RS&A is an art studio formed in 2001, whose first exhibition and original raison d’etre, was a series of chess sets by different artists.

The results, as you might expect, are varied, wild, and beautiful.

Numerous articles about the studio and the intersection of Chess and art in general, including this one from the UK Telegraph, have since been written.

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Bag Games are cloth games in a bag, kind of like the windbreakers I remember wearing in the 1970s.

Unfold the board from the bag and spill the pieces out, then roll up the board and dump the pieces back in when you’re done.

I would have thought that one could create Chess, Checkers, and Backgammon all in one product without requiring you to buy three bags, but that’s what you get for a product advertising itself as Eco-friendly.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFFQINRs53w]

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In this week’s Escapist, Jason Rohrer asks how is it that some board games, such as Go, are infinitely re-playable, while this quality is nearly non-existent in video games. And simply getting faster with each level isn’t enough.

His answer lies in single-player vs multi-player. In other words, comparing single-player board games to single-player video games yields the same puzzle like qualities. He’s pretty sure that competent AI programming stopped once video games went on to become multi-player, and that there’s a reason for that:

If there is a single, optimal path to victory, then systematically finding that path is the main task in the game. Once the path has been discovered and documented for future use, the game’s depth is exhausted. If there are multiple possible paths to victory, finding the rest after you’ve found one is an optional act of completionism, an exploration of mechanical depth.

While I agree that that’s what most video game designers do, it kind of ignores the branches of AI that learn from their mistake and play better, or at least differently, the next time.

He also provides a free original downloadable board game that he designed.

(article)

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