The games blog I always wanted to write

Tonight I went to a R&D/workshop performance of Terraforming Mars by the Ludens Theatre Company. Noting that they refer to it as a show, but also noting the first word in the company names, I treated it as a game, and a very fine one; it's very firmly in the conversation for the most-enjoyed game I've played all year, and probably actually the leader in the clubhouse, even despite some firm competition. (The Initiative campaign board game, Bridge Command and Phil Hannay's latest Manorcon puzzle hunt spring to mind.)

Thinking a little harder, I'm not sure to what extent I was attracted to this show in particular, and to what extent I was attracted to a format that I had long (literally decades) known about but hadn't actually experienced before. I would regard it as having been a small example of a megagame, perhaps a "chamber megagame" or perhaps fitting in to the rather intuitive definition of a kilogame. As is the case with most megagames, the game was played in teams; as is the case with many megagames, there were board game or war game elements in something that was essentially a very light LARP - with the lightness referring to the way that players joined sub-teams performing specific jobs within a scenario rather than devising and playing their own characters. It was played co-operatively within teams, but whether the teams would co-operate with each other or not was left up to us.

It was simultaneously played by two teams, each of perhaps fifteen or twenty, each in their own room. There were six (?) actors/referees/facilitators/NPCs, of which we normally had two in our room and the others floating through or communicating with us from another room. The show lasted two and a half hours, incorporating a break of about fifteen minutes halfway through. I hope that the Ludens theatre company finds further opportunities to stage the show; I would recommend following the company for further developments and if the principle appeals then I would wholeheartedly recommend giving the show a try if you get the chance. If you're someone who believes in trying to go in unspoiled, let's leave it at that.

( But if you're interested in learning a little more... )

From Thursday 30th May up until early Monday 3rd June, I did something quite out of character for me: for the first time, I attended Electromagnetic Field (hereafter EMF) held at Eastnor Deer Park, about half-way between Hereford and Cheltenham in the West-South-West Sort Of Midlands. It was probably the single most crazy-in-a-good-way thing I've done for a few years. I'd been aware of EMF for a few years and had watched more than a few of the videos of talks from previous events. When it turned out that a friend of Emerson's had been to the 2022 edition, that pushed me over to deciding to actually go this year. I'm pretty damn sure it was an excellent decision to do so. A blow-by-blow would be not just self-indulgent but probably actually unhelpful, so I'll try to condense into bullet point lists where it could be useful and use prose as required for the more discursive parts.

"Electromagnetic Field is a non-profit camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers. A temporary town of nearly three thousand like-minded people enjoying a long weekend of talks, performances, and workshops on everything from blacksmithing to biometrics, chiptunes to computer security, high altitude ballooning to lockpicking, origami to democracy, and online privacy to knitting. ((...)) Imagine a camping festival with a power grid and high-speed internet access; a temporary village of geeks, crafters, and technology enthusiasts that's lit up by night, and buzzing with activity during the day."

Two of my favourite adjectives are nice-mad and geekycool. You won't find them in dictionaries, but I expect their meanings are pretty intuitive, and it should be clear that I use them both as high praise. EMF, and its attendees, scored extremely highly on both fronts. ( A few thousand words about a remarkable long weekend. )

Emerson Milford Dickson's UK memorial service did indeed take place as planned on the afternoon of Saturday 18th March 2023 at Forest School. It was, more or less, everything I wanted it to be; there’s very little within my control that I would change about how it went. I know more people wanted to attend than actually could, due in part to a train strike; other factors like road works didn’t help and the weather before the event wasn’t favourable, though it all dried up by mid-afternoon.

Happily, we were able to stream the event live. If you want to see what happened, I would recommend not watching the live stream but instead watching the high-quality recording instead. That said, it may be more efficient just to read the text of the tribute instead.

( The transcript of the intended tribute )

In practice, there were a few infelicities in the reading, but nothing too serious. We couldn’t actually get the Bruce Springsteen excerpt to play, in practice, because the school’s Windows network picked a very inconvenient time to force an upgrade on the machine we had linked up to the audio system.

That said, there was one unexpected event that more than made up for it. Forest School has had a cat wander around its grounds more frequently in recent years; one day, it visited the library, and this was a red letter day about which Emerson tweeted in delight. The very same cat came and visited the room where we were giving the tribute, while were giving it. (There is a photo of the cat curled up next to two 24-packs of Coke that I had brought in, and few things – if any – could have been a more suitable or appropriate blessing.)

Many thanks to all those who came in person, or attended virtually via the livestream, or just sent warm thoughts. Many thanks also to everyone at Forest School who kindly let us use their wonderful facilities and provided a lovely finger buffet, with drinks, after the event.

I regret not having taken more photos of Emerson in his later years, and especially not having recorded more video or audio of him, but this was largely by his choice. That said, I was very grateful to everyone who stayed behind a little after the ceremony for a group photo; behind the group you can see the Forest School cloister and its dining hall. ( In the photo were... ). There were other attendees who couldn’t stay around for the photo as well.

After the service, there was not only a photo and a buffet, but also a chance to visit the Forest School library and see how it reflected the work done by Emerson and his team. There was also a delightful tribute in the form of a set of puzzles for teams to solve, created by Caroline and Dan. These puzzles are available online for you to try, as are the answers. (The metapuzzle answer is not a dictionary word, but should be very clear from context, especially in light of a recurring theme of the tribute.)

Ever since then, I’ve been doing OK enough, though the grieving is a near-constant process. Days with work are easier for me because they have a clear structure; non-work days are very easily spent rooted to a seat or in bed. There are still plenty of things to do and take care of just by way of estate administration. In the longer term, I have no idea what I’m going to do, but that’s OK; I don’t need to answer that question right away, and I have the rest of my life to find an answer.

My father has passed away.

No contact for now, please; I choose to assume your best wishes and condolences.

(Edited: the date in the original title was 29th April 2021, despite the message being posted on 28th April 2021, so it looked like a prediction from a day in the future! Clearly I didn't know what day it was under the circumstances, and I had written it down incorrectly elsewhere.)

Insomnia last night inspired this game idea; maybe there's something to it, maybe there isn't. I might give it a try next time I'm at a games event.

"The Floor is Lava" mini golf, version 0.01
Remixing and improvement encouraged. Released under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Players: (at a guess) 6-10 at a time, freely subbing in and out between rounds
Duration: three minutes per round, plus 5-10 minutes for setup
Equipment needed: a dedicated area (maybe 20 yards by 10 yards) that's probably outdoors, one golf putter per player, one easily distinguishable golf ball per player, one numbered target per player, three or four pieces of detritus (pizza boxes, buckets, paint cans, car tyres, plant pots, album covers, sheets of newspaper, carpet underlay offcuts... really, anything that can be stood upon and is perhaps 1.5-5 times as large as an adult foot) per player, one timer.

It's not a very prescriptive game in terms of equipment. The putters are presumably picked up second-hand from charity shops for peanuts. In a perfect world the targets might be, say, gateball hoops which come with their own numbers, but croquet hoops or pegs would be almost as good, or tent pegs, or wooden spoons, or whatever you can imagine and distinguish. Similarly, if you end up using other sorts of bats and balls then that's fine as well.

Dot the detritus and targets around the playing area. Ensure that the sequence of targets does not make a simple circle but a path that crosses the area from one side to the next and criss-crosses itself several times. There should be at least one piece of detritus in the way of the straight route from one target to the next. The items of detritus should be sufficiently far apart that the player with the shortest step cannot quite step from one to the next, but not much further than that - just far enough apart that every player has to jump a bit. Once the detritus is down, the extent of the playing area is defined as "anywhere that can be reached while standing on any of the detritus".

Starting position: each player is given their own putter and ball, picks their own numbered target (one player per target), then places the ball at that target and stands on the nearest piece of detritus to that target. When the stopwatch is started, players then attempt to putt their golf balls from one numbered target so that it hits the next one in sequence, then the one after that, and so on, before the time expires. If you reach the highest-numbered target, then your next target is the lowest-numbered one.

Special difficulty: the playing area is lava and players must be standing on detritus at all times; Players who step onto the playing area are disqualified. Additionally, players must move to a different piece of detritus after each shot, so it's more important that you putt your ball to somewhere that you can reach from another piece of detritus than that you actually hit the targets. Also, all players putt and move simultaneously at their own speed.

Victory condition: the game ends after three minutes. The player, or players, who have hit most targets in sequence during that time win that round. Play as many rounds as there is interest, substituting players in and out and/or redistributing the targets and detritus between rounds.

There are some deliberately vague issues left to vary from game to game, or from round to round, as the players see fit. Deliberately putting other players' balls with your putter is cheating, though groups may consider players' balls hitting each other to be part of the fun. (I suppose players can step outside the playing area if they need to - for instance, if their ball gets knocked out of it. Alternatively, you might prefer to disallow that but instead to put some sort of physical boundary rope in place.) I decline to rule whether or not the detritus may be moved while the game is in progress; whatever's more fun goes. This is not intended to be a roughhousing game where you attempt to dislodge your competitors off the detritus into the lava, but if everyone gives enthusiastic informed consent to the thought of it then you go for it.

Between 2005 and 2010, I made a habit of making one post each year about chess. Now seems like a reasonable time to restart the habit.

The world's number one player is Magnus Carlsen from Norway. (There is no decisive number two.) Magnus is now 25, so thinking of him as a child prodigy is a little out-of-date. Carlsen won the World Championship in 2013, defeating six-year titleholder Vishy Anand of India; Anand won the Candidates Tournament in 2014 to earn a rematch and Carlsen beat him a second time. Carlsen is currently defending his world championship title against Sergey Karjakin, another former prodigy of comparative vintage; their stars shone brightly during their mid- and late teenage years, representing the current generation of talent. The first two games of the twelve in the match were both drawn; the third game is in progress, taking place through the afternoon and early evening in New York, and Magnus is trying to press a very slight advantage into a possible win. (Edited the next day: due to slight inaccuracies in the sixth hour of play, it was a draw as well. Games four to six, completed while I wrote this slowly, also proved drawn.)

British chess has not notably kicked on in the past few years. Michael Adams had a fantastic result at a very strong tournament in Dortmund in 2013 but is gently falling from being a firm top-ten player to being a fringe top-twenty player; Nigel Short is the oldest player in the top 100 at age 51. David Howell briefly represented the generation after (well, half a generation after, being 16 years younger than Adams) in the top forty, but has since faded; there are no British players in the top 100 juniors list. The British Isles' 4NCL has got larger but it's been a while since there's been a team to seriously challenge Guildford for the title.

The London Chess Challenge has been one of the very strongest tournaments in the world in the last couple of years, being part of a small Grand Chess Tour circuit along with a counterpart similarly strong event in St. Louis. Chess in St. Louis is hugely strong thanks to benefactor Rex Sinquefield, who was even able to drag Garry Kasparov briefly out of retirement for a blitz chess tournament in April; Kasparov remained competitive against opponents roughly half his age.

I've long been fascinated by the online United States Chess League from the perspective of sport organisation, both considering chess as an e-sport and considering a mind sport as a spectator sport, or at least a sport that might develop a following. Over the course of eleven seasons, from 2005 to 2015, it grew from eight teams to twenty. It has long been an initiative very much in the image of its commissioner, IM Greg Shahade, though not without very considerable assistance from Arun Sharma and others. Greg has a blog worth reading; a recurring theme is calling out sexism where he sees it, which helps me feel he's on the side of the angels. (Anyone who volunteers to run something starts with a ton of credit in my book, but calling out sexism is more important.) Another recurring theme is the promotion of rapid chess, even at the expense of classic-time-control chess, and this has inspired his latest major change in his online chess league.

The United States Chess League is no more. Instead, starting in January 2017, welcome the Professional Rapid Online Chess League in its place. In practice, it's referred to as the PRO Chess League; this is not quite a GNU's Not Unix recursive acronym, but a little artistic licence for the sake of a really good acronym can only be a good thing.

( Read more... )Mind sports e-leagues are a fascination of mine; I have followed the USCL through its existence, I have written about the Learned League quiz phenomenon, I keep an eye on the Pandanet European Go Championship and I wrote about taking part in the Croco-League, for logic puzzles, from 2012 to 2014. The PRO Chess League is one of the most interesting and ambitious yet.

I'd need some pretty serious convincing that this whole operation might work in practice if it had been organised by someone who had no track record, but Greg's track record is a very strong one. It's worth noting that as well as starting exciting schemes up, Greg also has a habit of closing them down when he feels they are no longer working (see the USCL, but also see his Scramble With Friends league, which has a few similarities in league design philosophy, and also see his New York Masters live tournaments) so I would be inclined to believe that the PRO Chess League might not be around forever, and not just in a trivial "nothing lasts forever" sense. It's definitely going to be fun to follow while it's around, though!

I'd say that I was getting myself onto night shift mode, but I just have a headache and cannot sleep. Normally I would post this elsewhere except that colleagues might worry about my ability to work the night shift tonight, which should be fine.

I'm at Dad's house and, in this insomnia, have been looking through drawers for a letter that I received, literally half a lifetime ago, from someone who has been in the news recently. I didn't find it but there are other places to look yet.

However, I did find some exercise books from the late '80s and early '90s with pencil-on-paper designs for games and game systems: some RPG character attribute systems, a few adventures, but mostly pencil-and-paper designs that I might have got round to programming in Sinclair BASIC - or, later, AmigaBASIC - some day. It's unclear that any of them would stand up on their own merits, but fun personal nostalgia all the same.

A frequent theme is comparing games to each other in slightly unnecessarily complicated ways. One notebook has one particular comparison scheme for ZX Spectrum games, iterated several times in 1988, a couple of times in 1989, an "end of the decade special" and a retrospective edition from, gasp, 1997. Would it be fun to go back and create one more edition, comparing memories of games I haven't played for twenty years? Would it be worthwhile to run them through emulators to refresh my memory? Perhaps if I still can't get to sleep in another hour or two. Nevertheless, it's cute to know how I thought of them at the time, even if giving reasons to the scores was beyond me.

It's also a reminder - hopefully salutary, though I doubt it - that my taste in games has changed little if at all over the last two-thirds of my life. Ever since I became fully aware of the depth of the football pyramid system, I have loved the idea of a game where you manage a football club that starts in a hypothetical league made up of teams representing parts of Middlesbrough, then in successive leagues covering larger and larger areas of population still, onto the national stage and beyond.

What have I been doing on and off for the last couple of days when concentration has permitted? Why, trying to work out which teams would be in which leagues so that I might produce a customised data pack for the (pro version of the) Football Chairman management game for iOS and actually play out a much better version of the game that I idly dreamt of back then. Given that my pencil-and-paper notes from the previous version of the exercise had Liverpool as top team in the land, they probably date from late 1988, give or take, at a guess.

If you'd told me then that I would still have been actively interested in the concept when three times my age, I think tiny!Chris would have been amused. He would also have been impressed that my taste in computer games still hasn't grown beyond games that cost £2.99.

I have recently taken on a new Project. Having ranted in late December that there needs to be a UK puzzle hobby web site, I have started one, about four weeks ago. Nominally it's about exit games (also known as escape games or locked room games; there isn't really a great generic term for "things like HintHunt and ClueQuest", but there are currently seven others in the UK and one in Ireland) but the thinking is that they're very popular and can be used as a hook to get people interested in all sorts of other puzzle-related topics. It's an "as and when" blog, but I've written a couple of dozen entries over the course of a month or so. In theory I'm trying to be happy with entries as short as 200 words or so, plus an appropriate picture, but in practice they're working out longer than that.

The site hasn't really caught fire yet, but not many things ever do in the first month, which is really all about getting a baseline down and gaining credibility, which I can use to make contacts and then things will get easier. I reckon I'm not actually far off the point where just writing about news will make for an adequate blog, though there are some rather more background-y and 101-ish articles to start with.

Nevertheless, if you want to read about my UK and Irish puzzle-related writing, the best way is to follow the RSS feed (which happens to be syndicated to LiveJournal as exit_games_uk) or to follow the site Twitter which, so far, has been used in a similar way in practice. (If you want to do me a favour, please like the Facebook page, whether you're ever going to follow the site or not - a few dozen more "Like"s would help. Thank you!)

I'm still going to keep writing here from time to time, especially longer and more personal pieces, but this will always have the "personal blog" sort of arguably negative slant to it that an independent Wordpress site will hopefully not. Nevertheless, I am going to demonstrate some sort of discipline by concluding this post here and starting a different one for a different, but related, topic.

1) A couple of weeks ago, meggitymeg and I went down to London and stayed overnight, with the focus of the trip being to attend the fourth month of Puzzled Pint in London. Meg had been to the first three, and indeed is the only person to have solved at all of them; this was my first time down. The event was a glorious success, exceeding my expectations by far. It was a treat to catch up with delightful puzzle people, some of whom I haven't seen since DASH 5 last May, plus first known face-to-face meetings with i_am_magoo and pseudomonas, though I have long enjoyed both their blogs.

It occurs to me that I have written far more about Puzzled Pint on Facebook than in long-form blogging. ( Imagine taking part in a pub quiz with your friends... )

Meg and I turned up a good half-hour early and were far from the first to arrive, with others we knew arriving in fairly rapid succession; Meg brought malachan along last month and he has become a convert, we brought another friend (M.) along for the first time and it was good to see Nick who had come some way up from the south coast as well. (Not nearly as far a journey for him as visiting us for our MIT Mystery Hunt cell, but still a trek!) Meg had also previously solved with some of the people on the next table along, and so on and so on. Very seldom do I get to see so many lovely people in the same room at the same time, short of games cons. This is effectively a monthly evening-long puzzle con.

Delightfully, this month had a rather bigger attendance than the previous three months. (I believe the figures are something like 24 in 5 teams - 14 in 3 teams - 23 in 5 teams followed by, this month, 49 in 12 teams.) This big jump did cause a problem for the London organisers who weren't expecting the number of teams to more than double, but good news all round - not least for the bar hosting us! - and everybody ended up with puzzles to solve in the end, a couple of teams after some degree of pause.

The puzzles were fun, though I think it's probably fairer to Puzzled Pint to consider the accumulated mass of puzzles over the months as a whole than to pick on individual months' puzzles. It's probably important to say that this month's was probably more of a speedwork challenge than most for people who recognised some of the themes. (See also the talk by Ian Tullis at the most recent Game Control Summit, passim.) Nevertheless the theming was particularly cute and the meta especially well-suited. Many thanks to everyone who constructed, edited and tested the puzzles, and particularly to Dan and Lisa for being lovely and running the event.

I am happy to recommend Puzzled Pint, particularly in London. It's always fun to introduce existing friends who do not consider themselves particularly puzzle-oriented (after all, Meg has really caught the bug...) and I would be happy to team up, at least once, with anyone reading this, particularly if you think you won't know anybody else there. (That is, assuming I'll be there. Meg and I should be there in March for a casino-themed event, at least.) Let me know and I shall mark my dance card accordingly.

As an aside, in other Puzzled Pint news, this weekend, Meg and I went to xorsyst's in-laws' holiday flat in Llandudno for the most glam housecon ever. The venue was stunning and better-appointed than even the rare-splash-out hotels we've used. (We're pretty low rollers, though.) The company was great, too; several people I hadn't seen for far too long, and delightful to get to properly spend time with alobear and Dave. Meg reran the January Puzzled Pint for our two teams of three, which was great fun once again, and a bigger chunk of that fun. It was also a rare and wonderful opportunity to be introduced to new board and card games of recent years; there were no immediate stand-outs, just several 7/10 games in 9½+/10 company.

2) The day after Puzzled Pint in London, Dan, Meg and I went to Hint Hunt in a rather... insalubrious part of London, a couple of minutes along the road from Euston station. We played their original "John Monroe's Office" room and escaped with a little over three minutes of our allotted hour remaining. It was tremendous fun and rather thought-provoking.

Locked room escape games have existed for a couple of years now and are reasonably familiar, so I cheerfully admit to being quite behind the times in only getting to play now. I have blogged about them in passing before, updating that post from time to time when I have more news. In London, ClueQuest's second room opened at the weekend; further ahead, Escape Hunt's ambitious-looking expansion plan calls for them to open in June.

The staff at HH were both professional and lovely, erring - if at all - on the lovely side. The young lady who briefed us on our introduction, and also hinted us through our game, was pretty much a consummate example of what you'd hope for from room escape customer service. Her accent was clearly Central European, though her English perfect; I asked her if she was Hungarian, ( which turned out to be an excellent icebreaker question, particularly if you have a geeky interest in the history of the genre. )

Players are requested not to spoil the experience for others, so it's hard to know how much to say. However, the verbs describing the actions you will do most frequently during your hour are search, read, unlock and (to a limited extent) decode. There are a great many unusual and fun toys to play with during your hour, a strong sense of progression between the layers of the puzzle and plenty of pleasant surprises. You are kept very busy for the entire hour and it's very easy to feel you have attained a sense of flow, and I write that purely so that I can name-check Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Some of the leaps of logic feel a little arbitrary, particularly at the very end, but in practice that doesn't matter much. Was it enjoyable? Yes, hugely so.

I'm now going to wildly extrapolate based on having played one (1) locked room exit game and looked at the web sites of at least half a dozen others, and say that ( I suspect there is a wide variety of approaches taken, across the world, to the issue of difficulty, and take a wild guess in great detail. )

Anyway, very nicely done and firmly recommended to those who think they might enjoy it, yet with a sense that playing only one room at one centre merely scratches the surface of what the genre has to offer. I will continue to look out for developments, not least because new ventures tend to be good matches for crowd-purchasing sites and you can occasionally pick up a Groupon Wowcher or somesuch to play a new centre at an attractive rate. Come on, new centres: be closer to here!

3) OK, let's rush around the other things more quickly. You've hopefully seen my post about DASH registration being open, so I won't go into detail again. Still: very cool, strongest recommendation.

3a) While looking for more English-language information about the incredible Czech-language puzzle hunt tradition TMOU, I discovered puzzlehunt.eu, an English-language puzzle hunt in, of all the places, Saarbrucken, Germany. (It's just over the border from France, a few dozen miles around from Luxembourg. If you hit Switzerland then you've gone too far.) Investigation by others suggests that it's something of a pan-European educational mecca, hence the hunt being in English.

The really remarkable thing is the independent reinvention of so many coding, encryption and other administrative properties that are very similar to the ones that evolved in the US-based puzzle hunt tradition, without me being aware of established contact between the two, and that's practically anthropology for your anthology. Disappointingly, the same investigation has suggested that the games in 2010, 2011 and 2012 were not followed up by one in 2013 and might not be followed up again in the future; "three up and three down", and I'm very sad not to have heard about these at the time. Still, at least players there would only have hundreds, rather than thousands, of miles to travel in order to play in DASH. :-/

3b) Another online hunt coming up is Puzzle Boat 2, sequel to you-guessed-it The Puzzle Boat, both by the hyper-prolific Greg ("Foggy") Brume, who also displays his exceptional creative fecundity in his P&A Magazine. Both the first and second liners are available online for solvers to have at in their own time, but the second voyage also offers a prize for the first team to solve it after the opening date of March 23rd. The first Boat is free, the second carries a $60 charge - which might seem a little sticker-shock-y at first, but the 100+ puzzles (and metas) are expected to take a sizeable team many hours, so that's an eminently reasonable price and I suspect it may well be a spectacular labour of love.

3c) If you prefer your puzzles logical, the World Puzzle Federation are staging a circuit of 90-minute logic puzzle contests, each available over the course of a long weekend every fourth week. The first contest was set by German constructors; I enjoyed it, but it was deliberately World Championship calibre. There were 12 puzzles to solve in the 90 minutes, the median performance was around four correct answers, and I came far from the bottom of just the 375 names that made it onto the scoreboard (mind you, about three times further from the top...) by getting a second puzzle correct.

The second contest is the Slovakian Grand Prix, taking place this weekend. There are sixteen puzzles rather than a dozen so fingers crossed that there are more at the relatively accessible end of things than there were in the German round. You have until the end of Monday (by central European time, GMT+1) to solve it, so don't hang around too long, particularly if you're stumbling for a humbling.

Meg's sister Sarah has been staying with us for the winter, since just before Thanksgiving. As usual, she has brought joy and laughter to our house. She has an exciting deadline to meet in the US, so unfortunately her time in the UK has had to come to an end. Accordingly, the last couple of weeks have been sad. The most faintly silver of linings of the recent Polar Vortex and its impact on Atlanta has been that her original flight home was cancelled and thus we got three extra days of sister time for free, but even that has come to an end. Today has been as sad as we feared - and, with taking her to Manchester to check in early for a morning flight, a tiring day as well. There is space in our house, but this does not make up for the space in our hearts. Long distance things don't get easier.

I have, as often is the case, retreated to find comfort in mathematics. The football pools were one of the foremost forms of gambling in the UK until the National Lottery launched, nearly twenty years ago. Simplifying, participants attempted to predict which (association) football games from a list would end as a draw - ideally, a score draw (1-1, 2-2, etc.) rather than a 0-0 draw. If a participant picked eight such games from a list of fifty-some - and some weeks there might only be four to find, whereas other weeks might have four times as many - then they would share a prize made up of a reasonably high proportion of the total entry fees. A scoring system shared some of the entry fees as consolation prizes ("second dividend", "third dividend" and so on) among players whose selections were near misses.

The relative difficulty of determining which matches would be drawn in this way made picking such a winning line a very difficult challenge, and a great degree of public interest was placed in trying to make accurate selections. There was a considerable degree of luck in the enterprise and its prominent place within public life was more a historical accident than anything else. Accordingly, it would be usual for participants to select more than eight matches and submit every possible combination of eight matches from the larger number selected. This was, technically imprecisely, referred to as a full permutation. However, the more possible matches were covered in this fashion, the more attempts at the competition were required and the greater the cost. In fact, the number of attempts required increased very rapidly as more matches were named.

The mathematically interesting part was ( a little bit complicated. )

Another discovery on a related search that I considered interesting was this index comparing different UK bookmakers' football gambling offerings in the year 1960. If Ray Winstone had wanted to "have a bang on that" at the age of three, what options might have been available to him? Again, they're quite intricate and interesting from a gaming perspective. Even then it was possible, though highly unlikely, to win many thousands of pounds for a stake of just pennies - and pre-decimalisation pennies, at that. There's also a degree of commonality in appearance between these bookmakers' coupons and the standard format of the football pools coupon that survived over the decades.

The conclusions I draw are ( again pretty technical and I'm going to assume a degree of familiarity with the terminology. )

None of which will help you make money betting on football, of course, and will only confirm how strongly the oddsmakers of the world tilt things in their favour. Still interested me, though.