Fun and Games

1.

Hannukah has always been my favorite Jewish holiday. No fasting, no seders - just candles, latkes, and dreidels. Here’s a confession, though. I don’t like the dreidel game. It’s - well, it’s boring.

This year I had a really lovely Hannukah celebration. A small dinner with friends, where I learned how to make homemade applesauce (apparently you just heat some apples! that’s it!), experimented around with zucchini latkes, and played a totally satisfying game of driedel.

Our dreidel game’s design sprang from the fact that we’d gotten a large bag of MnMs to use for the pot. As we sat down to play, one of my friends who runs a weekly boardgame night, took one look at the dreidel sitting on the table and said, “There’s got to be a way to make this fun.”

We made up rules as we went along, changing them as we saw what worked and what didn’t. Here was our end result:

Goal: To maximize the difference between the number of MnMs of the color you have the most of, and the number of MnMs of the color you have the second most of.

Nun: Trade one MnM with a player of your choice. Gimel: Take everything in the pot. Hei: Take half the pot, taking the MnMs of your choice. Shin: Figure out the most common color MnM in the pot. If you have MnMs of that color, put either an equal number of that color in, or all of that color in, whichever is possible. If you have none of that color, put in a number of any color MnMs equal to the number of the most common color in the pot.

The final rules worked pretty well. What I liked best was that no one result was always good for you. Getting “take the whole pot” when the pot is full of blues and you’re trying to get rid of blues is just as bad as having to give up all of your highest color. Hei turned out to be the best result overall, as it gave you the most control. It was still primarily luck based, but there was definitely more strategy than in a typical game.

I think I want to try to create a new dreidel-based game every year.

2.

My cousin, Katie, is obsessed with my cat, Oedipus. When I walked into her house on Christmas morning, she grabbed my hand and pulled me into the living room. “Do you want to hear my song about Oedipus?” she asked. “Do you want to see the picture I drew of Oedipus? Do you want to see the Christmas present I got for Oedipus?”

(This last question was followed by an innocent, “What did you get Oedipus for Christmas?” I distracted her with a pillow fight.)

After Christmas she came down to stay with my family for a few days. Every morning while the rest of us slept in, she’d creep downstairs and snuggle with the cat. At one point during her visit she mused aloud, “There should be a videogame about Oedipus! I would play it all the time!”

I’d been planning to create a simple game for her in Scratch for her birthday, but I seized the opportunity. We sat down with a computer and spent all afternoon working on a game. She’s only seven, so she didn’t understand some of the tougher concepts, such as variables, but she really enjoyed dragging the colorful blocks of code around, and seemed to understand things like if-else statements and the movement commands.

I’ll wait to share the game we made until I’m sure Katie’s satisfied with it, but I can’t recommend Scratch enough.

3.

Last summer I played a single game of Go. Although it’s not the most fun game I’ve ever played (that would be this) I immediately understood why so many people enjoy it. It has the simple rules and clean aesthetics of checkers paired with the complex strategy and near-infinite variety of chess.

“It’s even more complex than chess,” the new friend I was playing with pointed out. “They’ve created AIs that can beat humans at chess. They’ve never made an AI that can beat humans at Go.”

A few hours after that game, I boarded a plane and flew 3,000 miles back to Boston, so I’ve never had a chance to play him again. And none of my friends here has a Go board. I quickly forgot how much I’d enjoyed the game.

Enter GnuGo. It’s an open source attempt to build an AI that can consistently beat humans at Go - and, in the mean time, it provides an excellent way to train for beginners like myself, and players of moderate skill. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to an understanding of the game where I’d be useful as a contributor, but it certainly adds an extra motivation to play!

(I’m watching a series of lectures on algorithms with some friends. I may at some point try to make a super-simple Go AI, as a test of both my algorithm-writing skill and of my understanding of Go.)

4.

This weekend is Mystery Hunt! I am so excited!

That is all.