Gen Con has everything a gamer needs: great games, free stuff, and good times. The enormous exhibit hall overflows with game vendors from big names like Avalon Hill to small publishers like Z-Man Games. At every booth, publishers are eager to show off their current products and will entice gamers with sneak peaks at new games. Many have freebies or prizes that people can win from participating in demonstrations.

Gen Con started out in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in 1967 as a place for war gaming fans to meet and have fun. The name Gen Con comes from “Geneva Convention” and is a play on words referring to the international treaties of the Geneva conventions. As attendance grew, the convention moved around Wisconsin, finally settling in downtown Milwaukee in 1985. It remained there until 2003, when it moved to its current home in Indianapolis, Indiana.

If you plan on going, be sure to take advantage of early-bird specials that start in January. These specials offer discounts for four-day passes and hotel registration. Hotel registration is the most important, as hotels near the convention center fill up quickly. Most hotels near the convention center are attached via skywalks, convenient for dropping off new games and freebies collected at the convention. Otherwise gamers can try to find lockers at the convention hall or carry their loot around all day.

The Internet has simplified event registration. Previously, people had to wait for the event catalog to arrive in the mail, then mail in a list of events they wanted. The biggest problem was you didn’t know until the last minute whether the events were sold out. Now, events are posted on the Web about two months ahead of the convention. With the posting of available seats, searching for specific games and times is easy.

One of the best things about Gen Con is that it has something for everyone. The Exhibit Hall holds a mass of vendors selling new and used games, gaming material, and books. Large companies like Wizards of the Coast, which holds the rights to the games Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: the Gathering, occupy large amounts of floor space with huge props and plenty of game demonstrations. Smaller game publishers are found throughout the hall and have great games. There are also individual vendors who sell used and out-of-print games, videos, art work, and other merchandise.

The Media Guests of Honor have booths in the Exhibit Hall. This includes celebrities from television shows and movies. At the 2006 convention, celebrities included Jamie Baber and Richard Hatch from Battlestar Galactica and Kevin Sorbo of Hercules and Andromeda fame.

Ready to go head-to-head with some of the best players in the world? Gen Con is the place for national and world championships for games such as Magic: The Gathering, VS and Pokemon.  Some of these tournaments are invitation only.  They are for hard-core game players who have invested more money in cards than in their cars. For gamers who wish to play with this group, be prepared to know the rules by heart and have invested a large portion of time and money playing the game. The contestants at this level are playing for prizes and bragging rights, so the games are often more cut-throat.

For lesser mortals who do not dare spend as much time and money, there are small sealed-deck tournaments for the same games. For the cost of entry, participants get several unopened decks of cards in which to build a hand and play in a round-robin competition. The types of people in these games are more casual with the rules and will often educate new players on strategy and game tips. Other tournaments can be found for classic board games such as Risk, Axis & Allies, and even Monopoly.  Poker is also a popular game at Gen Con.

One of the most popular types of games at Gen Con is the role-playing game (RPG). The most well known is Dungeons & Dragons, but other examples include Star Wars, Spycraft, and Vampire: The Requiem.

For long-time Dungeons & Dragons players, the True Dungeon is a must. Just like in a table-top role-playing game, players in True Dungeon assume classic D&D character classes like rangers, cleric, fighters, and rogues to hunt for treasure and battle monsters. This massive, walk-thru adventure is a real challenge, as people have to search for traps and secret doors as they solve puzzles. Traps that are triggered will set off lights and sounds. A Dungeon Master who escorts you through the maze will deduct hit points from a card that the player wears. The rooms are dimly lit. The players have only a small lantern to share between them. This provides a spooky atmosphere and makes it harder to find treasure and traps. The items that players collect, like weapons, potions, and gold, can be traded or used in future True Dungeon adventures. True Dungeon trips cost around $25, a higher cost than most events at Gen Con, but certainly worth the money.

There are several workshop sessions where people can meet with game designers about upcoming products, learn to paint miniatures, meet with writers, or learn how to sell their own games. Most of the sessions are free but can fill up quickly. These sessions can be an easy way to learn the latest in popular games like VS. Famous science fiction and fantasy authors like R. A. Salvatore and Ed Greenwood host group discussions of their characters, readings of forthcoming books, and autograph signings.

Film fans can enjoy free 24-hour movie viewing. The films are mostly Japanese action and anime but also include classic American horror and fan-created films. The film festival can be a great time to relax and unwind between games and events.

The strange and absurd abound at Gen Con.  There is the annual costume contest and parade. The costumes are usually very elaborate and span the genre of sci-fi and fantasy. It is one of the few places where one can find Stormtroopers escorting a shackled Gandolf with a Pikachu right behind them. The Klingon Jail and Bail is where people go if they have been bad or good, or just to be tormented by their friends. People pay others dressed as Klingons from Star Trek to have friends locked in a cage near the Exhibit Hall. Prisoners then have to perform for their captors, like singing “I’m a Little Teapot” at the top of their lungs, or they can pay bail. All of the money goes to local charities.

For spouses who are not into games, or “Game Widows” as they are affectionately known, there are day spas, wine tastings, tours of museums, and transportation to local shops.

Sunday, the last day of Gen Con is a sight to behold. On Thursday, the atmosphere is alive with people bustling with excitement and amazement at what is new at this year’s convention. By Sunday, the best four days of gaming has caught up with almost everyone. Corners where people once held impromptu games of BattleTech are now littered with people trying to get a few minutes of sleep. Some Gen Con regulars refer to Sunday as the “Day of the (Walking) Dead,” as a zombified look is on everyone’s faces as lack of sleep and too much reliance on caffeine catches up to them. Sunday afternoon can be a time to find some of the best bargains in the Exhibit Hall, as vendors will sometime lower prices so they have less merchandise to haul back home.

Gen Con is a must-see for any serious game player, geek, or fan of fun. The friendly attitude of most of the players there makes it fun to play games for all levels and ages. Few places are so welcoming to such a diverse group of people. The love of games is amazing; it brings out the best in almost everyone there.

Six months ago, I investigated how to send games to troops overseas, but the Army website and other sites I ran across insisted that non-family members should not send packages to troops.

Well, last week I ran across AnySoldier.com, a website that soldiers write to with requests for them and their battalions. The soldiers include addresses of where material can be sent and spell out what they want. Some soldiers send updates thanking people for the material they’ve received; a few include pictures as well. A search for “board games” and “card games” in November 2006 turns up close to 200 requests. With your help, I’d like to pull together a game package for several of these battalions. The units range in size from 5 to 200+ members.

If you’re interested in donating, please write me through the “Contact” page. You can donate by check or PayPal or with new or used board and card games. If you send funds, I will use your entire donation to purchase games at a local store. I plan to pay all shipping costs myself, in addition to donating funds for games.

If you donate games, please make sure the games include English rules; used games should be in good condition, but feel free to include a note inside the box. Small games are probably better than large ones. Card games (e.g., No Thanks, For Sale, High Society) with easy to learn rules are probably best of all. I’d appreciate game suggestions so that I don’t miss something obvious.

A Christmas delivery is already out of the question due to the time that shipments take, but I’m sure gifts in January will be just as welcome. I hope you’ll join me in spreading games around the world and giving our soldiers a bit of fun to leaven the tedium and anxiety of their days.

Update (Nov. 18): Since my first post on Nov. 10 about collecting games to donate to soldiers overseas, donors have contributed more than $250 to purchase new games. I’ve also heard from many others who have promised to contribute money or games, whether new or used.

My deadline for collecting funds is Saturday, Nov. 24th. I’ll place an order for games on the following Monday with a local store who offered a generous discount if I can pay for the games up-front. The games will arrive within two days, then I’ll package them for shipping overseas at my expense. Ideally any games sent to me for donation should arrive by Wednesday, Nov. 29, so that I can pack them at the same time as the new games I’ve purchased.

There’s still time to contribute funds through Paypal or by check. You can also ship games to me if they’ll arrive by Nov. 29. To donate, please write me through the Contact form and ask for my mailing address. If you send games, please include notes for the soldiers so they know who to thank, in case they actually have time to write.

I’ll send a final update once everything has been shipped out.

How does one deal with a situation in which two (or more) gamers meet to play games, but they are playing games with different gaming philosophies? For instance, most members of [my local game group] seem to play with a philosophy similar to “play to win, but have fun win or lose.” Other people play under something more like “if I don’t win, it’s a failure.” Some people play for the excuse to socialize with others, and others don’t really want to talk during a game about anything besides the game. --BC, in NH

Let’s deal with your first question first, namely because it comes first and is in addition an easy question to answer once you start to consider the implications of gamers who adopt a philosophy along the lines of “anything less than victory is a reason to cut off my head and yours, starting with yours.”

Even when gamers don’t fall on the homicidal end of the scale, you must consider what it would mean for two of you to play under a similar philosophy. Except for certain cooperative games and feeble titles that allow co-winners, at least one of you will lose the game, which means that at least one of you will transform a previously cheerful gaming situation into a nightmarish pit of whiny squalor. (Note that this might have already occurred as the prospect of losing loomed overhead during the final turns.) You have now succeeded in ruining the night for everyone. A joyous evening out with friends has turned into an event that will forever raise an eyebrow among everyone else at the table (when you’re not present, naturally).

In short: This philosophy is as welcome as a meatball in lime Jello.

What can a person holding this philosophy expect, in any case? That players will throw the game to him to avoid the gloomy Gus look he’ll otherwise bear? That he’s so preciously smart and gifted that winning is the expected outcome in every game? Such a player needs to overcome this philosophy quickly or else look forward to lots of solitaire games in the future.

As for the socializing/non-socializing dichotomy that some players evidence during a game, ideally talky Tammys will identify others who share a similar nature and converse only with them during the game. More importantly, they should talk only when doing so doesn’t disrupt the flow of the game as doing so is an impoliteness to others just as it is with chatty self-absorbed deli workers who steal the time of someone who only wants to buy a pastrami-and-swiss-on-rye and get back to work before the sun sets, thank you very much.

Gaming is a utilitarian activity. Your goal during the game should be to maximize the pleasure of everyone involved as much as possible while staying within the laws of your state and county. If you find your social self alone at a table of quiet chin-rubbers, don’t insist on examining the roly-poly happenings of your new kitten; let them puzzle until their puzzlers are sore, then at game’s end try to see whether folks of a similar nature might be gabbing at another table.

By the same token, quiet Quentin shouldn’t insist on silence simply because he likes to hear his neurons fire if everyone else at the table likes to share stories. Quentin doesn’t need to spill his own guts, mind you; he simply needs to keep his shusher shut and search for others later who share his gift of gamey gab.

Have a puzzling game question of your own? Click on the “Contact” page and submit your missive!

Or you can keep costs down, include everyone’s kids, and have a great time by throwing a boardgame party. “Boardgame parties have become a great way to entertain and build comradery,” says Robyn Spizman, author of “The Giftionary: An A-Z Reference Guide For Solving Your Gift Giving Dilemma...Forever!” and “Make It Memorable: An A-Z Guide To Making Any Gift, Event or Occasion...Dazzling!” “They’re also an inexpensive source of fun and great way to spend an evening.”

Here’s how to put on a boardgame bash that’s sure to become a fun-filled tradition:

* Reel Them In

Lara Starr, author of “The Party Girl Cookbook,” suggests sending out invitations three weeks before the party. Many wired partiers these days rely on online invitation services such as Evite, which lets you e-mail invitations to all your friends at once and allows the invitees to RSVP online. If you prefer to mail paper invites, “search for images of classic board games online to decorate an invitation you create on your computer,” says Starr. “Or use square cards and envelopes and decorate the fronts to look like dice.” To learn how to create invitations that look like Uno cards or Scrabble boards, check out the DIY Network website. Be sure to let invitees know that the party will include snacks (since it’s hard to eat a real meal while playing games)—that way, they’ll know to eat lunch or dinner beforehand.

* Know Your Audience

When choosing the boardgames to play at your party, keep the least experienced boardgamer in mind. If your invite list includes only experienced gamers, you can pick games that involve lots of strategy (and time), like The Settlers of Catan or Power Grid. If some partiers are light on boardgame experience, choose games that are easy to understand and quick to explain and play, such as TransAmerica or Walk the Dogs. If kids will be involved, either choose games that are fun for both adults and kids, such as dexterity games like Handy or Bamboleo, or set up different tables for children and grown-ups. Finally, suggests Spizman, “Shoot for a reasonable time to play and be considerate of everyone’s time frames and attention spans.”

* Pick a Number

Try to buy or borrow boardgames that accommodate anywhere from two players—in case you need to provide a game for a couple of latecomers while the rest of the partygoers finish up their game—to eight players or even more for big-group fun. Some good two-player games include Cartagena and Clans; the charades-type game Time’s Up handles four to twelve players, and Werewolf plays from eight to eighteen.

* Read the Rules

Familiarize yourself with the rules of the games you plan to offer at your party so that when it comes time to teach the other partygoers how to play, you won’t be umming and hmming, forgetting the rules, or having to continually refer back to the printed rules. You can even test-play the games with your family or some friends before the event to make sure you have the rules down pat.

* Recruit Helpers

If your party will be a big one, get a friend or two to volunteer to teach games and preside over the game tables—while they play, of course! That way you can have a couple of different games going on at the same time. This is especially helpful if there will be young kids at your party who can’t (or won’t) play the same games as the grown-ups.

* Deck the Halls—with Boardgames!

Using old gameboards and game pieces is a fun and easy way to decorate for your party. “Whenever it’s time to retire a game, I save the game board, and if I lose pieces, I save the other pieces,” says Spizman. “The boards can be used as placemats, and the pieces can be sprinkled over the table for a great party decor.” You can also hang the gameboards on the walls, and use old boardgame boxes to display snacks at different heights on the food table. If you don’t have any old boardgames that are past their prime, scope out used games at thrift stores and yard sales that you can “use for parts"—that is, that you can take apart for their boards, play money, timers, and pieces.

In addition, suggests Starr, be sure to have plenty of card tables or other small tables available so guests can keep their snacks and drinks off the game table.

* Play with Your Food

Finger foods work best because guests won’t have to balance plates, cups, and utensils while trying to play a game. Starr recommends creating boardgame-themed goodies like “cheese dice” (use a food coloring marker to draw dots on cubes of cheese) and “Scrabble snacks” (use a pastry bag to pipe tapenade “letters” onto square toasts). Find more game-themed finger foods on the DIY Network website.

For more than half a century, one board game has risen above all others as the epitome of gaming. It’s the game you played for hours as a child and the game you buy for your children to teach them a thing or two about money. Its pieces and slogans have become common in cultures around the world. It inspires cheers and groans and triumphant pumps of the fist and heart-rending cries of “Never again!”

The game, of course, is Monopoly, and it’s the most popular brand-name game in the world. According to Hasbro, which purchased Monopoly publisher Parker Brothers in 1991, more than 200 million copies of the game have been sold worldwide and 500 million people—one-thirteenth of the world’s population—have built trusts and gone bust.

To celebrate that first Parker Brothers release back in 1935, Hasbro has released a special 70th anniversary edition of the game, complete with Art Deco graphics, unique hotels, and four styles of houses.

But that’s hardly the only edition of the game for sale. Hasbro also offers a Deluxe edition, an America edition, a Lord of the Rings edition, and both a Star Wars Saga edition and a Star Wars Original Trilogy edition. Walt Disney rates an edition of the regular game as well as a special Disney Princess edition of Monopoly Junior, which shares shelf space with Shrek 2 and Toy Story editions. And that’s still just a fraction of the Monopoly-style games on the market:

• Versions of Monopoly, either authorized by Parker Brothers or produced on the black market, have appeared in more than 80 countries, including Russia, Vietnam, China, and Iraq.
• Late for the Sky Production Company, founded in 1984, publishes more than 20 versions that focus on a particular city (such as Atlanta-in-a-Box), 50-plus college-oriented editions (such as Auburnopoly and Irishopoly), and two dozen specialty versions (Wineopoly and Cat-in-the-Hat-opoly).
• Not to be outdone, USAopoly puts out nearly 20 licensed Monopoly games, including the John Deere Collector’s Edition, the United States Army edition, and the Night Sky edition, which invites you to “buy, sell and trade the wonders of the universe, including Halley’s comet, Mars, and the Milky Way Galaxy.”
• Opoly Enterprises has cornered the religious slice of the capitalist crowd with Jewishopoly, Christianopoly, Islamopoly, Latinopoly, and Armenianopoly.
• Pride Distributors of Farmington Hills, Michigan and Help on Board, of Ontario, Canada help towns raise money by selling advertising space to local merchants on customized “Your Town"-opoly games.
• Ghettopoly, in which “playas” buy stolen properties and build crack houses, debuted in 2003 to outraged headlines in newspapers and magazines across the U.S.

How can hundreds of nearly identical games all find a place on the shelves? Doesn’t Parker Brothers have a, well, monopoly on Monopoly?

The 70-Year-Old Game That Isn’t
In fact, Parker Brothers was a relative latecomer to the Monopoly scene. Hasbro’s history of the game is relatively succinct—“It was 1934, the height of the Depression, when Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania, showed what he called the MONOPOLY game to the executives at Parker Brothers”—but that’s really the tail end of the story.

To get the scoop on how Monopoly came about, you have to go back more than 100 years, to 1904 when Elizabeth Magie patented “The Landlord’s Game,” an educational game designed around the principles of economist Henry George.

George felt that nothing should be taxed except real estate. Inventors and workers should receive the full profit from their creations and labor, he said, but real estate barons make money by selling a natural resource that they didn’t make, so they shouldn’t profit unfairly just because they planted a flag in the soil before anyone else.

While George’s name is unknown today outside universities, Magie worked hard to bring his beliefs to the masses. Her creation was remarkably similar to today’s Monopoly game, featuring a continuous path of forty spaces with jail in one corner, “go to jail” in another, and a public park on a third. Twenty-eight properties were available for purchase, including water and electric utilities and a railroad centered on each side of the board.

Where Magie failed with her creation was that the game proved to be no fun. It didn’t find a manufacturer until 1910, so Magie had to self-publish the game for six years. What’s worse, at least from Magie’s point of view, the Georgist message of taxing real estate was lost in the actual game play. The player who had the most money won, so they were encouraged to be greedy land owners.

The game spread throughout economic departments in East Coast colleges and Quaker communities as players made up their own versions of the game, drawing boards and labeling properties with streets and roads in their hometown. At some point, properties became color-coded, and anyone who owned all the properties of one color could charge a higher rent. Buildings could be added to properties to make them even more valuable.

In 1924, Magie came out with a revised and newly patented edition of “The Landlord’s Game” that incorporated many of these popular changes, while also beefing up the Georgist message. Properties now boasted snooty names like “Soakum Lighting System” and “Lord Blueblood’s Estate”—but the goal of the game was still to get the most money, so the message was again lost.

Still, enough of the message got through that George Parker, founder of Parker Brothers, turned down the game in 1924 after Elizabeth Magie Phillips (who was now married) approached him with the game.

Everything Falls Into Place
Throughout the 1920s, the popularity of Magie’s game grew, and players tagged it with the generic name “monopoly” since that characteristic defined game play. College student Dan Layman learned monopoly from friends in Pennsylvania and in 1932 sold a version of the game (under the name “Finance") to Knapp Electric in Indiana.

Finance included Community Chest and Chance cards, a $75 Luxury tax, Pennsylvania Railroad, and many other familiar elements, but the properties cost different amounts and the street names ran from the well-known (Wall Street, Broadway) to the “never heard of it” (Wayback, Ye Olde Manor).

The final three elements that made monopoly into Monopoly all came from Quakers in Atlantic City, who learned the game from Ruth Hoskins; Hoskins, in turn, had learned the game from friends in Indianapolis, who were also friends of Finance creator Dan Layman. First, the Atlantic City Quakers disliked the mix of New York, Chicago, and Massachusetts street names on their monopoly boards, so they renamed the properties after streets in Atlantic City, many of which were names of states and therefore familiar to everyone who would play.

Second, the Quakers objected to a property being auctioned once someone landed on it. From the Quaker point of view, auctions are dishonest because you name prices lower than what you’re actually willing to pay, so you are effectively trying to cheat the property owner. Jesse Raiford, who was familiar with Atlantic City real estate, worked out fixed prices, and these were added to later boards, thus giving one player the sole chance to buy a property before the banker opened it for auction.

Finally, since the Quakers were rather frugal, they used household items like thimbles and keys to serve as playing pieces instead of spending money on uniform-looking pieces. The game of monopoly was essentially complete…

Darrow Steps In
In 1932, Jesse Raiford’s brother Eugene and sister-in-law Ruth visited Atlantic City and played monopoly for the first time. As was the custom, they created their own board on oil cloth and introduced it to friends back in Philadelphia, including one Charles B. Darrow.

According to Ralph Anspach’s The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle—from which much of the above history is taken—Darrow pestered the Raifords and their friends, the Todds, constantly, asking to play the game again and again and begging them for copies of the board and rules. Since Darrow’s wife was an old friend, the Todds helped him out. Within months, Darrow had hired a graphic designer to dress up the game board and was marketing handmade versions of the game with his name on the box as creator.

Darrow submitted the game to Parker Brothers, but the company rejected it as too long and complex. (The rejection letter mentioned “52 fundamental design errors,” a number apparently chosen at random to discourage Darrow from reapproaching the company.) Despite the rejection, Darrow kept selling copies of Monopoly on his own, and once word of his brisk sales reached the Parker Brothers office, the president of the company, Robert Barton, wrote to Darrow and offered him a deal.

Before Parker Brothers would publish the game, Darrow had to sign a statement stating that he had created Monopoly; PB executives had heard rumors of the monopoly folk game, so they wanted Darrow to take full responsibility. They also insisted Darrow patent the game in his name, but when he did so, Magie Phillips’ 1924 patent for a remarkably similar game came into the limelight, threatening to send Monopoly’s future directly to jail without passing go and without collecting far more than $200.

To solve any patent issues, George Parker offered to publish Magie Phillips’ most recent version of The Landlord Game if she would sign over her patent. She did, and before too long, she had been airbrushed out of Monopoly history as Parker Brothers promoted Darrow as the sole creator of the game.

“Parker Brothers gives lip service to Magie’s contribution because it conned Magie into cooperating with their scheme, but its most important distortion of history lies in its failure to credit the Atlantic City Quakers for their invention of the commercial Monopoly,” says Anspach. The company’s history of the game “is deception by not telling the whole truth.”

The Truth Comes Out
How did Magie Phillips regain her place in history? Thanks to bullying tactics of Parker Brothers itself. In the early 1970s, upset over the monopolistic tactics of OPEC, Ralph Anspach created a game called Anti-Monopoly. The game took off in the West Coast press, and all the attention soon had Parker Brothers knocking on Anspach’s door, claiming that he was violating the company’s trademarks.

During Anspach’s efforts to fight for the right to sell his game, he learned of rumors that Parker Brothers had stolen Monopoly, the very game he was now accused of mooching off of. Over the next ten years, Anspach crisscrossed the United States, interviewing elderly game-players whose collective memories brought out the true history of the game. In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court found in favor of Anspach because Darrow hadn’t invented the game; teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, though, Anspach had to settle with Parker Brothers out of court, which let the company hold on to the Monopoly trademark.

But while the name and the specific design of the tokens, the game board, and other elements are still trademarked, the rules to monopoly itself are in the public domain. When Darrow first published his homemade copies in 1933, he placed no copyright notice on the rules he included—which means that anyone is free to publish a version of monopoly with the same rules as long as he or she stays away anything that resembles the Parker Brothers product.

These trademarks allow “Hasbro to sue people regardless whether the suit is meritorious or not,” says Anspach. Someone in this situation “may eventually win the suit, but it may take ten years as with me and lots of money—and I don’t mean Monopoly money.” In 2004, for example, thousands of copies of Ghettopoly were seized after Parker Brothers accused the publisher of violating its trademarks. (You can still buy Ghettopoly through the publisher’s website, so draw your own conclusion.)

Despite Parker Brothers’ attempt to erase Magie Phillips from the history of Monopoly, the game itself has clearly stood the test of time. Her Georgist message about the value of real estate might have been lost in the shuffle, but we can still learn a thing or two about property management thanks to a simple game she created more than 100 years ago. Roll the dice, and start moving!

No, your cable system hasn’t crossed coverage of a heavyweight fight with a chess match. You’re just getting a taste of chess boxing, a blending of sports both mental and physical that debuted in 2003. The mastermind behind chess boxing is Dutch artist Iepe Rubingh, who fights/checks under the sobriquet “Iepe the Joker.” Iepe claimed the first middleweight chess boxing title in November 2003 after defeating “Luis the Lawyer” in Amsterdam.

A match consists of 11 rounds, with alternating rounds of chess and boxing. Rounds of chess last four minutes, rounds of boxing two minutes, with 60 seconds between rounds to change gear. Each match is decided by checkmate or violation of the 12 minute time limit (chess), knockout or referee decision (boxing), or concession (chess or boxing).

“The hardest part is the switch from boxing to chess,” says Andreas Dilschneider, spokesman for the World Chess Boxing Organisation (WCBO). “You have a very high pulse and high adrenalin, which makes it hard to play good chess. If you have a defensive boxing style, it’s much easier in the chess rounds.”

The WCBO is in the process of arranging bouts in the U.S. Dilschneider says competitors must train hard in both sports. “Concentrating in one area won’t work,” he says. “You will not survive.”

Whenever you play with a standard deck of cards, you’re playing with more than a mere game—you actually have your hands on an entire game system. After all, the cards themselves aren’t the game; they’re only tools.

But combine the tools with a set of rules, and suddenly you have a game, be it Spades, Bridge, Go Fish, Piquet, or any of the hundreds of other card games created over the past millenium.

Another familiar game system, whether you’ve thought about it as such or not, is an 8x8 gameboard and a set of tokens. If you label 12 tokens as one color and 12 tokens as another, you can now play checkers; label them king, queen, knight and so forth, and a chess set magically appears; label one side black and the other white, and you have Reversi (Othello). The number of games you can play is limited only by your imagination and willingness to try something new.

James Kyle, creator of HellRail (published by Mayfair Games) and owner of Glastyn Games, liked the idea of generic game systems but couldn’t find one that matched his ideal. “I wanted something that was like a deck of cards, but designed for family-oriented board games,” he says. “The Icehouse set [Looney Labs’ square pyramids that come in three sizes and multiple colors] is a great system and has a number of games written for it, but I think if I were to take it to my grandmother’s house, it wouldn’t immediately say, ‘I’m a family game system.’”

Generating the Generic
What’s a game designer to do when he doesn’t find what he’s looking for? Go off and create his own naturally. Thus was born the piecepack, a set of tiles, coins, pawns, and dice in four suits.

“I modeled the piecepack on a deck of cards, and a lot of it is fairly obvious,” says Kyle. “Suits came from there, and then extrapolating from games on the shelf, you find basic components like pawns and dice. If anyone else had tried to do the same thing, you’d probably get the same result.”

Modesty aside, Kyle experimented with numerous suits and values to determine what combinations offered the most possibilities while remaining within the family-friendly model he desired. He thought about using the binary values 2, 4, 8, 16 and so on, but considering how baffling the doubling cube is for casual backgammon players, Kyle wisely opted for more familiar values: null, ace, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

“The big challenge was the board,” says Kyle. “In order to make the system compact enough to carry around, it couldn’t have a set board, which is how I ended up with tiles, making it more flexible.” He considered different shapes for the tiles, such as hexagons, but stuck with squares to make it both easier for those who wanted to build their own and less expensive for those who wanted to manufacture piecepacks.

That last part was especially important because Kyle didn’t plan to produce the piecepack himself. Instead, in late 2000, he released the design into the public domain, inviting anyone to create games, produce sets, add elements, and explore.

“The grand hope is for ubiquity,” says Kyle, “and although I don’t expect it, that’s the only thing to shoot for. Every house in the world has a deck of cards, and the only way to potentially match that with the piecepack is through a distribution model similar to that of a deck of cards. If one company manfactured it and didn’t make money, that would have been the end of it.”

Now, says Kyle, “I don’t have to worry whether I’m making money on it or coming up with cash for the next print run. I get to watch people who are inspired create games just for fun without the commerical overtones.”

Designing Games, New and Old
“The piecepack is portable, fitting into a VHS cassette box, and there is a variety of games available, but I was mainly drawn to it as a game design tool,” says Phillip Lerche, designer of six piecepack games, including Black Pawn Trucking, Sarcophagus, and Kingdoms of the Middle Sea. “The challenge for me is to try to create good games within the confines of the components, or to use the piecepack along with other generic playing pieces, such as money.”

More than 100 piecepack games are currently available on piecepack.org, a support site maintained by piecepack publisher Mesomorph Games, and the creativity of the games is astounding. In addition to translations of existing games such as Reversi and Mancala, designers have created games about building skyscrapers, racing worms through a maze, delivering food to picky customers, escaping from prison, and exploring a funhouse. Games exist combining the piecepack with Icehouse pyramids, dominoes, a candle(!), a Go set, and—as might be expected—a deck of cards.

Kyle, for one, isn’t surprised by the breadth of game topics or melding of materials. “The piecepack is great to experiment with because you can release a rules set without worrying about whether the game is commercially viable. When you’re trying for commercial success, you can reach only so far or else people won’t buy it.”

No single term can sum up the multitude of piecepack games. Some have puzzle-solving aspects, while others require memory, deduction, or strategical tile placement. Dexterity games also have a presence, such as Mark A. Biggar’s Ppolf, a version of Frisbee Golf, and Kyle’s soccer simulation in which the tiles form the boundaries of the field and players flick coins that represent their kickers.

Bryan Kornele lacks any published games to date, but he’s found the piecepack easy and fun to fiddle with. “Consisting of just a few bits and tiles, this compact system allows me to use any small table as a playing surface,” he says. “I very much enjoy playing some of the games with my seven year old, and some of my game ideas come from him. I’m well on my way to becoming a piecepack evangelist.”

A driving force behind piecepack game design have been regular contests initiated by Kyle and organized by Mesomorph Games. Each contest involves a different focus—solitaire games, historical themes, boards that change shape during play, the use of other generic game bits—and the winner of each contest sets the rules for and judges the next. “People who design games often wait for something to strike and inspire them, and the contests have been great from that standpoint,” says Kyle.

“The latest contest, Solitary Confinement, was one of the more productive,” says Karol Boyle, co-owner of Mesomorph Games. “There were only a handful of solitaire games before, and now there are more than twenty.”

“Our first set in 2001 came out with seven games,” says Boyle. “Within three years, there are more than 100, and a few years from now there will likely be hundreds more.”

Picking Up the Pieces
While game design is a fun option, many piecepack users simply enjoy the large number and style of games. “At first what seduced me was the elegance of the concept,” says Michel Fortin. “The game designing aspect was attractive, too, but I soon found that creating a new game was not as easy as I originally thought. However, what makes me rate the game so highly is the quality of the available games, including the originality, the game mechanism, the rules clarity, and the humor. I firmly believe that some piecepack games could easily be produced as successful commercial games.”

“One of the main aspects I consider when judging a game’s worth is what it asks of me. A game like Ricochet Robot requires a good understanding of spatial relationships, quick thinking, and careful planning, while a game like Fluxx requires merely a tolerance for change and a sense of humor,” says Paul Blake. “Piecepack rates highly with me largely because it allows for and encourages any and all levels of thinking. To me, it’s a game with lots more games inside it, a tiny package with immense possibilities.”

Wei-Hwa Huang, who regularly finishes near the top of the standings in the annual World Puzzle Championship, rates games solely on his estimate of how long, as he puts it, “I’m going to enjoy playing the game until I get bored of it and feel that it is a waste of space. Since a piecepack set has enough components for lots of possible games, it gets a high rating.”

Although he’s found a fair share of klunkers among the gems, Iain Cheyne says, “I like the piecepack most of all because of its flexibility and portability. No matter where I am or who I’m with—even if I’m alone—I always have a suitable game.”

Feedback from both designers and players has led to expansions and changes, such as Mesomorph’s 4 Seasons, which adds four more suits and colors, and its Playing Cards Expansion, which adds the familiar suits hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades. Says Kyle, “I didn’t have any specific mechanics in mind when I created the piecepack, and I take a hands-off approach to it at this point. I expect it to evolve as people try things out and like the changes enough to make them standard.”

That long-term approach to evolution is essential to Kyle’s quest for piecepack ubiquity. “Most of the card games we know and play were transmitted to us orally, not by Hoyle’s,” he says. “It may not happen in my lifetime, but I’m interested to see in the future whether more families pick up the piecepack and play with it so we get designs that can be passed on.”

You and your chopstick-wielding opponents sit around a bowl containing 25 colored pieces in five colors and five shapes. A token is flipped over, revealing one of the 25 pieces, then you race to grab pieces of that color or shape and place them in your side dish. Whoever grabs the most pieces wins the token; grab the most tokens, and you win the game! (Pair-of-Dice Games, 2-3 players, $19.95, available October 15)

At Spiel 2006, taking place October 19-22, more than 700 game publishers, manufacturers, and vendors from 30 countries will display hundreds of new board, card, dexterity and party games. The fair also features a flea market with thousands of games for sale: both collectible and common, pristine and played to death. For more information on Spiel, visit Spiel’s organizer, Friedhelm Merz Verlag.

Your humble FAB editor will be on hand, taking pictures and loading down his suitcases with swag galore. If you see me, give me a hand back to the hotel…

For more on the Spiel experience, check out ”The Essen-ce of Gaming,” originally published in the April 2005 issue of GAMES.

Game lovers in the U.S. are like the poor souls in Plato’s “Parable of the Cave.” We explore toy and department stores for new gaming experiences, but we encounter only reworkings and reissuings of games that are decades old. A movie tie-in here, a television tie-in there, yet another chess game with pieces shaped like cartoon characters—they’re only shadows of what exists in the real world of gaming outside the cave.

Okay, perhaps that scenario is a tad grim in light of the great work from Rio Grande Games, Uberplay, Face 2 Face Games, and a dozen other new American companies. But if a gamer wants to leave the cave and experience the full light and glory that gaming has to offer, he or she can’t do better than a trip to Germany and the annual game convention known simply as Spiel.

Spiel (the German word for “game") takes place each October in Essen, a small town in western Germany that has lost much of its manufacturing trade over the past few decades. Spiel takes place in Messe Essen (the town’s convention center) and attracts more than 150,000 visitors from Germany, the rest of Europe, and around the world over four days. Spiel is, quite simply, the center of the gaming universe around which all else rotates.

Non-Stop Playing
Movie companies release serious films in December to build Oscar buzz. Gift manufacturers release new products in November to take advantage of holiday shoppers. Game companies issue many of their new games in October to take advantage of the Essen crowds, hoping that visitors will carry word of their games back home to build excitement.

At Spiel, the major German manufacturers—Amigo, Ravensburger, Hasbro, Haba, Kosmos—set up enormous booths that cover thousands of square feet with dozens of tables available for visitors to try out games both new and old. (Amigo even prints game boards directly on the table to speed set-up and play time.) Days of Wonder, fresh off its Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) win for Ticket to Ride, had multiple booths throughout the convention.

Mid-tier publishers Goldsieber, Hans im Glück, Abacusspiele, Queen, Winning Moves Germany, Tilsit, and others offered smaller play spaces, while small and self-publishers such as England’s Warfrog, Holland’s Splotter Spellen, and Germany’s Bambus Spieleverlag often had no more than one or two tables.

The important thing, though, is that all of these companies had games ready to play and helpers on hand to teach the games. Every company seems to have had at least one English speaker on staff, and many had fully bi- or trilingual staff.

At this year’s Spiel, for example, the demonstrator for Yuhodo Inc. spoke German and English when teaching Fairy Tale—a beautiful and quick-playing card drafting game that sold out during the fair—and Japanese when speaking with the game’s designer, Satoshi Nakamura. One player learning Fairy Tale with me translated the rules from English to French for his monolingual friends. Dutch, Norwegian, Spanish—a polyglot of tongues all devoted to teaching and enjoying games.

And with more than 400 games introduced at Spiel ‘04, you had an incredible menu to choose from with games and themes for nearly every taste, such as:

• The Garden Gnomes Society (Argentum Verlag), in which players breed garden gnomes
• Old Town (Clicker Spiele), a deduction game in which players use documents to recreate the layout of a ghost town
• Isis’ Sweets Sins (CommonGame), an educational game about exercise and nutrition
• Kablamo (Gigantoskop), a chaotic board game based on Russian roulette
• Akaba (Haba), which has players using an air balloon to blow their flying carpet across the board to collect presents
• Ice Lake (Live Oak Games), in which players skate around one another to create cracks in the pond and dunk unfortunates in the chilly water
• Popeln (Sphinx Spieleverlag), about, um, picking your nose and the noses of those around you
• DRG - Das Spiel (Themenspiele-Verlag Meppen), which indirectly criticizes its subject: the new accounting system in German hospitals, known as Diagnose Related Group.

When the tables at a booth filled up, players sat on the floor, took out the rules and pieces, and started playing among everyone else’s feet. If you could unfold a board in a space, someone was surely playing a game there.

Learning from the Masters
One of the most interesting parts of Spiel was getting to learn a game from the designer him- or herself: Kris Burm taught games from his GIPF Project; Australia’s Don Bone taught his puzzle-based board game Sunda to Sahul; Andrea Meyer taught Mall World in both German and English; and Corné van Moorsel led players in his two-player game SeaSim and Typo, an easy-to-learn game for 2-6 players that’s sure to be a hit with fans of word games.

And even though they wanted you to buy the game, designers would always do their best to beat you. Andreas Steding won easily against three neophytes in Scottish Highland Whisky Race, his new title from JKLM Games in which you outwit the English while dealing in contraband whisky. Scotsman Fraser Lamont, teaching in a kilt, ran away with Leapfrog, a bluffing game from Fragor Games that won over the crowds with its light play and colorful frogs.

Marcel-André Casasola Merkle, designer of Attribute, Verrater, and Attika, leant a hand to the folks at Goldsieber by teaching its new family game Piranha Pedro. Klaus Teuber posed for photos with numerous fans of Settlers of Catan, and Francis Tresham sold his latest 18XX games from a small table at Mayfair Games’ booth.

Not all the designers on hand were playing games, however. Reiner Knizia, Wolfgang Kramer, Alan R. Moon, Michael Schacht, Bruno Faidutti, and many other designers were spied going from publisher to publisher, game prototypes often in hand, as they talked business about the games we might get to see at next year’s event.

Breaking the Bank
The line at the ATM outside Spiel was longer than the line for any single game inside the convention hall—but that should hardly be a surprise.

In addition to new titles galore from dozens of manufacturers, discount game retailers offered pallets of merchandise in their booths, with prices dropping bit by bit to undercut the competition. Klaus Teuber’s Candamir, his latest extension to the Settlers of Catan line, dropped from 25 Euros to 23, then 22, and finally ended up in the ballpark of 20 Euros plus a free Carcassonne expansion.

Aside from all these attractions, the lure of the Flohmarkt—the used game vendors—called out as well. Nearly two dozen vendors each offered a few hundred games for sale, ranging from common Ravensburger games priced at a few Euros each to highly prized rarities such as a nearly complete set of Alan R. Moon’s self-published White Wind games for more than 200 Euros and an original copy of Crude: the Oil Game for a whopping 650 Euros!

You couldn’t find every game ever printed at the Flohmarkt. Requests for Quacksalbe, a trick-taking game themed on treating patients with just enough medicine not to kill them, turned up dry, but most visitors found at least one—and more often, a dozen—games that they were hoping to find.

Best of all, on Spiel’s closing day, vendors at the Flohmarkt slash prices so they don’t have to box everything up and cart it home. “This stack of games, 2 Euros each; this stack, 1 Euro.” Only the size of your suitcase restrains your desire to grab everything. You start figuring, “Well, I can stack these two card games inside this box, and if I throw out this plastic insert, I can fit another four games here,” and so on. Packing for the trip home becomes a game in itself.

But Wait, There’s More!
The primary draw for Spiel is board and card games, but the entire world of gaming opens before you once you’re inside the convention hall. Collectible card games of every type are for sale with multiple tournaments ongoing. Gaming miniatures of all types can be found. Role-playing manuals and accessories take up an entire building of their own. LARPers—that is, live-action role players—can choose from a wide variety of swords, suits of armor, Victorian costumes, and other accoutrements for sale.

One building contains nothing more than vendors of used and new comic books and science fiction novels. Fantasy artists sell prints and original work. Toy vendors, both new and used, are interspersed between everyone else. BrettSpielWelt provides computer terminals so that visitors can learn games immediately and play against opponents from around the world. Oh, and the nutella/banana crepes are to die for…

No matter how experienced you are with games, Spiel will overwhelm you with all it has to offer—and for those just exiting the cave of Monopoly and Scrabble, welcome to all that gaming has to offer. Grab a seat, and let’s get playing!