Wild Talents

Posted by Rob on September 3, 2006 at 06:20 PM

Random fact of the day: Charles Fort (yes, that Charles Fort) was a game designer! Late in life, as his eyesight started to go, Fort packed away all his notes and books and devoted his energies to something called "Super-checkers," a game played with armies of hundreds of men on a board with thousands of squares. Fort used bits of cardboard with thumbtack handles for the men and a bolt of checkered cloth for the board. Yeah, because that would be great for your failing eyesight. At first, players moved just one man at a time, but Fort found that games could go on continuously for a week, so he changed the rules to allow movement en masse:

So let A start out, moving until B tells him to stop--say a hundred moves. Then B makes a hundred moves. A may want to make another hundred moves, but B, sizing up the situation, tells him to stop, say at thirty. Then perhaps occurs 'fighting,' at close quarters, one move at a time. But at any time, if either player wants to make a 'mass movement' that is a matter of obtaining permission from his opponent.

You don't have to be a Fortean to be amused by the image of this guy playing massive week-long games of checkers across his living room floor. In 1930, Fort wrote to his friend Tiffany Thayer:

Super-checkers is going to be a great success. I have met four more people who consider it preposterous.

That's going to be my criteria when I get into designing games, too.