Modernizing Table-Top Role-Playing Games — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #96

in Games, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | June 21st, 2021

What’s the current status of table-top role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons in pop culture? Thanks to D&D’s recent depiction in Stranger Things and the enormous popularity of fantasy properties like Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, interest in elves and magic and such is no longer fodder for Satanic panic, but the idea of actively pretending to be a character in this genre to engage in collaborative story-telling still seems foreign to many.

Your Pretty Much Pop hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt are joined by Amanda McLoughlin, the host of Join the Party, a beginner-friendly, purposefully inclusive D&D real-play podcast, to go over some D&D basics, the dynamics of playing vs. spectating (by listening to her podcast, for instance), and the racism and imperialism built into the setting (adventure = going into a foreign land to kill often intelligent creatures and take their stuff). What is it to “act out your fantasy” in this way?

Some of the ways of witnessing others playing that we refer to include Critical Role, The Adventure Zone, and Dimension 20.

The Join the Party game master Eric Silver wrote the article “Dungeons & Dragons Has an Antisemitism Problem.” You can also look at Wikipedia’s “Dungeons and Dragons in Popular Culture” entry or get a flavor of the range of options by looking at Dicebreaker’s list of “10 Best Tabletop Roleplaying Games Out Right Now”, this list of “The 12 Best Actual Play Podcasts,” or this video of “Top D&D Channels that Aren’t Critical Role.”

Follow Amanda’s podcast @jointhepartypod on @MultitudeShows. She also hosts the Spirits Podcast about folklore and urban legends.

Hear more of this podcast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion that you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Learn to Play Senet, the 5,000-Year Old Ancient Egyptian Game Beloved by Queens & Pharaohs

in Games, History | May 25th, 2021

Senet gaming board inscribed for Amenhotep III with separate sliding drawer, via Wikimedia Commons

Games don’t just pass the time, they enact battles of wits, proxy wars, training exercises…. And historically, games are correlated with, if not inseparable from, forms of divination and occult knowledge. We might point to the ancient practice of “astragalomancy,” for example: reading one’s fate in random throws of knucklebones, which were the original dice. Games played with bones or dice date back thousands of years. One of the most popular of the ancient world, the Egyptian Senet, may not be the oldest known, but it could be “the original board game of death,” Colin Barras writes at Science, predating the Ouija board by millennia.

Beginning as “a mere pastime,” Senet evolved “over nearly 2 millennia… into a game with deep links to the afterlife, played on a board that represented the underworld.” There’s no evidence the Egyptians who played around 5000 years ago believed the game’s dice rolls meant anything in particular.

Over the course of a few hundred years, however, images of Senet began appearing in tombs, showing the dead playing against surviving friends and family. “Texts from the time suggest the game had begun to be seen as a conduit through which the dead could communicate with the living” through moves over a grid of 30 squares arranged in three rows of ten.

Facsimile copy of ca. 1279–1213 B.C. painting of Queen Nefertiti playing Senet, via the Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Beloved by such luminaries as the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun and Queen Nefertari, wife of Ramesses II,” Meilan Solly notes at Smithsonian, Senet was played on “ornate game boards, examples of which still survive today.” (Four boards were found in Tut’s tomb.) “Those with fewer resources at their disposal made do with grids scratched on stone surfaces, tables or the floor.” As the game became a tool for glimpsing one’s fate, its last five spaces acquired hieroglyphics symbolizing “special playing circumstances. Pieces that landed in square 27’s ‘waters of chaos,’ for example, were sent all the way back to square 15 — or removed from the board entirely,” sort of like hitting the wrong square in Chutes and Ladders.

Senet gameplay was complicated. “Two players determined their moves by throwing casting sticks or bones,” notes the Met. The object was to get all of one’s pieces across square 30 — each move represented an obstacle to the afterlife, trials Egyptians believed the dead had to endure and pass or fail (the game’s name itself means “passing”). “Because of this connection, senet was not just a game; it was also a symbol for the struggle to obtain immortality, or endless life,” as well as a means of understanding what might get in the way of that goal.

The game’s rules likely changed with its evolving purpose, and might have been played several different ways over the course 2500 years or so. As Brandeis University professor Jim Storer notes in an explanation of possible gameplay, “the exact rules are not known; scholars have studied old drawings to speculate on the rules” — hardly the most reliable guide. If you’re interested, however, in playing Senet yourself, resurrecting, so to speak, the ancient tradition for fun or otherwise, you can easily make your own board. Storer’s presentation of what are known as Jequier’s Rules can be found here. For another version of Senet play, see the video above from Egyptology Lessons.

A Brief History of Chess: An Animated Introduction to the 1,500-Year-Old Game

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Original Colors Still In It

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Magnus Carlsen’s Mind-Blowing Memory of Historic Chess Matches

in Games | May 3rd, 2021

How many historic chess games can Magnus Carlsen recognize just by looking at the placement of chess pieces on the board? It turns out a lot. And that’s partly what makes him the reigning World Chess Champion.

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via Kottke

A Free 700-Page Chess Manual Explains 1,000 Chess Tactics in Straightforward English

A Beautiful Short Documentary Takes You Inside New York City’s Last Great Chess Store

A Brief History of Chess: An Animated Introduction to the 1,500-Year-Old Game

Vladimir Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Sketches of Mind-Bending Chess Problems

The Magic of Chess: Kids Share Their Uninhibited, Philosophical Insights about the Benefits of Chess

Garry Kasparov Now Teaching an Online Course on Chess

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The Bauhaus Chess Set Where the Form of the Pieces Artfully Show Their Function (1922)

in Art, Games, History | February 3rd, 2021

Learning to play chess first necessitates learning how each piece moves. This is hardly the labor of Hercules, to be sure, though it does come down to pure memorization, unaided by any verbal or visual cues. Does the name “pawn,” after all, sound particularly like something that can only step forward? And what about the shape of the knight suggests the shape of the knight’s move? The form of a chess piece, in other words, doesn’t follow its function — and under certain sets of aesthetic principles, there could be few greater crimes. Leave it to a member of the Bauhaus, the art school and movement that aimed to unify not just form and function but art, craft, and design — to bring them all into line.

Brought into the Bauhaus in 1921 by its founder Walter Gropius, the sculptor Josef Hartwig began work on his redesigned chess set the following year. In all its iterations, the pieces takes on forms made of simple shapes: “The sphere, double cube, and three sizes of block, singly or combined, yield pieces that, despite their highly geometric stylization, are strongly suggestive of their rank or power,” says the Metropolitan Museum of Art, owner of one of one of Hartwig’s original sets.

“The bishops are clearly implied by the cross outline, and the rooks by the simple stability of a cube. Most ingenious of all are the knights, formed of three double cubes joined in such a fashion that each face of the resulting form shows two cubes one above the other and a third on the side, an embodiment of the knight’s move.”

Like many Bauhaus works, Hartwig’s chess set found a dual existence as both a piece of art and a consumer good. The artist himself also “made a poster to talk about his product” and “a box to package it,” says cuator Anne Monier in the video above, “so we really are in a total creation around a game of chess.” In addition to making the game’s movements easier to learn, it also constitutes a visual demonstration of what it means for form to follow function. The idea, says Monier, is “to spread the ideas of the Bauhaus in people’s everyday life, to be able in fact to change the living environment, to take part in creating a new society.” The video comes from Bauhaus Movement, an online shop where you can invite the spread into your home by ordering a replica Hartwig chess set. It’ll set you back €495, but ideals, now as in the heyday of the Bauhaus, don’t come cheap.

Man Ray Creates a “Surrealist Chessboard,” Featuring Portraits of Surrealist Icons: Dalí, Breton, Picasso, Magritte, Miró & Others (1934)

The Politics & Philosophy of the Bauhaus Design Movement: A Short Introduction

Marcel Duchamp, Chess Enthusiast, Created an Art Deco Chess Set That’s Now Available via 3D Printer

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Documentary That Celebrates the 100th Anniversary of Germany’s Legendary Art, Architecture & Design School

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

The Renewed Popularity of Chess and The Queen’s Gambit: Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast Discussion #78 with Chess Expert J.J. Lang

in Games, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | January 21st, 2021

The high level of interest in Netflix’s adaptation of the 1984 Walter Tevis novel, The Queen’s Gambit has brought this most popular game back to the forefront of pop culture. Chess expert/teacher J.J. (who’s also a grad student in philosophy) joins your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt to consider chess culture, what gives this game its edge on other contenders (why not Terra Mystica?), player personality characteristics, and the effect of chess media.

We consider gender, genius, and other issues in Gambit, plus Pawn Sacrifice, Searching for Bobby Fisher, The Luzhin Defense, and The Coldest Game.

A few articles and lists:

“Five Myths About Chess” by Jennifer Shahade
“Queen’s Gambit Beauty Debate Explained” by Constance Grady
“The Fatal Flaw of the Queen’s Gambit” by Sarah Miller
“16 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About ‘The Queen’s Gambit’” by Janaki Jitchotvisut
“10 Essential Movies About Chess” by Tim Grierson
“10 Movies to Watch About Chess if You Liked Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit” by Jake Dee
“‘Genius’: 10 Films That Explore the Brilliant Mind” by Kat Sommers

Watch J.J. on stream on Twitch. Other interviews he’s done: Perpetual Chess, Friends and Enemies, Aakaash

Hear more of this podcast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion about more chess films and other topics that you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The David Bowie Monopoly Game Is Here: Advance to GO and Collect 200 Hunky Dorys!

in Games, Music | December 28th, 2020

Another way to pass the time while we’re snuggled in, awaiting the arrival of a vaccine: David Bowie Monopoly.

Gone are the thimble, the top hat, the old boot and other iconic game pieces you may remember from your childhood or rainy days in seaside holiday rentals.

This special edition replaces them with 6 major Bowie signifiers: a star, a skull, a Pierrot hat, a rolled up tie, a space helmet, and a lightning bolt.

Monopoly has previously catered to music fans with sets devoted to AC/DC, Beatles, Metallica and the Rolling Stones, but Bowie’s chameleonic quality and highly developed aesthetic sense ensures that this one’s ephemera will appeal to all factions of the Bowieligious, not just those with the patience for a long board game.

Forget about Boardwalk and Marvin Gardens. Instead of real estate, the perimeters of the board feature albums from Bowie’s enormous catalog.

Secure albums to begin erecting stages and stadiums that other players will have to “rent” when they roll into town.

The Chance and Community Chest decks have also undergone some ch-ch-changes. Players now draw Sound and Vision cards which have the capacity to “open doors, pull some strings or bring the stars crashing down.”

Collectors will find that this set’s paper money pairs nicely with the souvenir Metrocards from Bowie’s posthumous 2018 takeover of a New York City subway station.

The four cornerstones of Monopoly—GO, Free Parking, JAIL, and Go to Jail—remain faithful to the original, leaving some fans opining that an opportunity was missed:

When you weary of David Bowie Monopoly, you can play a couple hands of Bowie, a free downloadable card game that can be printed at home:

Each player will play David Bowie, or more accurately, a persona of David Bowie. The object of the game is to achieve the greatest legacy of any Bowie and survive the 1970’s. Legacy is judged by points earned from cutting records (flat, black, round- oh, nevermind). There is one slight problem. The Bowies are endangered by various threats, dark princes, and figures of the occult (which is in no way related to the copious amount of cocaine being inhaled by our hero). If any Bowie dies, all Bowies are dead and the game is lost.

There’s also Bowie’s appearance in the 1999 video game, Omikron: The Nomad Soul:

David Bowie Monopoly is available for purchase here.

via Dangerous Minds

The David Bowie Book Club Gets Launched by His Son: Read One of Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books Every Month

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Learn How to Play Chess Online: Free Chess Lessons for Beginners, Intermediate Players & Beyond

in Games, How to Learn for Free | November 30th, 2020

The most desired Christmas gift of 2020? A chess set. It’s certainly desired, at any rate, by the rapt viewers of The Queen’s Gambit, the acclaimed Netflix miniseries that debuted in October. Created by screenwriter-producers Scott Frank and Allan Scott, its seven episodes tell the story of Beth Harmon, an orphan in 1950s Kentucky who turns out to be a chess prodigy, then goes on to become a world-class player. During the Cold War, the intellectual and geopolitical prospect of American and Soviet masters going head to head stoked public interest in chess; over the past month, the surprise success of The Queen’s Gambit has had a similar effect.

Whether or not you feel a sense of kinship with the series’ unrelentingly chess-obsessed young protagonist, you may well feel an urge to learn, or re-learn, to play the game. If so, all the resources you need are online, and today we’ve rounded them up for you.

To get started, Chess.com has produced “Everything You Need to Know About Chess,” a series of Youtube videos “designed to give every aspiring chess player the ‘one chess lesson of their life’ if they were only to get one.” Watch them, or explore these web-based tutorials. And even if you don’t have a chess set of your own, you can get started playing immediately thereafter: create an account at Chess.com and you can play against the computer or real players around the world matched to your skill level, all for free.

To shore up your knowledge of the game’s fundamentals, watch this five-video series by instructor John Bartholomew on topics like undefended pieces, coordination, and typical mistakes. The Chess Website’s Youtube channel covers even more, and its basics playlist teaches everything from opening principles to the nature of individual pieces, pawn, rook, knight, and beyond.

But nobody with a taste for chess can stop at the basics, and the supply of instruction has grown to meet the demand. The St. Louis Chess Club offers a series of lectures from national masters and grandmasters geared toward beginning, intermediate, and advanced players.

At Chess School, you’ll find videos on“the greatest chess games ever played, the immortal chess games, the best games from the latest tournaments, world champion’s games, instructive chess games, famous players games and much more.” Among serious players you’ll find many fans of Agadmator, whose extensive playlists examine current masters like Magnus Carlsen, past masters like Garry Kasparov, and examples of techniques like the English Opening and the Sicilian Defense, the later of which enjoyed quite a moment in the era of The Queen’s Gambit. The series has hardly gone unnoticed in the chess world: on channels like Chess Network, you’ll even find videos about the strategies employed by Beth Harmon, whose style has been programmed into chess-playing AI “bots.” They also have a “Beginner to Chess Master” playlist that will continually build your understanding of the game in a step by step manner.

The character’s personality, however, remains a creation of Walter Tevis, author of the eponymous novel The Queen’s Gambit. Tevis’ other works famously brought to the screen include The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth: works of literature concerned, respectively, with mastery of a deceptively complex game and the condition of the social outsider. These themes come together in The Queen’s Gambit, whose author also described it as “a tribute to brainy women.” Perhaps you plan to give such a person in your life a chess set this year. If so, you know which book to wrap up with it — apart, of course, from Ward Farnsworth’s 700-page Predator at The Chessboard: A Field Guide To Chess Tactics. Or Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. If you have other favorite resources, please feel free to add them to the list below…

A Beautiful Short Documentary Takes You Inside New York City’s Last Great Chess Store

A Brief History of Chess: An Animated Introduction to the 1,500-Year-Old Game

Vladimir Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Sketches of Mind-Bending Chess Problems

The Magic of Chess: Kids Share Their Uninhibited, Philosophical Insights about the Benefits of Chess

Garry Kasparov Now Teaching an Online Course on Chess

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

A Free 700-Page Chess Manual Explains 1,000 Chess Tactics in Straightforward English

in Games | November 27th, 2020

Image by Michael Maggs, via Wikimedia Commons

FYI: In 2011, Ward Farnsworth published a two-volume collection called Predator at The Chessboard: A Field Guide To Chess Tactics (Volume 1 — Volume 2) where he explains countless chess tactics in plain English. In this 700-page collection, “there are 20 chapters, about 200 topics within them, and over 1,000 [chess] positions discussed.” Now for the even better part: Farnsworth has also made these volumes available free online. Just visit chesstactics.org and scroll down the page. There you will find the content that’s otherwise available in Farnsworth’s books. With this free resource, you can start making yourself a better chess player whenever you have the urge, or especially as you watch The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Garry Kasparov Now Teaching an Online Course on Chess

A Human Chess Match Gets Played in Leningrad, 1924

Man Ray Designs a Supremely Elegant, Geometric Chess Set in 1920 (and It’s Now Re-Issued for the Rest of Us)

Play Chess Against the Ghost of Marcel Duchamp: A Free Online Chess Game

A Beautiful Short Documentary Takes You Inside New York City’s Last Great Chess Store

A Brief History of Chess: An Animated Introduction to the 1,500-Year-Old Game

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 14 ) |