Customer Reviews

New Rules for Classic Games

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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
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Wayne Schmittberger is a longtime associate of Games Magazine. It's a lot of fun to tinker with games to see how they change. The growth in Chess Variants is just one aspect of this. He explains those well, along with variants on Go, Risk, Monopoly, and many other games. He introduces many games you probably haven't seen before. All of them are great games, too! If you are considering designing a game of your own, or if you just have a collection of games, you need this book.

A great book. If you've struggled with classic games that are too slow, unbalanced, and otherwise flawed and less fun than you've like, this book is for you. A few hours of reading the lucid explanations of play variants and reviewing the clear diagrams of examples of play and you'll find those old games improved significantly.

The discussion of effective handicap design alone is worth the cover price. The text is also useful to get ideas on what new games in which you should consider investing. I'm mostly a German-style board game player but this book has me taking another look at classic board games. I highly recommend this out of print classic.

In this book we see games we have played many times, and have (maybe) become bored with, revitalized with clever ideas, enhancements and suggestions from the author. As an example, consider the section on balancing non-symmetric games (such as Chess and Go which have an inbuilt first person advantage). Bidding, simultaneous playing of two games and the ingeneous "I'll make a move and then you decide whether to play black or white" idea where one player makes a move that the other player has to decide is bad or good are suggestions that are useful not just in the context given, but in the design and evaluation of all games. Recommended for anyone who enjoys, studies, reviews or designs games -- especially strategy games.

I skimmed through this and there were interesting options to jazz up games. I didn't find anything amazing, but perhaps it will come in handy one rainy day.

Aside from a monoply variation I didn't get much out of this. Most of the games I had never even heard of and I play a lot of games.

This book is excellent. This book will open a gamer up to new possibilities and ideas. Lots of variants on common games like chess.