In the Iraqi city of Mosul, the Islamic State has banned Backgammon and Dominoes, common after-dark leisure activities during Ramadan. Another game prohibited by the group for the Muslim holy month is Al Mahibs, a traditional activity in which teams line up and try to guess which one of their opponents is holding a ring.

According to a report by Hamrin News, in lieu of games the Islamic State is organizing wrestling matches and races.

[via Radio Free Europe]

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission today announced the settlement of its first case for a failed crowdfunding campaign and it’s for a board game project. Erik Chevalier, doing business as The Forking Path, raised nearly $123,000 via Kickstarter for The Doom That Came To Atlantic City but failed to produce the game or issue refunds. The FTC found that instead of putting the money raised in to production of the game, Chevalier spent backer funds on personal expenses, such as rent. A press release from the Commission quotes Director Jessica Rich:

Many consumers enjoy the opportunity to take part in the development of a product or service through crowdfunding, and they generally know there’s some uncertainty involved in helping start something new. But consumers should able to trust their money will actually be spent on the project they funded.

Kickstarter’s Terms of Use at the time of the project required project owners to fulfill all promised rewards or issue refunds. Backers of $50 or more for The Doom That Came To Atlantic City were to get a copy of the game.

The FTC settlement order prohibits Chevalier from making any misrepresentations or failing to issue refunds with regard to any crowdfunding campaign, or disclosing or benefiting from backers’ personal information. The order also imposes a $112,000 judgement, though the obligation is suspended because of Chevalier’s inability to pay, and various reporting requirements for a period of 18 years. The settlement does not require Chevalier to admit any wrongdoing.

The Doom That Came To Atlantic City game was eventually produced and sold by Cryptozoic without the involvement of Erik Chevalier.

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An unemployed man in Shanghai lost ¥2,000 playing Mahjong. In an effort to fix his mistake, he followed the man to whom he lost the money and beat him to death with a brick.

Mattel’s CFO reportedly fell for an email scam and wired $3.2 million to a bank account in China. The email is said to have looked like a request from the CEO for funds as part of an acquisition. Fortunately, Mattel realized the error in time and by sending a representative in-person to Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, was able to have the receiving account frozen pending final resolution with local authorities.

Chris Morris Lent claims it is common for Magic: The Gathering competitors to take the drug Adderall to enhance their performance during tournaments. Despite that, he claims that he was high on mushrooms when he won a regional event. Chris is also known for recently publishing an article in which he suggests that the quality of play on the Magic Pro Tour isn’t particularly high, that Wizards of the Coast skimps on expenses when running Pro Tour events, and that most online MtG news outlets fail to cover how these events are run.

The Rwanda Chess Federation runs an annual Genocide Memorial Chess Tournament.

A couple vacationing near New Braunfels, Texas got in to an argument over a game of Scrabble. When the guy decided to send his girlfriend home on the bus, she broke a wine bottle on him and then stabbed him in the arm with a shard of glass.

A Connecticut investigation in to restraint and seclusion practices by public schools found that one student had been put in a padded cell for lying about winning a board game.

Spurred on by social media (#charliecharliechallenge), students around the world have been getting in to trouble for playing Charlie Charlie in school. The game, similar to Ouija, has students balance one pencil on another to ask questions of a Mexican demon. The Vatican disapproves. Daniel got detention for “summoning demons in class.”

Battlefront Miniatures and Dust Studios are at odds over their closed joint Kickstarter project for Dust miniatures. Each has made public accusations blaming the other for their failure to deliver a second wave of backer rewards.

According to police, a couple in North Battleford, Saskatchewan were up at 3:00 AM drinking and playing Monopoly. An argument developed over the game and the woman hit the man in the head with a planter.

The Seminole Indian tribe of Florida is keen to have renewed its exclusive license for gambling on card games but the state failed to take the necessary action before the adjournment of the legislature. The deal is covered by the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and expires at the end of July.

After threatening “proceedings” last month, FIDE reinstated Grandmaster Sebastien Feller, previously banned for cheating at the 2010 Chess Olympiad.

Police in Tamsui, Taiwan raided an illegal Mahjong parlor, which they discovered in an apartment building when they heard loud noises coming from a second story window.

A young Chess player fled his native Bangladesh because of political persecution then was able to obtain asylum in France after winning a French championship tournament.

Flora, Mississippi: dice, argument, gun-in-car, murder.

Another Chess coach—last month it was one in Columbus Ohio, this month it’s one in Sydney, Australia—has been charged with indecent assault of a young girl. Police say it happened during Chess lessons.

A few guys were playing Dominoes around a park bench in Nassau, Bahamas when a car drove by and someone shot in to the group. One of the players was declared dead at the scene.

A group of six men playing Dominoes at a recreation center in Wichita were robbed by a group of five men wielding guns.

Plainclothes Brooklyn police officers found five men gambling over dice and arrested them for loitering, weapons possession, and drinking in public.

In Grand Rapids, Michigan, a witness says that two people were playing dice in his driveway when one got upset at losing and shot the other. This was the second time in less than a year that the victim was shot. There won’t be a third. Two days later the suspect was found dead of a self-inflicted wound.

In St. Louis, a man on his way to purchase drugs stopped to play dice with some strangers. It turns out this was a mistake because an argument ensued and one of the men he was playing with shot him at least five times. He did not survive.

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Grandmaster Gaioz Nigalidze of Georgia was expelled from the Dubai Open tournament after his smartphone was found running a Chess app and hidden in a bathroom stall wrapped in a wad of toilet paper. His opponent had lodged a complaint with tournament organizers after Nigalidze had visited the bathroom several times and always used the same stall.

Dhruv Kakkar was caught employing a slightly different approach to cheating at the Dr. Hedgewar Open Chess Tournament in New Delhi, India. He had two mobile phones strapped to his legs and a micro-speaker in his ear, a setup he was using to receive instructions from a friend running a computer Chess program in another city. In this case, Mr. Kakkar’s opponent became suspicious when no matter how simple or complex the current situation, Mr. Kakkar took a consistent 2 minutes to make each and every move.

In a 4½ year old cheating case, the World Chess Federation is threatening to take “proceedings” against Sebastien Feller of France if he doesn’t return by May 7th the medal and prize money he won at the 2010 Chess Olympiad.

While attempting to offer its condolences to the Nepal Chess Association, FIDE instead stated, “We… deeply deplore those whom we have lost in this disaster.”

Officials in Handsworth, UK yanked the license of Club Paradise (“weddings, parties, funerals, much more”) after management failed to notice or report a shooting that took place at the club because they were busy playing Dominoes.

The Polish government just noticed that since 2013 the game Apples to Apples has had a card that refers to “Nazi Poland”. After complaining to Mattel that the card misrepresented history, the company apologized and offered to exchange the game free of charge.

British Chess grandmaster Nigel Short is feeling public ire after telling New in Chess magazine that women are not as good at Chess as men. He claims that his position is not a value judgement but rather an honest assessment of the different skills between men and women.

After receiving several warnings for writing notes to himself during the ninth round of the U.S. Chess Championships in St. Louis, Wesley So had his game forfeited by the arbiter. The rising star of the Chess world was distracted and put off his game by a surprise visit to the tournament of his estranged mother.

The folks at Cards Against Humanity are in a bit of trouble with local officials in Liberty, Maine. As part of one of their holiday promotions, the company purchased an island, Birch Island in Lake St. George, and doled out 250,000 “licenses” for exclusive use of 1 foot square parcels. The company also installed on the island a vault containing unique expansion cards. Town officials, however, consider this illegal commercial activity and subdivision of property. A letter from Liberty’s code enforcement officer threatens Cards Against Humanity with significant fines unless the company submits a satisfactory remediation plan.

In Sri Lanka, a man murdered his wife’s lover by luring him to the house to play board games.

An allegedly intoxicated driver fleeing police crashed his car through the front window of Red Castle Games in Portland. The owner of the store is asking for donations to cover losses not covered by insurance. Oh, and the incident was caught on the store’s security video:

After entering in to a marketing arrangement with Hasbro, BuzzFeed deleted an article critical of Monopoly. The article has since been restored and an editor has apologized.

Shuffle Tech International filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court against Scientific Games Corp., alleging that the latter has monopolized the casino market for card shuffling machines through fraudulently obtained patents.

More than 1,600 government workers in Qianxinan prefecture, China were “recalled” and forced to undergo extensive retraining, including military drills. What did they do wrong? Gossip, watch movies at work, and play Mahjong.

A group of grandmothers from Zhejiang province, China who were arrested for participating in ketamine drug parties told investigators that Mahjong just wasn’t enough anymore to alleviate their dull existence. I wish they would have asked. I could have recommended some other games to try.

The latest round between Mattel and Zynga saw the toy company score the upper hand. The Court of Appeal found Mattel’s trademark for “Scramble” valid and infringed by Zynga’s use of “Scramble” and “Scramble With Friends”. The court, however, decided that Zynga’s “Scramble” did not infringe on Mattel’s “Scrabble”.

Upper Deck won a $1.8 million verdict against J&T Hobby in a dispute over a distribution deal dating back to 1994.

Ruling that MGA’s infringement wasn’t willful, a federal circuit court judge has cut in third the $4.7 million dollars in damages awarded by a lower court to Innovention Toys in the patent case for laser board games.

Topps has applied to trademark “Masterwork“, which it began using in February, even though Leaf has been using that term in the trading card business since 2013.

A former Philippine basketball star was arrested in a police drug raid. The charges leveled against him, however, were for illegal gambling. He was found at the scene playing Mahjong.

A former UK and European Scrabble champion who felt persecuted for being a transgender woman, decided to step in front of a moving train.

A man out on bail was shot dead while playing Dominoes on the street in Coconut Grove, Bahamas.

Six men playing dice on the street in Waterbury, Connecticut were arrested for gambling.

Gambit, a website that allows users to wager Bitcoins when they challenge each other on classic board games (e.g., Backgammon, Penta, Dominoes, and remakes of Monopoly, Risk, and Battleship), has decided to eliminate rake (the fee charged as a percentage of each pot).

A Chess coach, who’s also the founder of a Columbus-area Chess club, is facing charges for raping a 4 year old girl at a preschool where he taught.

Albany County, New York has passed a law prohibiting any amount of benzene, lead, mercury, antimony, arsenic, cadmium, or cobalt in children’s products or apparel. The Safe to Play Coalition, an alliance of manufacturers and retailers, is challenging the law in court, claiming that it’s preempted by federal regulation.

A shootout erupted among a dozen men playing dice in Wetumpka, Alabama when half the players tried to rob the other half.

In Beaumont, Texas, a man apprehended by police with a gun and cocaine claimed that he was actually the victim. He said that when the police saw him running through a park, he was trying to escape from another man who shot him in the ear during an argument over a dice game.

A man who ran when he was spotted by police playing dice on the street in Memphis was also caught and arrested for possession of cocaine.

Other men from Memphis decided to take their dice game to a hotel in Nashville. The move, though, didn’t help. One ended up shot in the leg. Police are looking for the other.

The man Indianapolis police found shot following a dice game later died at the hospital.

Not all dice rolling is frowned upon by government. In fact, in Platte, South Dakota, the winner of the mayoral election was decided by a roll-off between the two candidates.

Wild Horse Concepts has filed suit against Hasbro, claiming that the idea for interchangeable action figure body parts, which Hasbro made in to Marvel Superhero Mashers, was presented by Wild Horse in a meeting 2 years earlier.

Corporate Responsibility Magazine ranked Hasbro second overall in the list of 100 Best Corporate Citizens of 2015.

Police raided a dice game, which a laundry owner in Thailand had organized in his business.

When the host of a Dominoes game in Delray Beach, Florida asked one of his guests to leave, a fight erupted and the host ended up stabbed in the chest and abdomen.

A Utah-based financial planning firm claims that a Florida-based financial planning firm intentionally copied its trademarked logo, a knight Chess piece centered above the company name.

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A High Court judge in the U.K. has declared that the card game, Bridge, may be considered a sport.

If the brain is a muscle, it [may satisfy the definition of sport]. You are doing more physical activity playing Bridge, with all that dealing and playing, than in rifle shooting… There are a number of physical activities, such as running on a treadmill in a gym, which are physical recreation but not sports.

The question of whether a card game should be considered a sport is the subject of a case initiated by the English Bridge Union against Sport England. The latter, a government agency responsible for disbursing lottery grants to non-professional sporting groups, had refused to recognize mind sports as “physical activity aimed a improving physical fitness and well being, forming social relations and gaining results in competition at all levels.”

The judge, however, disagreed, possibly enabling the English Bridge Union to obtain public funding for tournaments.

[via Daily Mail]

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A board game is turning out to be a significant piece of evidence in the multi-million-dollar gender-discrimination lawsuit brought by Ellen Pao against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. One part of Pao’s claim is the nature of gifts given to her by partners of the firm. The firm, however, points to the fact that Pao gave one of the partners a gift of the $300 Abundance game.

The Supreme Court of the Philippines has decided that it shouldn’t be so difficult for lower courts to annul marriages on the basis of psychological incapacity. What prompted this decision? A case in which the court was asked to nullify a marriage because the wife was playing too much mahjong.

The U.K.’s National Measurement Office tested a sample of 15 high-risk electronic toys purchased from high-risk retailers and found that 40 percent of them failed toxin safety tests. Certainly, this is a problem. However, multiple media outlets apparently made the problem seem worse by reporting that 40 percent of all toys at retail in the country were dangerous.

Hasbro has been declared one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute.

During a night of drinking and playing Mahjong, a man parked his car somewhere in Jilin province, China. Now can’t find it. Neither has a fortune-teller been any help. If you spot a grey jeep with license plate number 吉ASB799, please let him know where it is.

In an effort to combat home-grown terrorism, the government of Australia granted the Burwood Council $138,000 to develop a board game that would instruct high school students on the “link between violent extreme behaviour and cultural intolerance.”

The mother of a Hong Kong police superintendent was arrested for being a methamphetamine courier. She claims she was forced in to the position after racking up a large gambling debt playing Mahjong.

After an arbiter at the European Individual Chess Championships stopped a player from castling with a rook he had already moved twice, the player resigned the game.

A New Jersey 10-year-old committed suicide following an argument over a game of Chess. He jumped from the window of his second-story classroom while other students watched.

A British Chess grandmaster has claimed that it is common for players at all but the highest levels to cheat by consulting computers while visiting the restroom during games.

Steve Dillard was a giving man and very active in the Kentucky Chess community. He taught Chess in schools, ran Chess tournaments, purchased Chess sets for people who couldn’t afford them, and fostered children. One of his former foster children has been charged with beating and stabbing him to death.

A politician was photographed playing Scrabble on his laptop during a local council meeting in the UK. In addition to pointing out that others were also playing games (just not caught in a photograph), he explained that he needed the distraction during another councilor’s long “boastful” speech.

Monte Cook Games was accused of cultural insensitivity for Native American-themed content in its The Strange roleplaying game. The company denied any problem but subsequently decided to replace the material anyway.

Privacy advocates are concerned that an internet-connected interactive Barbie doll will violate the privacy of children.

In a filing with the U.S. International Trade Commission, Lego has accused Lite Brix, Mega Brands, and Best Lock of infringing Lego patents tied to the Friends line.

Spin Master says the lawsuit against it in Florida over Paw Patrol is preempted by federal copyright law.

After being ousted from the CEO position of Mattel, Bryan Stockton was brought back as a consultant to the company.

5th Street Games is declaring bankruptcy and will not be fulfilling outstanding Kickstarter commitments.

A man playing Dominoes was killed in a drive-by shooting in Tampa.

Las Vegas’ 20th murder this year occurred during a dice game.

One of the founders of Ancestry.com and the owner of Kringle’s Toys & Gifts in Utah is charged with rape and other crimes allegedly committed by luring his teenage victim with card games and alcohol.

A Lakewood, New Jersey man has been indicted for murder. Police allege that he shot and killed someone for failing to pay-up on a dice game wager.

In Columbia, Missouri, a man was arrested for stealing $2,700 from someone with whom he had just finished playing dice, then after being released was again arrested for offering to pay the victim $2,700 to withdraw his statement to police.

…And not a single one an April fool’s joke.

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For a family in County Durham, U.K., the Ouija game was a good-news bad-news kind of thing. The husband said that he drowned and dismembered the dog because the Ouija board told him to do it. The wife and daughter, however, said it was also a Ouija that warned them about the impending house fire.

In Iran, they take the term “political dominoes” literally. A group there recently put on a display in which the international conflict over the country’s nuclear program was symbolically represented by the toppling of dominoes. This included one large element featuring a missile destroying an Israeli flag.

The NCAA is claiming a trademark both on the term “bracket” and the image of brackets with regard to tournaments.

A mom who went to a Target store in Canada looking for discounts, instead found $800 worth of marijuana in an Angry Birds Telepods board game.

Ten banks were fined a total of $43.5 million for promising to publish positive research results in exchange for a piece of the Toys “R” Us IPO business.

The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected Panini’s attempt to trademark the term “Limited” with regard to trading cards. The Board sided with Topps and found that Panini had failed to prove that the mark, a descriptive term, had acquired sufficient distinctiveness.

The owner of Chez Geek, a game store in Montreal, says the Quebec government is pressuring him to stop selling board games that are not in French.

Spielbound, a game cafe in Omaha, Nebraska, has successfully registered its game library as a 501c(3) tax-exempt nonprofit with the IRS.

While Hasbro has come up with a replacement for the phallic Play-Doh extruder, some are complaining that the new tool looks like a certain kind of sex toy.

Hasbro also took some flak for the way it responded to a question about the number of toys based on female Star Wars characters.

Disco choreographer, Deney Terrio, is suing Hasbro. He claims that the Vinnie Terrio character in Littlest Pet Shop copies his signature dance move, the finger point made famous by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

In Tune is a game that provides players with the opportunity to practice observing physical boundaries and consent. Using video game controllers it electrifies the players such that it’s able to register the places they touch each other.

Hasbro has settled with Mexican tax authorities, paying $65 million out of the $250 million sought by the government.

Lego is accusing Mega Brands, makers of Mega Bloks, of copying Lego Friends. Mega Brands, however, says that Lego can’t seek the help of the U.S. International Trade Commission because Lego doesn’t meet the ITC’s domestic industry requirement.

Sheldon Adelson, the owner of several casinos, is lobbying for laws in the United States that would prohibit online gambling. He calls it a moral issue.

Police in Trenton, New Jersey arrested seven people for playing dice in the hallway of an apartment building of which none of them were a resident.

Police in Staten Island, New York are running Chess and Checkers tournaments for at-risk youth. In Atlanta, a Chess program run by probation officers and attorneys is for youth already convicted of crimes.

A Chicago-area high school student visiting Peoria, Illinois for a Chess tournament was able to give a young girl CPR and save her life.

By order of the country’s parliament, Chess will be compulsory in Spanish schools.

Students at Padjadjaran University in Indonesia claim to have developed a card game that can train people to detect when others are lying.

A woman in China is up on murder charges for stabbing a man she claims got her husband addicted to Mahjong.

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A man that police in Jackson, Mississippi found naked and shot in the “lower extremities” was said to have been “playing dice.” Really?

What sets apart the brawl that erupted over a dice game in Memphis, Tennessee is the fact that it took place in a high school cafeteria during lunch break.

A factory in China is making unlicensed, risque My Little Pony inflatable dolls.

One million fake Peppa Pig toys have been seized by customs authorities in Brazil.

Community organizers in Bakersfield, California are using a Chess-like game to teach youth about the dangers of gang violence. The standard Chess pieces are replaced with “little homie”, “big homie”, “hustler”, “baller”, etc., and after losing a piece players must flip and answer a discussion card.

The Sun Prairie Area School District School Board is using a board game to educate the public about its budgeting process.

Someone in New Jersey is organizing a Cannabis Chess Tournament.

A Target store in Anchorage, Alaska started selling the latest Magic: The Gathering release, Fate Reforged, one day before they were supposed to.

Two UK Chess players took their dispute over a £160 debt to court, the debt related to expenses for attending a Chess tournament in Gibraltar. The judge in the case, however, dismissed it for lack of evidence.

While robbing a GameStop in Renton, Washington, the criminal slit the throat of a store employee.

One of Bill Cosby’s accusers claims that he sexually assaulted her during a game of Backgammon.

A bomb exploded, killing two, at an open-air cafe in Turkey where people gather to play Backgammon.

Seventy-eight people were arrested on gambling charges when police in Hong Kong raided two Mahjong parlors.

Two men shot in North Charleston, South Carolina denied they were participating in a dice game, though witnesses say that is exactly what they were doing. Hey, at least they were wearing clothes!

A man in Chicago was charged with homicide for shooting and killing his friend during a dice game.

At another Chicago-area dice game, a man shot a fellow player “execution-style in the head,” then fired 10 times in to a crowd.

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Corruption in the Bulgarian Chess Federation was caught on video by investigative reporters of television show, Gospodari na Efira. The Federation’s Executive Director promised tournament supplies and an arbiter position to the President of a local club in return for votes in an upcoming Federation election.

Thirty-five national Chess federations are late paying their dues to FIDE. Players affiliated with those federations will not be allowed to play in certain tournaments.

When an intoxicated man playing The Game of Life in Mill Creek, Indiana commented about already being married, his wife didn’t take it kindly. Though it never became violent, the ensuing argument was loud enough to attract the attention of police, and because the man ran instead of answering their questions, he was arrested and charged with resisting law enforcement.

A $3,000 collection of Magic: The Gathering cards was stolen in Madison, Wisconsin, then recovered when someone tried to sell them at a local game store. The person who tried to sell the cards admitted to police that he was high on drugs but claimed that he purchased the card collection from “some dude”.

Controversy erupted after OneBookShelf removed a card game about GamerGate from DriveThruRPG. Some, believing that public statements by people associated with Evil Hat Productions drove OneBookShelf’s action, called for boycotts of Evil Hat or DriveThruRPG. The retailer, however, disputed that assertion, stating instead that the ban was because the subject of GamerGate was “too current, too emotionally fraught, and too related to violence to be an appropriate subject for satire.” OneBookShelf further argued that “the violent element of the Gamergate issue has a basis in misogyny”—this argument despite the presence of a number of directly misogynistic products in the store.

Government corruption scandals in Spain have spawned a second board game. Last month we mentioned Corruptopolis. This month it’s D€mocracy.

A Chess set was stolen from a car in Arlington Heights, Illinois.

Two men playing Scrabble in the public library of Hespeler, Ontario were asked to stop making so much noise rattling the bag of tiles.

A man who in 2008 was banned from tournament play for 1 year by the Victoria branch of the Australian Scrabble Players Association was hoping to finally have his day in court. The man had already served out the ban for poor behavior but wanted the disciplinary action declared illegal. In the end, Ringwood Magistrates Court did overturn the ban but refused to order the Association to admit that he did not cheat. It turned out that the man had already agreed to a settlement with the Association and that settlement did not require the Association to state that it was wrong.

Cards Against Humanity’s Black Friday deal was for a box of Bullshit. Thirty-thousand people purchased it, even though the company warned them not to expect anything different than the name on the box.

Hasbro released a Corporate Social Responsibility Report, detailing the company’s progress during 2013 on product safety, environmental responsibility, ethical sourcing, human rights, responsible marketing, and global philanthropy.

Taking that responsibility seriously, Hasbro has offered to replace a phallic extruder tool in its Play-Doh Cake Mountain toy.

According to a former inmate writing his memoirs, Chess and Dungeons & Dragons are popular pastimes in New York state prisons.

Two men in Cleveland were watching sports and playing Dominoes when they got in to an argument over sexual orientations. Then one of them attacked the other with a sword.

Two men were shot while arguing during a Dominoes game in Frankfort, Kentucky. Local reports do not indicate what this argument was about.

A woman in Kendal, Cumbria was convicted of slapping a man during a heated discussion about the scheduling of a Dominoes tournament. Her sentence included a 12-month conditional discharge, a fine of £620 for court costs, and a £15 victim surcharge.

A high school honors student was shot and killed during a $2 dice game in Detroit. The men he was playing were upset that he was winning. During the resulting argument, the student offered to fight the men, but one of them pulled out a gun and shot him instead.

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FIDE (the World Chess Federation) is undertaking greater efforts to combat cheating at Chess tournaments. Aimed primarily at the possibility of players obtaining the aid of computers, FIDE plans to establish a permanent Anti-Cheating Commission and to adopt security measures for screening players and segregating them from spectators. Security measures may include searches and metal detectors, depending on the significance of the tournament.

Additionally, FIDE is in the process of developing a computerized tool that identifies cheating through statistical analysis of completed games. The tool is based on the work of Professor Kenneth W. Regan of the University at Buffalo Computer Science department, and rather than evaluating a player’s likelihood of winning, looks at the quality and consistency of individual moves. Dr. Regan’s research, for example, shows that human Chess players are more likely to make mistakes the further ahead or behind they are, whereas computer players perform consistently despite the present game state.

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