Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe....

I know, I know.  I don't post for weeks and then you read this title.  Hear me out - work is crazy, dog is quite sick, and basically the only time I've had off was last weekend.  Speaking of which, we went to Origins for another fun weekend and I'll post some convention pics by the weekend.

But seriously, check out this link.  I scoffed at first but then I read ALL the rules.  It is actually a pretty clever and rather tricky variant.  Which is probably why it showed up on a math blog.  And yes, it's probably eventually solvable but then isn't every abstract?

(Thanks for the tip, Gilad...)

Sum Wars on Kickstarter...

My family has been subjected to many games over the years and there are a few that can get a bit rowdy, particularly with my mother.  She's a sharp player and picks up rules very quickly, but throw a frantic game at her where everyone plays at once and she comes out swinging.  HA!  My sister and I can recall many rounds of Dutch Blitz which got way out of hand.  Another game which was a frantic, violent favourite of ours is called Pick Two.  It was basically Scrabble on speed.  Players draw two tiles at at time to add to their crosswords and once one person uses them all everyone immediately has to draw two more, whether they want to or not.  It's a riot. 

Well, a new game Sum Wars is currently campaigning on Kickstarter and it's kind of like the mathematical heir to Pick Two.  And since I loved Pick Two and I studied math in university for far, far too long, I am particularly interested in this game.  In Sum Wars, the crosswords are now built with simple equations and you always have access to the addition, subtraction, and equal tiles.  There are also bomb tiles which allow you to remove other players tiles and will add more to the interaction and nastiness.



I'm an avid supporter of math education and if Sum Wars does for numbers what Pick Two did for spelling, then I imagine it would be an excellent addition to any math classroom or even just your own board game collection.  Check out the video above or the Kickstarter page here for more info.

A particularly mathy way to determine first player....

At games night at UW, the mathematician friends of mine have a particularly quick and clever way to determine who starts each game which they call "Shoots" (don't ask me why...) Anyone who has done any studies with modular arithmetic or group theory should be quite comfortable with it.

Okay, so here's how it goes: one player calls "Shoots!" and on three, everyone reveals a random number of fingers, rock-papers-scissors style. Now add up all the fingers and count that many around the circle of players clockwise starting with the player who called for "Shoots". Ta-da. Whoever you finish with is the start player.

Of course, in math terms, if x is the total number of fingers and the players are numbered clockwise as 1,...,n where 1 is the caller of "Shoots" then the start player is simply x modulo n. See, easy!

Or I suppose you could just grab Ted Alspach's cute Start Player deck of cards. But I think math is WWWAAAAYYYYY more fun.....