bearing resources are out there waiting to be exploited, it is this: in a situation where you can’t invade or destroy rival settlements that are in your way, trade is the solution to economic scarcity, and ultimately the path to victory. Again, there is nothing in the rules that say you must trade, let alone do it effectively. It just implicitly becomes a strategic necessity.

This isn’t to say that the mechanics are always going to be relevant to what the game is doing, or that they even serve an interesting purpose in any significant capacity. Removing Hitler from a game about throwing darts at Hitler leaves you with nothing more than a game of darts. And I’m sure that decorating Goering would be a ball no matter how it is you went about determining whose turn it is, or what kind of decorations you may affix, and where.

As I discussed when I wrote that rather lengthy piece about Connect Four back in May, I personally derive more enjoyment from strategic elements than the activity of roleplaying. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a spot of incisive political commentary for its own sake, independent of how fun it is to actually play the game.

Case in point: I have, before me, a rather splendid birthday gift entitled The Game of France, 1940: German Blitzkrieg in the West.

This isn’t a rare piece of Nazi memorabilia, of course, but a relatively obscure Avalon Hill title published in 1972. I haven’t the foggiest idea how to play it, but it sure is fun to read the appropriately sardonic companion booklets.

The “Designer’s Notes and Campaign Analysis” supplement begins thus:

A game is not like a book. A game can talk back. For this reason we give the game’s designer a chance to talk back also. What he had in mind, and what the game says to some people may not always be the same. And, finally, there is the problem of figuring out just what the game is supposed to be saying. That’s what we’re going to try to do here.

First, it is necessary to explain some general background on why France, 1940 was designed. The subject has always been a popular one. The campaign was, after all, the first real test of the “blitzkrieg”. But it was a rather one-sided test. The Germans smashed the Allied armies so decisively that they did not have to face a large “western” army again for three years. Most people assume that, because of the magnitude of the German victory, the Allied armies in 1940 didn’t stand much of a chance. That’s a fairly correct assumption. And that was the main reason why it took so long for a game on this period to appear.

And so on.

There are also instructions for playing the game in a historically accurate manner (“The ‘Idiot’s Game’: Re-creating History with the ‘Dyle Plan’”).

For those of you who aren’t familiar with computing science, game theory or their related fields, what it means in layman’s terms is this: consider how with a simple game like Tic-Tac-Toe, pretty much everyone over the age of five has stumbled upon a strategy that will always play to a win or a draw. Well, it’s been a long time coming, but they’ve just done that with checkers.

There’s a considerable wealth of information on the Chinook website, where you can step your way through a demonstration of the proof or find your way to the article in Science.

More than anything else, I hope this kind of high-profile accomplishment encourages others to pursue studies in what is, I think, a grossly misunderstood and often ill-introduced branch of the sciences. I know that I, for one, had little idea just what I was missing until I transferred into their programme in my third year, a decision about which I have almost no regrets. Computers aren’t just tools that are meant to sit around generating heat in office cubicles, waiting to be thrown out a nearby window; their study is not limited to job training for information-age janitors, network witch-doctors and software monkeys. There’s a genuinely interesting field of scientific enquiry there to which few receive anything remotely resembling a proper introduction. I sincerely hope this is a step towards the elusive remedy.

Next stop, poker!

On a game-by-game basis, it was far from a disaster by any standard, as I won one game decisively (6 VPs on the table, 4 for Longest Road and Largest Army, and another one just to make sure) and tied for a close second in two others in the face of unfavourable dice. But I needed two wins to advance to the semis. As with most games that involve a tenuous balance of skill and chance, consistency in the face of misfortune is the mark of a skilled player. It looks like I have some ways to go.

We will speak little of Round 3, in which I did not show up, nor did the number 5, and I finished dead last with only 4 VPs. That debacle was almost entirely due to tactical and strategic miscalculation on my part, as I drew first position on the snake (placing my initial settlements first and last), grabbed a 5/9/10 and went for an expansionist wood/brick strategy, which I almost never do. Anyone who has heard me mope about Scrabble knows that I have a remarkable tendency to get overly experimental in untimely competitive situations. All three of the other players went for an ore-heavy game, and rolled the numbers to match, erecting early cities and grabbing piles of development cards while I sat on my hands with nothing of significant trade value. With no cities, no soldiers to keep the robber off my property and no 5s, my exit from contention was terrible, swift and entirely my fault.

But it happens. And while the knowledge that you played poorly is hardly a happy thought, it gives you the opportunity to shoulder the responsibility and think about how you might act differently in the future. In spite of the dice, you retain the impression that you have control over your own destiny.

However, three key elements of Settlers of Catan elevate its strategic complexity to a whole other dimension that I am only beginning to grasp. It’s non-zero-sum, it’s for four players, and it’s built on trade.

Settlers is non-zero-sum in that you can check a player, or you can block him from victory to some extent (ask Jake Troughton about the game he had elsewhere in the tournament where the other players held him at 9 VPs for well over an hour), but aside from snatching away the Longest Road or Largest Army, you can’t roll him back. Once you have points on the table, they stay on the table. And when someone coasting to victory settles on the same numbers as you, the rolls that permit you to develop confer no relative advantage. The dice may well push them over the edge, and there isn’t a damnable thing you can do about it.

And more to the point, in a four-player game, someone can hand someone else the game with a series of bad decisions, and there isn’t a thing you can do about it except sit there and watch. If the initial settlement placement pans out so one opponent is left with a disproportionate tract of uncontested land open for expansion, because the other two decided to crowd you instead, it sucks to be you and that’s that. Similarly, if another player decides to go through with an uneven trade, or break a three-way embargo, there’s little to be done apart from taking a bullet and proposing an even more ridiculous counter-offer. I’ve been on both sides of this situation. On the winning side, you try to get yourself into a position where someone else has to cooperate with you just to stay in the game.

I’m not an Xbox 360 owner, so I haven’t had a chance to poke and prod the AI behind the Settlers of Catan video game, but I’d be very interested in examining it for its shortcomings. Like the human element behind games like poker or Diplomacy, it seems to me that the trading element that fundamentally drives the course of proceedings in Settlers would be extremely difficult to formalize and refine. One of the biggest challenges when it comes to artificial intelligence is getting over the assumption that you’re playing against someone rational. Game theory was designed to fight rational fire with rational fire, which is why you end up with suboptimal equilibria like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In Settlers, you have to account for deeply suboptimal opponents – the ones who, in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, could actually be hoodwinked into cooperating instead of defecting; the Kevin Lowes who will actually give away their Chris Prongers for less than nothing (to your divisional rivals, no less). What you do at a table of championship-level thinkers is and must be different from how you behave when someone is just there for the burgers and door prizes.

And I wouldn’t have complained about a little help from the dice.

Belated congratulations to my compadres Chris Samuel, who finished 13th with two wins and contended in the semis, and Steve Smith, who finished 19th with one win (Round 4 against me, knocking me out), and sat (but did not play) as an alternate.

Hockey anthem addendum: I have a lot of respect for Holly Cole for being one of Canada’s leading jazz ambassadors, but here’s a three-letter memo about her performance of “O Canada” at the Duck Pond in Game 2: WTF?

But first, as I have been tending to do with increasing regularity, I am going to precede the main feature with some ancillary featurettes.

I don’t write that much about hockey (proportionate to my other interests) because other, more prolific minds know a lot more about the ins and outs of the subject than I do. But I do know music, and I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to the singing of the national anthems. I remember, with astounding clarity, that the most execrable part of watching Tampa’s home games in the Tampa-Calgary series in 2004 (aside from seeing the Lightning hoist the Cup) was Brooke Hogan’s consistently lamentable butchering of “O Canada” – and I’m sad to report that since then, Hulk’s baby girl hasn’t faded into deserved obscurity, but has instead released an album and graduated to B-list pop-stardom.

So, for all the press about how epic the Buffalo-Ottawa series will be when it comes to the action on the ice, I think it falls to somebody to mention two of the lesser-recognized reasons why it will be (and already is) so fun to watch: Doug Allen and Lyndon Slewidge. I haven’t seen every regular anthem singer currently making the rounds in the NHL, of course, but of the ones I have, these two are the very best. (And being from Calgary, where we get the excellent Heather Liscano, I do have standards.) What does the trick is their clarity, charisma, genuine quality of musicianship, and unflinching respect for what they are singing. Oh, and they stay in time. I’ve lost count of the wannabe divas who trill left and right and demonstrate nothing but a lack of education in the basics of metrical tempo (to say nothing of tone control). We’ll have none of that.

Next: Its run at the Varscona Theatre closes on Sunday, but Shadow Theatre’s production of David Belke’s Dreamland Saturday Nights is an absolute delight. I’m not as well-versed in appreciating the subtleties of the stage as I am with cinema or music, but this was my best experience with live theatre in some time. I do wonder, however, if it plays nearly as well to people who aren’t major cinephiles, as so much of its magic is referential.

And now, as promised, a bit about board games.

Last week, I went out into the wilderness with my new colleagues (pamperedness level: heated cabins), and one of them had the presence of mind to bring along the familiar diversion that we all know as Connect Four. On the last evening of our trip, when I was busy nursing a pot of cheap strawberry tea and making absolutely no progress on my cute little novel-in-progress about space colonies and married women, he challenged me to a friendly match. One friendly match quickly ignited into thirteen. We stopped when I hit ten wins. For those of you in the audience who can’t add, that’s a 10-3 record.

On paper, it looks like I demolished the poor guy; he certainly thought so, and it wasn’t until the next morning (when he beat up on someone else) that he regained some elementary semblance of confidence. To be fair, I started with six straight wins, and finished with a considerably weaker 4-3 thanks to careless errors in observation, unnecessary experimentation, and (in my opinion) noticeable improvement on the part of my opponent.

Now, I hadn’t played Connect Four in an absurdly long time: I only vaguely remember playing round after round on my Macintosh SE back in the black-and-white halcyon days of System 6, and I may have faced the occasional human opponent, though I’ve never owned a physical set myself. But the rules are simple enough that it’s not like you’re liable to forget how to play. The name of the game and the design of the board (i.e. it’s vertical, and pieces dropped in the slots tend to fall) make the mechanics about as self-evident as is possibly conceivable. That said, it would be foolish to understate its strategic complexity.

I can’t say I’ve ever considered myself any more than a casual player, and by purely casual standards, I don’t think my opponent was exceptionally bad. How, then, did I manage to be so dominant? What has really changed since the age of nine? Board game skills aren’t like fine wines: they don’t improve with age alone.

Two things come to mind: 1) serious exposure to other games of strategy, and 2) an education in the little-understood field of computing science.

The first is probably obvious. In the case of Connect Four – elegant, turn-based (but otherwise symmetrical) and fundamentally geometric – it’s easy to see how some half-decent Scrabble skills might help: looking for hotspots, settling into a rhythm of risk and reward, differentiating high-risk offensive positions from conservative and defensive ones. More pertinent would be a deterministic game like chess, where you learn to recognize certain patterns as opportunities for setting up zugzwangs and forced mates. I kind of wonder how well someone with a background in grid-based video games like Tetris Attack would fare.

There’s also the psychological element of the discipline it takes to focus on a game, exercise the patience to find the best move, intuit what your opponent is trying to do, and avoid stupid mistakes, but I don’t have that.

Less obvious to the layman is the value of a computing science education, which a lot of people out there think of as the study of computers, when in many cases it would actually be more accurate to say it is the study of problem-solving. (That’s a crude generalization as well, but still more accurate.) It’s not too hard to see how excellence at games of strategy is so often conceived as the pinnacle of whatever it is computing scientists do.

I am not saying that in a given turn in Connect Four, I’m culling a game tree in my head or performing a systematic limited depth-first search. But just as a basic level of comfort with calculus provides you with a substantially better intuitive grasp of infinities and convergences even if you don’t remember the ins and outs of solving triple integrals by substitution, I wager that an understanding of rational, computational processes provides one with an intuitive basis for pattern recognition and logical reasoning.

On top of that, it provides you with the tools to easily pursue further study. The reason I am writing this post is in part because tonight, I thought about how I might design a Connect Four AI, and I started looking at what had already been done. As a mechanically straightforward (and fully deterministic) game, it did not come as a surprise that Connect Four had already been solved. (The relevant thesis, which you can download as a 91-page PDF, is Victor Allis’s “A Knowledge-Based Approach of Connect-Four,” published in 1987. I’m not through much of it, but so far, it’s a terrific read.)

It turns out that with perfect play, the first player to move (“White” in the standard literature, as I don’t think many people with the standard Milton Bradley set care if red or yellow go first) always wins if the first move is down the centre column, just as how X can’t lose in tic-tac-toe if the first move is in the centre square. It seems intuitive, but there’s no comfort like the warm cushion of a mathematical proof.

Apart from questions of the “how did I win” variety, I think there’s another issue in play: why did I have fun? (This might not occur to those of you on another planet who play games solely for amusement and diversion and not necessarily to win, but I do, on occasion, actually have fun.)

Let’s proceed by example and analogy, shall we?

Anybody who has known me for any period of time probably has at least a cursory knowledge of where I stand when it comes to board games. There are three games in the top tier. I play Scrabble (far and away my favourite game of any sort) seriously enough to compete but not obsessively enough to truly excel; I’m fascinated by Diplomacy, but inexperienced; I adore Settlers of Catan, but I’m not nearly as good as the statement “I finished second at the University of Alberta’s POGOB! tournament in October and I’m playing in the Western Canadian championship next week” might suggest. (With games like Diplomacy and Settlers, a good reputation is a huge liability. People start ganging up on you.)

I have the deepest respect for chess, checkers and Go, but there’s such a gulf between my level of skill and what I would consider an acceptable competitive standard that I view them much like I view movies that are obviously imbued with the finest craftsmanship, but do not stir any passions on a personal level, and cannot be said to be among my favourites.

Among the other popular entertainments: I used to enjoy Risk, but I abandoned it after I found Diplomacy, and I haven’t played it since. Back when I was an only child, my family played Monopoly, but we would fight over the game and inevitably leave it unfinished; later, I discovered that we weren’t following the rules correctly anyway. I’ll play Battleship, but it’s just not the same without the “Sploosh!” and “Kaboom!” sound effects from the version in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Then there’s the whole class of games like Cranium and Trivial Pursuit that I’m not even sure I should count: they suit social settings well, but you can’t “study” the game without feeling like you’re cheating.

I hate the Game of Life. (Not Conway’s cellular automaton, but that thinly-veiled wheel-spinning instrument of social engineering where you drive around in a little car and add pins to it when you get married, have kids, and coast towards your inconsequential demise in the thorny brambles of the American Dream.) Life sucks. No strategic depth whatsoever.

Now, let’s play Spot the Correlates. Is there anything I consistently like or dislike about board games?

If you look at the top tier – Scrabble, Diplomacy, Settlers – all three of them have an element of nondeterminism (stochastic in Scrabble, qualitative in Diplomacy, both in Settlers), but success or failure is primarily and repeatably dependent on conscious strategic decisions on the part of the player. In addition, a significant number (but not all) of these decisions are independent of who the opponent is, because they involve tactical knowledge of the game mechanics. It is possible to get progressively better as a player, but impossible to win all the time.

Connect Four initially falls into the same qualitative category as chess – although Go would be a better comparison, as it is based on placing pieces, not moving them, and there is only one type of piece. Connect Four doesn’t belong to nearly the same order of complexity, of course, but it feels like a faster-paced incarnation of the same deterministic experience. There is at least the persistent illusion of a fair fight, whereas in chess, I will almost always lose to someone who has a library of openings down pat, and almost always beat someone who can’t find his way around basic pins and skewers.

In a casual or novice-level game, you will almost never see a stalemate in chess except by accident, because the players aren’t skilled enough to set one up to avoid a loss, but they are skilled enough to finish off a familiar pattern like having a king and a rook to the opponent’s king. In expert play, draws are virtually the norm, and the result is a phenomenon called draw death: the prevalence of stalemates between players of sufficient skill exposes a serious air of futility that hangs over the game as a whole. A more familiar example of draw death is in tic-tac-toe. It doesn’t take very long for even a small child to figure out how to play every game of tic-tac-toe to a draw, at which point there is no real incentive to play anymore.

To be fair, this also happens in expert-level Diplomacy, where it is possible and not at all uncommon for the last two remaining players to entrench themselves in a stalemate line that cuts across the map, preventing each other from reaching the 18 supply centres required for victory. And a game like chess is sufficiently complex that unlike tic-tac-toe, it’s still possible to hold a championship. Draw death isn’t a reason to not play chess unless you are outstanding, in which case your name is Bobby Fischer and you remedied the problem by inventing a chess variant (Fischerandom/Chess960) where the initial placement of pieces is randomized within certain constraints.

I’m sure that against sufficiently skilled players, draw death presents a huge problem for Connect Four. But the real barrier to enjoying games of strategy is when improvement relies on the memorization of positions instead of principles; I also see it occur in Scrabble, where you need to dedicate a tremendous effort to memorizing words just to have a chance to apply strategic ideas. I like words enough that I don’t mind so much, but that obviously isn’t the case for everybody.

The elegance of Connect Four is how much complexity it manages to preserve in order to remain interesting, while its simplicity entails that it is never an exhausting game to play; it goes by so quickly that one can play round after round with little trouble. It owes at least some of its speed to a certain lack of choice, with only seven or fewer possible moves per turn. It also does not seem as susceptible to massive disparities in skill as many other games of its ilk. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that I just don’t know the game very well yet, and that once I do, the number of players with whom I feel evenly matched (in either direction) will plummet.

And that’s why I’m behind on my novel.

The initial strategy was to ally with Austria, push out from the centre, invade France with England’s assistance and pull a sharp one-eighty eastward. The game turned out to be not quite that simple, due to the unexpected factor of Austria, Germany and Russia not consistently submitting orders. The French invasion – an uncommon opening strategy – was held back due to the uncertainty of Austria and the need to defend Venice, but still succeeded due to a feint that drew France (played by Ross) into a defensive position that forsook expansion into Iberia in Fall 1902, and the good fortune of a missed submission on his part.

With France out of the way, the three most active powers in the game, which also ended up being the last three standing – Italy, England, and Turkey – all benefited from the truancy of the competition. Without the central powers actively expanding, there was little in the way of checks and balances for the first few turns. England marched into Scandinavia and the Lowlands uncontested; Turkey, despite starting a turn late when Josh stepped in to replace a resigning participant, and was clearly in the lead by the end of 1904, but made the fatal mistake of missing a submission when he was entitled to three builds – a gaffe that, along with a failure one year later to practically knock me out of the game when he had the chance, may have compromised a Turkish victory.

Would an Italian victory have been possible in normative circumstances, where every player submitted orders on time every turn? Perhaps so, but it would hardly have come that easily. I got away with a lot of things in that game that, under balanced circumstances, would be next to impossible barring some extremely cunning negotiation tactics. A lot of bad moves on my part went unpunished: aside from leaving Naples wide open for Turkey that one turn, I conducted a risky double-cross against long-term ally England that was next to suicidal; thankfully, an Anglo-Turkish alliance never came into being.

Regardless, it does feel rewarding to pull something off so contrary to the statistical norm, handicaps and all. Right now there is an attempt to set up another Webboard game, this one on a Middle Eastern variant map. While I will not be participating in this round, I encourage you all to sign up. Diplomacy is a game that truly shines with maximal effort and participation.