Preface
This is not a tutorial on how to invent abstract games. I wouldn't encourage anyone. Nor is it a comparative investigation, because inventors cannot escape the suspicion of bias. At most it may serve as a basis for either or both, for whoever decides to embark on this course.

Between 1979 and 1986 I invented some fourty abstract games, most of which can be found in the ArenA and the Pit. Dameo, HanniBall, YvY and Symple(x) are exceptions. Dameo's invention in 2000, after an incubation period of fifteen years, took two minutes. The invention of HanniBall and YvY in 2009 and Symple and Lhexus in 2010 were 'live' occurences decribed in a late arrival and a final whisper respectively.

Looking back now, from a safe distance, and with the benefit of hindsight, I'd like to clarify how and why I invented these games, and more specifically why not.

To start with the latter, I never was particularly interested in commercial success, because that's a whole different ballgame. I would have liked it, of course, and it might have made things easier in some respects, but I felt an inventor, not a promotor. I can honestly say that I never made a game for merchandise, ever. Havannah ended up a Ravensburger game nevertheless, but in hindsight it was destined to fail. Strategical games are almost a recipe for commercial failure.
Moreover, why buy them if you can try them. Bushka, Dameo and Emergo can be played by anyone who has a chess board, a 10x10 draughts board and a set of draughtsmen. Symple can be played on a regular Go board. So much for merchandise. I was simply interested in finding the best possible games.

Why did I do it? Because I could. As a kid I played a lot of 10x10 draughts. Never Chess. It was an 'upper class lower class' thing: proletarians played draughts. As a late hippie, in the mid seventies, I encountered Go. One night, while playing, I had a crucial shift of perspective. We still were absolute beginners, so it wasn't embedded in any real knowledge of how to play Go. Yet, under my eyes the game transformed from a mechanism, the parts of which for me were still found wanting in terms of interaction, to an organism with its own will and intent.
I watched the game come to life as conflicting bacteria in a petri dish. At the same time I felt the will and intent: how each side effortlessly absorbed the available territory with a maximum of efficiency and unbounded finesse. A complete identification with how the game intended to behave, if not spoiled by bad players.
Bad players like myself obviously. I wasn't even good enough to call that a reality check. I was at the very bottom of the strategy tree, feeling how it felt at the very top, where simplicity has come full circle through a universe of complexity, and where every move is self evident.

Like the guy who could count the number of letters in any sentence while saying it, I was not aware that this perspective was in any way unusual (116). I was only gradually to find out that knowing how some games will behave on the highest level is not a frequent quality, even among dedicated players. Moreover, the kind of identification involved is limited to a small class of games that I would label 'organisms' rather than mechanisms. Chess games in particular lack these qualities.

My first game was a attempt to blend Chess and Go, the mechanical with the organical. It turned out like Frankenstein's monster: all seperate parts, and no life of its own. I like to think it compressed all possible mistakes an inventor can make into one game. It put me on the right track for sure: look for simplicity.

The games that I consider the core of my work can be found in the ArenA. Emergo is a co-invention with Ed van Zon.
They're not mere abstract games, they're 'mental sport weapons'. They allow a grandmaster level of play without devaluating that concept. I will not say "that's why or how I made them", because one cannot set out to to make such a game. But given the right mechanism and a thorough application of Occam's Razor, a game may turn out that way.
And these games did.
 
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