It's endless fun! Opening this beautiful 2-color, lie-flat hardcover spiral book is like unlocking a treasure chest filled with puzzles and creative activities. Begin by taking the seven high-quality wooden tans (NOT cheap and sharp plastic) out of the resealable case bound sturdily inside. Now, you're ready to play--and to solve up to 500 mysterious tangram puzzles, using the seven simple shapes that can be put together again and again in countless figures and forms. Sometimes they're easily solved; other times, the puzzles are baffling. Decide just how hard you want a game to be! Set the clock and challenge your friends to a race, or do these brain stumpers on your own by arranging the pieces so they all touch, lie flat, or don't overlap. Make two separate shapes from a single set. If you happen to feel artistic, tell a story with the tangrams or create beautiful silhouettes for pure pleasure. One thing is for sure: you'll always find this ancient test-of-wits enjoyable, fascinating, and perplexing.
Chris Crawford earned a Master of Science degree in Physics from the University of Missouri in 1975. After teaching physics for several years, he joined Atari as a game designer in 1979. There he created a number of games: Energy Czar, an educational simulation about the energy crisis, Scram, a nuclear power plant simulation, Eastern Front (1941), a wargame, Gossip, a social interaction game, and Excalibur, an Arthurian game.
Following the collapse of Atari in 1984, Crawford took up the Macintosh. He created Balance of Power, a game about diplomacy, Patton Versus Rommel, a wargame, Trust & Betrayal, a social interaction game, Balance of the Planet, an environmental simulation game, and Patton Strikes Back, a wargame. In 1992, Crawford decided to leave game design and concentrate his energies on interactive storytelling, a field that he believed would become important. He created a major technology for interactive storytelling systems, patenting it in 1997. He is now commercializing his technology at his company website at storytron.com.
Crawford has written five published books: The Art of Computer Game Design, now recognized as a classic in the field, in 1982; Balance of Power (the book) in 1986; The Art of Interactive Design in 2002; Chris Crawford on Game Design in 2003; and Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling in 2004.
He created the first periodical on game design, the Journal of Computer Game Design, in 1987. He founded and served as Chairman of the Computer Game Developers' Conference, now known as the Game Developers' Conference.
Crawford has given hundreds of lectures at conferences and universities around the world, and published dozens of magazine articles and academic papers.
Crawford served as computer system designer and observer for the 1999 and 2002 NASA Leonid MAC airborne missions; he also has done some analysis of the resulting data. He lives in southern Oregon with his wife, 3 dogs, 7 cats, 2 ducks, and 3 burros.
His current work is in interactive storytelling. After seventeen years of work, Crawford's company, Storytron, is releasing its technology to the public at www.storytron.com.
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