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Welcome to MindSports
Acknowledgement

  • We humbly acknowledge that old games are always better because inventing games is one of two human activities excluded from progress. The other one is the brain activity of people adhering to that point of view.
  • You can play here for free. The Arena is dedicated to high strategy only, and features a rating system.
    In The Pit you can play a mix of strategical and tactical games that are presented in a more recreational context: notification happens as usual, but there's no rating system involved.
  • We're more committed to strategy games than to tactical ones. Here's the difference:
    Strategy games have strategies varied enough to allow different styles of play, tactics varied enough to induce their own terminology, and a structure that allows advantageous sub-goals to be achieved as calculable signposts along the way.
    Tactical games have strategies that are either fairly obvious (however deep), like Pente, or fairly obscure, like Othello.
 
Spirit
  • Games have a spirit - the one of draughts has been implemented in one form or another by almost every culture in the world.
    You can play international Draughts in the ArenA, as well as 2 variants and 2 variants of sorts.
  • We're not entirely serious all the time, yet we may bring up that:

    • Opinions are difficult because they're too damn easy.
    • José Raúl Capablanca, Edward Lasker and Bobby Fischer were great players, not great inventors.
    • Grand Chess is inevitable.
    • Draughts players are hooked on opposition - they'll oppose anything.
    • Playing Dameo is like exploring a new continent.
    • The great Emanuel Lasker made a bad game by improving on a really bad game.
    • Emergo is quintessential.
  • Defining the Abstract - a leading article by Mark Thompson.
  • How I invented games and why not - an essay by Christian Freeling.
 
On programmability
 
I Ching Connexion
  • The I Ching Connexion, a divination program based on the one-to-one correlation between the 64 hexagons of the China Labyrinth and the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, is now available online.
 
Puzzles
  • In this section you will find a number of unique combinatorial puzzles in two classes, tilings and 3D.
    All puzzles © This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
 
Side dishes
  • Math: We've discovered the structure of the series of successively better approximations of the roots of natural numbers, and the inherent division of non-squares in two distinct classes: carréphylic and carréphobic numbers.
  • Play online: Minimancala - the smallest almost non-trivial mancala game.
  • We feature a number of interesting games, both traditional and modern.
  • Don't forget to skip christian's almost complete games.
 
Finally
  • We're not democratic, but we welcome suggestions and we do actually answer questions (sometimes).
  • A note on gender: we use pronouns like 'he' or 'him' to exclude awkward constructions rather than women.
 
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