Onitama

Finally stopped by the gaming store down the street.  Got the spouse a birthday present and as an impulse buy picked up a game called Onitama.  Onitama is a sort of simplified version of chess played on a 5x5 board with one twist.

I never really got into chess.  Perhaps that's surprising.  It's a very deep analytical game that calls on humans' highest analytical skills and I have a fairly analytical mind.  Great chess players, I'm told, can see potential moves a dozen moves down the line while ignoring the bad ones, which is why it took decades for computers, who theoretically would always be better at games with clearly defined rules like chess, to be able to beat the best humans.

Humans also had a several hundred year head start.  There is a corpus of knowledge to chess.  Centuries of trial and error have taught players what moves and gambits work and what moves and gambits don't.  To be a good chess player, you have to know these things.

And this, I think, more than anything else, is why I'm not a chess player.  There's something lawyerly about it, something about it that rewards arcane and esoteric knowledge for its own sake.  Understanding the Latvian Gambit is useful in chess and nowhere else (not even Latvia!).  As much as I like to analyze, I don't like this sense of being hidebound by tradition that chess induces.  I like being able to improvise, to think on my feet, and in order to do that in chess it's necessary to memorize a whole lot of shit.

Onitama is different enough to chess that all that acquired knowledge is, on its face, useless.  Even at a lower state of computational development I don't think it would be nearly as hard for a computer to beat the World's Best Onitama player - but this also has an advantage to gaming neophytes like myself.

Of course, the longer a game is played, the more people play it, the more likely there are to be developed and shared effective tactics and even effective strategies.  I think this is why I'm so quick to abandon popular games.  Dominion was a well-designed game and it was huge a couple years ago.  I don't play it because, to put it one way, the novelty has worn off.  To put it another way the fun of it was adjusting to a new and unfamiliar set of rules.  Even given the possibility in the game for the rules to change on every play and the impossibility of playing every set of rules the game has to offer, at a certain point the thing settles down into routine.  (Perhaps this is an advantage of the sophisticated play-once games like Pandemic: Legacy that are taking the world by storm.  "Replayability" is all well and good but theoretical replayability will never quite match practical replayability.)