ALFRED'S BEST OF THE BLOGOSPHERE

Another Thursday night, another BotB.

This week's dedication goes out to--a game-related one!--Kris Burm, whose final chapter in the GIPF series, Pünct, has entered the collection. What an interesting project, with interesting games to match! Not all of them are my favorite games, but I love Zertz and Yinsh and they're all so interesting...I hope, some day, to play a "full" game with all the side-games and potentials.

On to the links!

I second ChiyoDad's suggestion that some maverick cabinetmaker create a Shaker-style floor goban. Interesting tables, though, over at Board Game Go.

Mikko has a new favorite color, and reports that at least one of the 14,454,338 new Sudoku games on the market looks interesting. I'm still not exaclty sure what the DVD does; I guess it checks for solvability. I like sudoku, but the games all leave me a little leery...

The One Hundred is winding down, with just two to go as of this writing. Brian Bankler is keeping the pace, and makes an interesting debate resolution on CCGs, and somewhat more broadly about how we view CCGs and Chess differently from "normal" games.

Chris Farrell, inspired by The One Hundred, seeks to encourage others to bring Civilization back from the dead. Civ may have a big fancy mausoleum, but it's still buried underneath. You know...I've never actually played "straight" Civilization, always Advanced Civ with all the trimmings. That's probably an oversight...I'd like to give it a try, now.

Peter at Nimrods wins this week's award for Most Determined Gamer, for the lengths he goes to play games, and his exemplary efforts to bring others into the fold. I suppose, given my own criteria, that I wouldn't consider Settlers to be a particularly great gateway game...but hey, it was the game that brought me into Eurogaming (I didn't know what they were when I was playing Scotland Yard, etc years before), and doubtless brought many of us into Eurogaming. Hard to knock it, I think, despite what strike many of us today as inelegancies.

I've owned a few games that I thought might taste better than they played. Joe Gola, apparently, has had similar thoughts.

The Ticket to Ride PC game is, apparently, less than totally amazing. But you get a Switzerland map! It'd be neat if it had some sort of CAD program for designing one's own maps, the way there are programs for Memoir 44 and Battle Cry maps. I mean, I doubt I'd like TTR any more, but, you know, for those who do.

Speaking of Switzerland maps, I'm kind of interested in seeing how the Age of Steam variant works (link to Billygames). I love how just tweaking a couple of rules can change the whole flavor of the game. I wonder if Eagle will have any expansions for Railroad Tycoon? One of my favorite parts of the computer game was trying the zillion scenarios. I'd love to see China...

Now for the special part of our program: Chess blogs!

If you thought I was lousy at go--and I did everything I could to convince you that I am--I'm a hundred times worse at chess. At some point the situation on the board enters a very strange zone, and it emerges from the darkness as a crushing loss for ol' Alfred. I've never really tried particularly hard to get better, but I still enjoy reading about chess history and chess culture generally. It seems to be full of intrigue and crazy characters, which always make for fun reading.

Anyway, until this week I've never made much of an effort to seek out chess blogs, but naturally this all changed.

The center of the chessblogging world is probably the Boylston Chess Club blog. It's quite interesting in its own right--I enjoyed reading about the tribulations of the US Chess League. The BCC Blog also maintains the fullest list of chess blogs, which I recommend checking out if you're at all interested. The highlights, from my (überpatzer) perspective:

Continuing a growing trend, there was another breakdown in talks to unify the World Championship--or, at least, have the major claimants (Veselin Topolov and Vladimir Kramnik) face off. It's discussed over at Chess Mind, Chess Ninja, Susan Polgar's blog, and, basically, just about everywhere. I haven't followed it all tremendously closely, but basically I've come to the opinion that chess "organizations" surpasseth all understanding.

The 64 Square Jungle reports on trophies in scholastic chess, which seems to be going the way of many other youth activities: Nuts. (I overgeneralize, I contain multitudes.)

One of my favorites is ChessWatch, although it hasn't been updated in a while, apparently...the kind of stuff I'm looking for, anyway, for my chess blog needs.

There's plenty more out there, as I said--I basically glazed over the ones with a lot of variations, since at my level they're basically all in Swedish as far as I'm concerned. For the discerning chess blog audience, however, they're worth looking into--but, as I'm beyond unqualified, I hold my tongue.

See y'all next week!