• “A minute to learn…a lifetime to master” — that phrase has been on Othello boxes for decades, and as it turns out, the “lifetime” unit of measurement was exaggerated.

Hiroki Takizawa of Preferred Networks, Inc. has written a paper explaining that Othello has been solved. Here’s the abstract:

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The game of Othello is one of the world’s most complex and popular games that has yet to be computationally solved. Othello has roughly ten octodecillion (10 to the 58th power) possible game records and ten octillion (10 to the 28th power) possible game position. The challenge of solving Othello, determining the outcome of a game with no mistake made by either player, has long been a grand challenge in computer science. This paper announces a significant milestone: Othello is now solved, computationally proved that perfect play by both players lead to a draw. Strong Othello software has long been built using heuristically designed search techniques. Solving a game provides the solution which enables software to play the game perfectly.

You can read the full paper here (PDF). I will confess to wrinkling my nose at the opening line of the paper’s introduction: “Mastering pure strategy games like chess has been considered a symbol of human intelligence.” I mean, yes, that’s true, but that intelligence-measuring method is weakly one-dimensional given all of the human activities that can be considered evidence of intelligence.

In any case, now you can spend your lifetime mastering something else…

• Designers Elizabeth Hargrave, Sen-Foong Lim, and Geoff Englestein have founded Tabletop Game Designers Association (TTGDA), which can be thought of as the North American equivalent to Spiele-Autoren-Zunft e.V. (SAZ), a European-based game designer association.

TTGDA will launch in Q1 2024, with the goal of supporting “designers of all types of tabletop games, including board games, role playing games, card games, miniature games, and others, whether mass market, specialty, or hobby” through advocacy, community, and professional development.

At launch TTGDA plans to offer model contracts, contract reviews, dispute mediation with publishers, and a newsletter with industry updates. Other services are planned, and if you’re interested in being a founding member, you can sign up for updates on the TTGDA website.

• In the video below, designer Amabel Holland asks, “Should board games be frustrating?”

Given the source of the question, not to mention the nature of the question itself, the answer is “Sure, why not at least some of the time?” (I mean, no one is going to ask a question like “Should dogs be inflated with helium and carried around like balloons?”, then say, “No, what a ridiculous question!” If you’re posing a question contra convention, then I would expect an answer contra convention.)

Says Holland in the video, “Our conception of games is unique in that the qualities that we have determined to be ‘good game design’ universally correlate to positive emotions, and this isn’t true of any other artform. Good filmmaking, good cinematography, good editing, good acting produces emotion, but it doesn’t need to be a happy one… Modern board games, for all their complexity — we’re still just at the point where we’re starting to make ‘talkies’. Are [board games] capable of giving us more than puzzley dopamine? Maybe. I’d like them to be.”

• Along those lines, in 2024 Hollandspiele will release a solo game from Holland called But Then She Came Back. Here’s the setting:

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“It hurt so much when she died — but then she came back, and it hurt so much more.”

In the solitaire horror game But Then She Came Back, a loved one has returned from the dead. But she’s not as she was – parts of her are missing. Changed. Twisted. You need to protect her, while feeding the ravenous ugly thing inside of her – finding her fresh victims. If you come up short, you’ll need to sacrifice your friends and family, cutting yourself off from your support network. And if she is still hungry, you’ll cut off pieces of yourself – an arm, a leg, your eyes, and finally, when you have nothing left to give, your heart.

Each day, you’ll go out to get the things you need: blood, to feed her; knives, to protect her; and locks, to protect yourself from her. Each day, you’ll lose a piece of her as the thing inside her continues to grow and hunger – demanding more and more from you, even as you’re able to do less and less. Desperation gives way to despair as the promises you made when she was alive threaten to swallow you up.

The game will end in one of two ways: either you’ll die, or you’ll let her down. And you don’t know which is worse, and which is kinder. And you pretend you don’t know which one you’d prefer.

This is a game about horror and heartbreak, grief and exhaustion. It is for mature audiences.