porges / ways-to-play

“A Site About Games”

Ways to Play is a site about games, viewable at games.porg.es.

Tips

Backing up everything on Internet Archive from the bibliography:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Porges/ways-to-play/main/bibliography.yaml -O - | grep -Poh '(?<=https://archive.org/details/)[^/]+' | sort -u > itemlist.txt

Then (from here):

wget -r -H -nc -np -nH --cut-dirs=1 -A .pdf -e robots=off -l1 -i ./itemlist.txt -B 'http://archive.org/download/'

ways-to-play's Issues

Morabaraba

• Include some strategy
• More cultural information (proverbs?)
• Identify the "alternate board"

Morris Games

Shisima

• Try to find African Games of Strategy: A teaching manual by Louise Crane (1982)

Lists of Games

in old books; springboards for investigation

Card terms

Sourcing terminology & nomenclature.

Tic-Tac-Toe

• A more satisfying origin story? I'm sure I once saw something in Notes & Queries
• Rules
• Strategy (Gardner had some nice points)

Variations

• Misère
• Multi-board (some Numberphile videos about this)

Image sources

Sources for free images:

• British Museum online collection – CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
• Images d'Art – free for non-commercial use
• National Museum of Australia – CC BY-SA 4.0
• Te Papa/Museum of New Zealand – CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 or no copyright restrictions
• Met Museum – many public domain
• MFA Boston – many public domain
• Portland Museum – public domain
• USC Digital Library – many public domain or otherwise liberal, depending on source

Free stock images:

• Unsplash
• Pexels
• Pixabay

No longer free:

• Strong Museum of Play used to have all their 70k+ images available under a CC license but the images are now hosted by Google Arts & Culture and have no license information (nor can they be downloaded)

Knuckle bones

• On the indoor games of school boys in the middle ages has an addendum about "Pot Checks" and names "huckle bones" as well.

Hanafuda fixes

Traditional:

• TS commander in chief depicts Wellington (ウエリントン)

Hanafuda cards 🎴

To investigate:

• Actual lettering for poems on cards (using hentaigana, or whatever) instead of the 'tidy' versions
• Images of poem cards from Kintokibana (these are very hard to scan due to curvature!)
• Anything about peonies?