Appropriate for International Day of Play, the goal of each game is to travel across countries and oceans. In The Game of Travel, players draw tickets with a list of locations. On a player’s turn, they proceed to the next location on their ticket. Once they’ve visited each location on the card, they draw a new ticket that takes them on the next leg of the journey. Players win by visiting Constantinople (now Istanbul) and returning to the United States. Named after historian and children’s book author Hendrik Van Loon, the Wide World Game was released almost 40 years after The Game of Travel. Fittingly, given its title, the game features a wider world than its predecessor. While The Game of Travel restricts players to Europe and the Atlantic Ocean, the later game’s routes take players across every continent except Antarctica. Here, the goal is to be the first to travel from San Francisco to Manila. The Wide World Game follows the same basic flow of moving between cities according to one’s tickets.

Both games were influenced by the increasing availability of international travel around the turn of the 20th century. Alongside technological developments and Gilded Age economic changes, the number of issued U.S. passports increased significantly in the late 19th century. Steamships and trains made travel more accessible to a growing middle class. Such methods of travel are highlighted in the games through an unusual feature. The Game of Travel has players swap out their moving marker according to the method of travel: a train when traveling by land, a ship if by sea. Since the games are so similar, though, it’s interesting to see where they differ. The wide world changed between 1894 and 1933. By the 1930s, there were several commercial airlines in the U.S., and with new forms of travel come changes to the rules. The Game of Travel requires players to move one city at a time, but the airplane in the newer game lets players move through as many as six cities in a single turn!

Guests could appreciate many things about the games if we showcased them in a display. The Game of Travel is a beautiful production. Its cover features painterly illustrations of attractive destinations like the canals of Venice and England’s Windsor Castle. Its metal steamships shimmer in the light. The Wide World Game’s stylized world map appears hand-drawn with vibrant colors. I’m sure guests would be delighted to see them. With interpretive labels, we could provide some information about the games’ rules and historical context. But games are meant to be played.

To be clear, not even I get to play the games in our collection. This is for good reason, although I’m often dying to give the games a try. For one, many of them are fragile. The Game of Travel was printed more than 100 years ago, and it shows. The board is coming off in flakes, leaving holes in eastern Europe. We wear gloves when handling artifacts not just to protect the objects, but also to protect ourselves. The malleability of the steamship tokens hints that they are likely made of toxic metals, and paint used in the Wide World Game is probably also dangerous. So, how can we have guests engage with these historic games without putting them or the games at risk?

We chose to create our own versions of each game. Making the copies required collaboration between multiple teams at the museum. First, I scanned the games’ boards and cards and sent the scans off to Corinna, one of our public programs coordinators, to fabricate those components. They pasted the boards to a large piece of cardboard and printed out and laminated the cards. Meanwhile, Martin, our arcade game conservation technician, began 3D printing trains, planes, and ships using a resin printer. Martin’s trains are a real highlight, featuring little linked cars that follow behind the locomotive. After laminating the cards and sealing the boards, our more robust versions of the games were ready to be played with by childhood hands.

Our International Day of Play programming was a success. I delivered a small presentation showcasing the original games, along with some other travel-themed games and puzzles, while our associate curator Natalie gave a fascinating talk about postcards and souvenirs. The reproduced games were available to play all day. The preservation of board games is important. Researchers come from across the globe to study our collection. But there are probably very few living people who’ve actually played these games. I’m excited that we gave our visitors a chance to join that exclusive group.

The post Recreating 100-Year-Old Games for International Day of Play appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

How to Win at Checkers, How to Beat Grandad at Checkers, Play Winning Checkers. These are the titles of just a few of the books from Alfred C. Darrow’s checkers library, which recently found a new home at The Strong Museum. The literature covers every aspect of playing a winning game, even How to Lose at Checkers, as it turned out. In my survey of Mr. Darrow’s vast collection, I discovered that I knew nothing about how to win—or lose—at checkers. Simply put, a player loses at checkers if they can’t make a move on their turn. You may find yourself in this situation after making a wrong move or falling for an opponent’s trap. Breaking any of the rules of checkers may cause you to have to forfeit the game.

If you are like me and many of my colleagues at The Strong, you probably haven’t thought about the rules of checkers since childhood. In the early days of my checkers studies, my team’s collective world view shifted upon learning that if you are in the position to jump an opponent’s piece, you are required to jump the piece. This fundamental aspect of the game had never been enforced by parents, teachers, or fellow children. Many historic school yard matchups were subject to the players’ invented, and arguable, rules. The games were after all just for fun, not to be taken too seriously. But for tournament checkers players, the rules are set and are the final authority.

According to the 24 “Standard Laws in the Game of Draughts,” listed in Anderson’s second edition of The Scottish Draught Player, a player can lose at checkers by taking too long to make a move, touching the wrong piece at the wrong time, moving a piece in the wrong direction, or even, as I was delighted to discover, doing “anything which may tend to either annoy or distract the attention of the player.” Yes, that’s right, annoying your opponent is against the rules of checkers. This includes, but is not limited to, “pointing or hovering over the board,” and “unnecessarily delaying to move a piece touched.” (Could somebody please inform my gaming group of this rule?)

Now that I’ve straightened out checkers rules for you, let me tell you about one of the foremost checkers players of the 20th century, Marion Tinsley. Tinsley was so good at checkers that he is reported to have only lost seven times during his decades-long career. He gained a reputation as being unbeatable, and other checkers players aspired to a drawn game against him. For Tinsley, however, winning all the time became a bit boring. He even took a 12-year hiatus from playing at one point due to lack of competition.

In 1990, an up-and-coming new player entered the competitive checkers world: Chinook, a computer program developed at the University of Alberta. Chinook was programmed to play for the win, seeking out interesting variations backed by algorithms and a database of grandmasters’ opening moves, end-game positions, and known losing positions. In comparison with human players who tended to play cautiously, especially against Tinsley, the program was the greater risk-taker. In 1992, Chinook played Tinsley in a 40-game match for the World Checkers Championship and lost

Through its games with Tinsley, other human opponents, and copies of itself, Chinook continued to learn how each position would play out to a win, lose, or draw. Chinook and its developers used this experience to finally solve checkers—“solved” meaning that they could correctly predict the outcome of every possible move, assuming both players play perfectly. With that in consideration, perhaps it is now time to find an opponent and start a game of checkers.

By: Laura Boland, Processing Archivist at The Strong National Museum of Play

The post Losing at Checkers: A Learning Experience appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

As I begin a new decade of my life, I’ve become more aware of the toys that model real-world “adulting.” Pretend play is a childhood staple, and often it involves kids performing what they see adults do. I’ve also realized, with a bit of my now developed adult cynicism, that it was a lot more fun to pretend to be an adult. The real thing doesn’t always measure up.

Take chores for example. Sweeping up with a fake broom or running a fake vacuum across the floor was way more fun than my now never-ending struggle to keep the cat hair out of my carpet. Cleaning the dishes is so much more fun when they don’t actually have food on them. I think it’s the lack of actual need to do the chores that makes the pretend chores more fun. I could flit around the house with my big fluffy duster as a kid, not properly cleaning anything, possibly making it worse, but there wasn’t any actual consequence. Dust is now my mortal enemy with its endless cycle of settling on surfaces.

Cooking is also way more fun when it’s fake. It’s so easy. You can “chop” up your food, stir it in a bowl, dump it on a plate—they’ll all say they love it because that’s their job as adults—and then you can just dump it all back in the basket. No recipes are needed because everything comes out perfect with just the right flavor. Who can beat that? The grocery shopping is so easy too. Super Kids Market is way more fun than the real Wegmans. I don’t have to spend real money, the food never goes bad, and nothing requires prep time. There’s no such thing as perishables in the world of fake food! And let’s be honest, even when we graduate to whipping up cookies in our Easy Bake Ovens, the simplicity, speed, and abundance of desserts means it’s always a good time.

I also held so many careers as a kid. Not to mention the work was so easy! Being a doctor required no medical degree, no actual understanding of the human body, and no charts. I was a super spy using totally real (definitely not toys) spy equipment without any risk of international crisis. I was the caretaker of dozens of animals that were miraculously healthy despite empty food bowls, inconsistent care, and multiple predator/prey combinations housed together. The work environment was great. I set my own hours, had unlimited time off, wasn’t subject to performance expectations, and could do all my work from home. I may have earned no money as well, but I had no bills so that was fine.

I have to say, I think the truest betrayal was the expectation set by the economy during childhood play. Every cash register was full, customers were always stopping by, and they never got to keep anything they bought, so it was pure profit. The board game Pay Day (the 2000 edition specifically) was popular in my house, but I’m beginning to think it established some false impressions about finances. I closed a lot more deals, won a lot more lotteries, and got a lot more bonuses in that game than I do in real life. My finances were way less complicated. Same thing with The Game of Life. The houses I bought and the sizes of the families I had in that game are completely unattainable.

The Game of Life in general needs some attention for its delivery of unrealistic expectations for life. I’ve ended my “life” winning a Nobel Prize, being elected mayor, writing a bestseller, and having six children, all while working as an artist and retiring to Countryside Acres. How was that supposed to prepare me for the expense-to-income ratio of late-stage capitalism? Why can’t I press CTRL + Shift + C and type the “motherlode” cheat code 300 times like in The Sims 2 and then live a life of luxury with my magically acquired wealth? Maybe Hasbro had it right when they released The Game of Life: Quarter Life Crisis (Now with Crippling Debt!).

Perhaps the last six paragraphs of complaining are also a cover for a certain melancholy that comes with thinking about a time in my life with fewer worries and more imagination. Maybe there’s a kid inside me begging to set aside the have-to-do for more of the want-to-do. Maybe it’s the rose-colored glasses that come with nostalgia. Maybe it’s a symptom of millennial burnout, pressure, and anxiety. Or maybe it’s just easier to yell into the abyss, “What gives?!”

The post Chores Are More Fun When They’re Fake appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

One rabbit that I recall from my childhood is Uncle Wiggily. Not familiar with him? He started back in 1910 in stories that Howard Garis wrote for the Newark News and he and his fellow characters went on to help Garis publish almost 80 children’s books in his lifetime. I’m not certain that I inherited any copies of those books from my mom, but my sister and I played an Uncle Wiggily board game that pitted the elderly rabbit with his candy-striped cane against various adversaries and obstacles as he hobbled down the path to Dr. Possum’s office to get his rheumatism medication. At least in the game version, Uncle Wiggily was on the innocuous side (a bit like Mickey Mouse in that regard), but I was much more amused by the names of his foes such as Skeezicks and the Bad Pipsisewah.

While Uncle Wiggily ranks as a senior rabbit, the younger end of the spectrum is represented by the little bunny in Margaret Wise Brown’s 1947 picture book Goodnight Moon. Reportedly Brown gave illustrator Clement Hurd minimal instructions as to what she was looking for and Hurd adapted to the assignment by making the characters rabbits—he felt more confident drawing bunnies than people. Despite sluggish initial sales, the book went on to become a children’s classic and a favorite bedtime story to wind down the day and send kids peacefully off to dreamland. Naturally, some of those kids wanted to snuggle into bed with their own plush version of the rabbit from the story.

Another storybook rabbit, this time from 1921’s The Velveteen Rabbit, has also made the leap into The Strong’s collection. Margery Williams’s tale about a stuffed animal who yearns to become real through the love of his owner has endured in the hearts of children and adults for more than a century now. Certainly, looking around the plush animals and dolls in the museum’s holdings, I can see signs of the deep affection that has been lavished upon them over the years as they were clutched for comfort. Their repaired stitching and threadbare fur make tangible some of the meaning they held for their little owners. Some may find The Velveteen Rabbit too sentimental for their tastes, but the story holds powerful emotions for some of us (including yours truly). It therefore feels fitting that a 3-D version of that rabbit makes its permanent home at The Strong.

But to end on a lighter note, let’s turn to the movies and the wisecracking hare of countless Warner Brothers cartoon shorts—none other than Bugs Bunny. A direct descendant of classic trickster characters from folk tales and literature around the world, Bugs holds a special place in the hearts of his many fans, although his nemesis Elmer Fudd and even Daffy Duck undoubtedly feel less cordial toward him. Bugs and Elmer faced off for the first time in the 1940 short A Wild Hare in which Bugs uttered his timeless catchphrase, “What’s up, Doc?” The player of innumerable pranks, Bugs Bunny has seen toys and other products bearing his likeness proliferate over the years, almost breeding like, well, rabbits. At The Strong, our collection includes products far beyond the anticipated Bugs Bunny plush figures, encompassing everything from jigsaw puzzles to PEZ dispensers to video games and yo-yos.

I have no doubt that the rabbits in The Strong’s collection will continue to thrive and multiply. Even as I write this, I’m visualizing more examples on shelves and in cases throughout the museum. Roger Rabbit. Peter Rabbit. Babs Bunny. The Runaway Bunny. The list goes on and on. I guess you can’t keep a good bunny down.

The post Hop to It: The Rise of the Rabbits appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

While I have run multiple tabletop role-play games (TTRPG) for friends, I had only recently started dipping my toes into the role of Dungeon Master (DM) —the term used for the person who is running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Before this, I had also exclusively run games online, over a Discord voice call using Roll20, a virtual tabletop service. In that setting, we don’t use cameras for our games so no one can see my facial expressions as I do silly character voices or see me searching for music while players talk to each other. The idea of standing in front of people while doing this can be intimidating. And it is no wonder why DMs are harder to find than players in the TTRPG community—it’s a lot of work to prepare such a game, even a short one! Nonetheless, I undertook the challenge, hoping to share this wonderful game we were celebrating at the museum with my co-workers.

The first question was if I was going to undertake a homebrewed adventure or use something pre-written. I immediately decided since I had access to many published short adventures, we would use one of those, since I could be confident they had been tested and designed with beginners to the game in mind. I searched and searched online and consulted many modules I own, but nothing felt quite right for what was needed . . . that is until LEGO announced their Dungeons & Dragons: Red Dragon’s Tale set and free module. I couldn’t believe our luck that they were coming out with exactly what was needed: A short and sweet 5th edition module designed to teach the game to new players, complete with pre-made character sheets, a delightful silly adventure, and they even provided music to play alongside gameplay for DMs! Not only that, but Wizards of the Coast streamed an actual play of the module run by Anjali Bhimani, so I got to see how the module should play out.

While it had almost everything a few things were missing. For monster stat blocks or descriptions of certain spells and items, the module referred to the 2014 5th-Edition books, which thankfully the museum has in our collection. As a result, I was able to look up everything I needed and have those descriptions at the ready for the games. There also was the small issue that the LEGO set itself was not going to be released in time for our event, so maps and miniatures for the characters were going to have to be a little different. Thankfully the internet offers access to a wealth of wonderful people who provide 3D print files for miniatures as well as maps! And Martin Reinhardt, our Arcade Conservation Technician here at the museum, was happy to help in printing everything for us!

Map and miniatures, ready! Module, ready! Music at the ready! Now to teach a game that has been around for 50 years, has had multiple editions, and is intimidating for newcomers to approach. I fully acknowledge that Dungeons & Dragons is a lot to learn and can be hard to get into if all you see with the game are people rolling dice, doing math, accessorized with massive books that are essentially textbooks for the game. I also will fully admit to players I often do not know all the rules—I applaud those who have it all memorized though! So where to start? I knew we needed a game that was going to provide a very general overview of various encounters and the most used mechanics of the game.

The first sessions I ran for members of our Collections Team were with co-workers who had played TTRPGs or knew a little of them beforehand, so we could jump in more easily. We played the full module over the course of two 2.5-hour sessions. The second group, our Marketing Team, were almost all new to roleplay games, so I decided to consider what would have been helpful to me when I started playing this massive and intimidating game. Having dice provided and a sheet made for me was a must, plus a clear idea of what I could do during each round of combat felt like a good place to start. Carefully I put together little binders with sheets, spell cards, magical item cards, dry erase markers to mark off on the sheets with, a bag of dice, and this handy free PDF by Matthew Perkins that explains what players can do on their turns in combat in 5e. Perkins’ website even acknowledges in the description of the PDF that “This game is complicated!” and explains he made the sheets to help onboard new players.

With the binders made, I decided to also cut out some pieces of the LEGO module to narrow in on the experience of a “typical game.” I knew I wanted to have a combat encounter, some investigation, a small social encounter to get into the roleplaying, but I didn’t want us to linger too long on Skill Checks or posing optional scenes to players. Also, for both groups and in general as a DM, I am a huge fan of what is called “Rule of Cool” in my games. This means that while the game’s rules may say: you can only move x amount of feet and only do this, I say: if it sounds cool and is within reason then give it a try, let’s have a dice roll still determine if you can do it or not. I always try to provide the space for my players to find alternative solutions. This could mean allowing a player character to talk their way out of combat or to sneak around to avoid an encounter.

Providing the space for players to make the adventure theirs has always been a goal of mine as a DM. After all, to quote Matthew Mercer from Critical Role, “How do you want to do this?” is what we ask players when they are about to defeat a foe in combat! We provide the player with the moment to shine and take control of the narrative of how they want to finish the enemies. But it can be hard to answer this question when just learning TTRPGs. When we started one game and I asked a player this question, the player hesitantly started to describe their finishing blow during the first combat encounter. But by the end of the game, we had excited descriptions and gestures as our heroes saved the day from the evil sorcerer! To see this transformation in just over two hours was amazing and I was so happy to see everyone enjoying the game.

Getting to share this game that has generated so many stories and imaginations for half a century now with co-workers was truly a delight. And I was happy to have the opportunity to be the one to run a game for them. The experience also provided me with a moment to step back and remember that, despite all the books, lore, and changes to the game over the years, it is just that: a game. And having fun with it, adjusting it to the players is always important as a DM. So even though I was there to teach others, I also learned a great deal from this experience and am ready for more stories to tell, whether it be online with friends or at work!

The post Teaching Dungeons & Dragons: Continuing the Years of Storytelling appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

In addition to these material components, however, at the root of every TTRPG experience are stories created by the players and sonic performances that happen as a result. In tabletop role-playing games, sound and story are inseparable. The players at the TTRPG table must evoke worlds, actions, and people through description—recounting what is seen, experienced, and heard within the theater of the mind.

Thanks to the generosity of The Strong National Museum of Play, I was awarded a Valentine-Cosman Research Fellowship. With this fellowship, I was able to spend two weeks going through The Strong’s extensive collection of TTRPG artifacts and associated archival documents in the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play to support my dissertation research on music and sound within TTRPG communities. What I found during my time demonstrated how sound and music has spurred creativity, conveyed literary genre, and inspired storytelling among both TTRPG writers and players since the inception of the genre.

The vast collection of TTRPG sourcebooks at The Strong includes games that span five decades of TTRPG play and cover the gamut of literary genres, ranging from the ubiquitous Dungeons & Dragons (1974) to obscure titles such as Woof Meow (1988). These books serve as manuals on the rules of play, “how-to guides” for acting as a character, and as primers for creative writing and sonic performance. In most of the books I examined, the designers of these games emphasized the need for dramatic storytelling. In a playtest copy of Dungeons and Dragons for Beginners (1979), Gary Gygax and Eric Holmes describe “Dungeon Mastering as a Fine Art,” that laid out the needs for theatrics:

“Dramatize the adventure as much as possible, describe the scenery, if any. Non-player characters should have appropriate speech, orcs are gruff and ungrammatical, knights talk in flowery phrases and always say “thou” rather than “you.” … The dramatic talents of the Dungeon Master should be used to their fullest extent. It adds to the fun.”

In other games, the role of the game master extends beyond general descriptions and into evoking source material and genre through audio. Star Trek: Roleplaying Game (1999), from Last Unicorn Games, establishes the need for musical props and sonic “recognitional signals” like writing and performing a Star Trek-esque “Captain’s Log” in the style of the television series, or playing Alexander Courage and Gene Rodenberry’s iconic Star Trek theme song to establish mood at the beginning of a session.

Cyberpunk (1988) from R. Talsorian Games Inc. presses the need for atmosphere to evoke the game’s dark, futuristic setting and suggests an appropriate sonic environment, instructing players to:

Get out your heaviest rock tapes and play them during your run. Encourage your players to wear leather and mirror-shades. Adopt the slang and invent your own… This is the dark future here; and it can’t be accurately portrayed in a brightly lit room with milk and cookies on the table.

Additionally, Cyberpunk doubles down on the sonic atmosphere for its setting, providing the option of playing as a “Rockerboy/girl” who uses music of any genre to make political statements, as well as provide in-narrative music reviews of fictional bands and albums such as Johnny Silverhand’s A Cool Metal Fire.

TTRPG companies’ attention to sonic and musical detail also extended into providing musical material as role-playing aids, starting as early as 1984. In an official game adventure for TSR’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons entitled Dragonlance: Dragons of Despair (1984), the author Tracy Hickman, along with members of the design staff Michael Williams and Carl Smith, composed “Song of Goldmoon,” a song specifically for use in the module. Hickman calls out this piece as vital to the adventure and instructs that one of the players read the lyrics aloud, or, if any players have “natural minstrel abilities,” to sing it with the music provided. TSR’s foray into musical material continued into the 1990s. The Strong houses one of TSRs Advanced Dungeons & Dragons audio adventures that includes a CD for use during play.

Ravenloft: A Light in The Belfry (1995) is a full campaign for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons set in D&D’s horror genre setting, Ravenloft. Along with the text, the adventure includes a CD with 87 different tracks that include narrative performances of the in-game story and atmospheric descriptions, as well as sound effects that enhance a spooky atmosphere. The CD is integral to play as the first 13 tracks tell the story of the adventure’s antagonist, Morgoroth, that players discover as a part of the game. The tracks on the CD are meant to be played as the players explore a haunted house, with each of its rooms having a dedicated narration and musical elements associated with the horror genre, such as eerie strings, bells, and synthesizers.

In addition to the musical and sonic work published by game companies, The Strong houses collections of unpublished materials from various game designers as well as materials created by TTRPG players for personal and public play. In particular, the Play Generated Map and Document Archive papers (PlaGMaDA) contain thousands of player-generated documents including character sheets, maps, GM notes, and homebrew adventures. PlaGMaDa offers insight into a lived TTRPG past and shows how players from various backgrounds interacted with sonic and musical ideas. Within the parts of PlaGMaDA that I was able to look through during my short time in the archives, I found that players experienced and engaged with music in different ways.

Many of these instances consisted of small notes of things that implied the presence of musical objects. In a collection of notes and maps for a game of Chaosium Inc.’s Call of Cthulhu, the game master detailed a short list of things in an apartment: “Liquor, Hi-Fi jazz records, promo glossies, occult books.” Despite the innocuous nature of this note, its inclusion suggests the owner of this apartment listened to “Hi-Fi Jazz,” and this in turn generates assumptions based on what the game master and the players associate with that genre of music.

Players also explored the possibilities of music within their games in another collection of character sheets dated between 2004-2007. A player drafted a song for a character they were playing in Mage: The Ascension (White Wolf Publishing, Inc., 1993). Set in the gothic-punk universe of the World of Darkness games, the song features edgy lyrics typical of a punk song.

The document shows how the player engaged with music by writing lyrics themselves, as well as implies that they were thinking critically about their writing. The crossed-out lyrics and rewritten lines imply that the player spent more than a few moments on their writing. In a sticky note attached to these lyrics the donor states: “Draft of a song [player’s name] wrote on as his MagePC [player character] Rain from the 06 game.” There is no record indicating whether this song was ever performed or what it possibly sounded like; however, its presence demonstrates how TTRPGs provide space in which creativity and musical practice can be explored through a play environment.

My time during my fellowship at The Strong has had a profound impact on my research into music and TTRPG communities. Contemporary TTRPG communities often consider the use of sound as a modern phenomenon that align with the resurgence of popularity in the genre since the mid-2010s. However, I hope my research conducted at The Strong will establish that music and sound have long been integral to TTRPGs as a creative practice.

Play, especially play through music and sound, is often ephemeral, as these moments between friends are not (usually) recorded.  I was confronted by this ephemerality while examining the William J. Hoyt Dungeon’s & Dragons Collection housed at The Strong. Hoyt was one of the first people to play Dungeons & Dragonsin the 1960s as a part of Dave Arneson’s wargaming group in the Twin Cities area. In a short 15-second sound clip from a slideshow Hoyt put together about the creation of D&D, he shows a copy of the game Dungeon! (TSR, 1975) and reminisced on these decades-ago moments that exist now only in Hoyt’s memory. Like so many gaming groups in today’s world, Hoyt describes these playful moments with fondness, and speaks to the sustained importance of music and sound in TTRPG play:

“This is my first copy of Dungeon!. We played this game over, and over, and just loved this game. We played it, and made up songs, and just had a great time playing this game.”

Written by Andrew Borecky, 2024 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow

The post Role-Playing with Sound: A Sonic History of Tabletop Role-Playing Games appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

In SYFY WIRE’s 2019 article on “The 9 scariest, and most unforgettable monsters from Dungeons & Dragons,” Beholders ranked at number 6. These early Dungeons & Dragons monsters differ from other monsters which draw upon various mythologies in the world; beholders are an original creation of the game. According to Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: a Visual History, this one-large-eyed, ten-smaller-eye-stalked, flying spherical creature was originally drawn by Greg Bell for the 1975 Greyhawk supplement. His initial sketch labelled “Big Eye,” was turned down by Gary Gygax. Later in another drawing, Bell labeled the monster as “Sphere of Doom.” This sketch became the one we now recognize from the Greyhawk supplement’s cover.

Within the supplement, Beholders are noted to have the nicknames “Spheres of Many Eyes” or “Eye Tyrants.” Within the first description they are given, their bodies are only 3 feet in diameter and had 40 hit points (HP). The monster’s armor class, which is a term used to describe a creature’s defense, was 0. To 5th-edition (5e) players this may sound strange since the Armor Class rules are quite different now. But previously 0 was a difficult Armor Class to hit. One would need to calculate based on armor and weapons their character’s “To hit armor class zero,” commonly known as THAC0. This mechanic has seen a bit of a change since then, but the idea is similar: you need to roll a certain number to hit an enemy creature in the game. The stat blocks for beholders mostly remained the same in the 1977 Monster Manual for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but now we have a little more information about these rare creatures. They are said to be commonly found underground, and each of their 11 eyes has a different magical effect:

1. Charm person
2. Charm monster
3. Sleep
4. Telekinesis
5. Flesh-Stone ray
6. Disintegrate ray
7. Fear
8. Slow
9. “Cause serious wound”
10.  Death ray
11.  Anti-magic ray

The note about their nature states: “The beholder is hateful, aggressive, and avaricious. They will usually attack immediately. If confronted by a particularly powerful party, there is a 50% chance they will listen to negotiations… to be bribed not to attack… they can speak their own language as well as that tongue known to lawful evil creatures.” Lawful evil refers to the monster’s alignment. This is a tool in Dungeons & Dragons that helps both players and the Dungeon Master (DM) know how to have a creature react to certain situations. A lawful evil creature, simply put, is one that follows clear rules and order but is not acting in everyone’s best interest.

While the behavior of the monsters has remained the same, beholders mechanically have changed with each edition. In the 2014 Monster Manual for 5e, they have an 18-armor class. And have an average of 180 hit points. Their central eye can create a 150 foot “antimagic cone” that prevents adventurers from using magic against them when active and, while each eye stalk eye does still have its own special ability, they are slightly different from the 1977 Monster Manual’s description. Now it is:

1. Charm ray
2. Paralyzing ray
3. Fear ray
4. Slowing ray
5. Enervation ray
6. Telekinetic ray
7. Sleep ray
8. Petrification ray
9. Disintegration ray
10. Death ray

Next to the beholder’s image and stat block, in 5e, is an interesting quote: “Every beholder thinks it is the epitome of beholding, and the only thing it fears is that it might be wrong,” which is why I mentioned previously this famous creature certainly believes it is the “perfect monster.” In the 3.5 edition supplement, Lords of Madness, it notes that beholders’ very xenophobic and intolerant attitudes are present “within minutes” of birth. It is mentioned it takes beholders about 2 years to become “normal size,” in this case the normal size now is 8 feet in diameter instead of the original 3 feet!

One of the most famous beholders that players of 5e will recognize is the current Xanathar from the 2018 adventure module Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. This specific beholder is known to consider his goldfish Sylgar his most prized possession, hence Xanathar being featured in art with a little goldfish beside him, including on the cover of its own 2017 supplement: Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. The traits displayed by this character in the adventure module match what is typical of a beholder, “having an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, taste for gold, and a general disdain for most living things.” According to Michael Mearls’ description in Dragon #313, “beholders style themselves as the ultimate race” but due to them believing themselves to be perfect, they believe they are better than even their follow beholders. This leads to the creatures constantly bickering among themselves and this “inherent animosity usually prevents beholders from working together in large numbers.” He goes on to explain that while they may be arrogant, beholders are actually “brilliant thinkers and cunning strategists” who use their intellect to create new weapons, armor, magic items, and tactics… which may explain why Xanathar has a guide to everything!

Due to their lengthy history in Dungeons & Dragons there are of course variations on the monster as well as their lore. This iconic creature has evolved alongside the game and remains on the covers of multiple source books for the 5th edition. So next time you roll initiative to face a beholder in Dungeons & Dragons, remember to tell them how perfect they are to get on their good side… or try to avoid that death ray, if nothing else!

The post A Sight to Behold:  Dungeons & Dragons’ Beholder Monster appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

Board games and television don’t seem like they would go together. It would be hard to imagine millions of viewers tuning in regularly to watch people play a game of Risk or Settlers of Cattan. But 40 years ago this month, viewers across the country had a six-year-long daily habit of watching people play Scrabble every day on NBC.

The Scrabble game show originated with Exposure Unlimited, a prize brokerage that game shows commissioned to acquire merchandise from vendors. Exposure Unlimited ventured outside their usual business and made a deal with Selchow & Righter for the rights to produce a television version of Scrabble. They got the rights on the cheap because S&R wasn’t even considering doing such a thing at the time. Exposure Unlimited then reached out to all the major game show packagers in Hollywood to ask if they wanted to try developing a Scrabble game show.

Reg Grundy Productions, an Australian firm which had just gained a foothold in America with Sale of the Century on NBC, expressed interest, and a team headed by long-time game show producer Robert Noah whipped up a format.

The host of Scrabble was a surprisingly apt choice. Chuck Woolery, who had hosted Wheel of Fortune on NBC for seven years before departing in a salary dispute, was suddenly back on the network just a bit more than two years later, hosting yet another NBC game show based around picking letters and solving mystery words. The pilot for the Scrabble game show, shot in 1984, was a harrowing mess. The set included a larger-than-life revolving cube that housed monitors, projectors, neon, light bulbs, and an electronic timer, all in service to various parts of the show. The NBC electricians who wired all of the equipment had warned the Scrabble team that the cube should only be turned 180 degrees. Eager to display the spinning marvel on their dazzling set, the crew in the studio made six complete 360-degree turns of the cube, severing every wire inside the cube and requiring production to shut down for major repairs. The pilot episode, which ran only 17 minutes, took a full two days to tape. But NBC saw something in the game, and a focus group for the pilot responded enthusiastically. Scrabble debuted on NBC on July 2, 1984, and compared to the disastrous pilot, the next six years were smooth sailing.

If you’ve ever pulled your hair out after seven minutes of listening to your opponent mutter “I don’t have any good letters…” you’d probably be surprised that anybody could make a game show out of Scrabble. You would be equally unsurprised to learn that the secret to success here was that the Scrabble game show wasn’t really Scrabble. In execution, it was the classic game of Hangman with Scrabble-based trappings.

Two contestants faced a gigantic Scrabble game board, drawing numbered tiles two at a time, and dropping the tiles in an electronic eye scanner to find out what letters they represented. Contestants would try to place the correct tiles in the word, while attempting to steer clear of “stoppers”—the tiles with letters that weren’t in the word.

Viewers loved the brain-tickling game and Chuck Woolery’s earthy, affable hosting style, all packaged in an elaborate setting. The set, operated properly, was a thing of beauty. An array of 14 unique sound effects helped viewers keep track of twists and turns in the game. The show even added some extra charm to the excitement of a cash bonus being awarded. The game made use of the pink and blue squares on a Scrabble board by awarding bonus money for letters placed in those squares. On the air, contestants were paid out in “Chuck Bucks”—blue and pink bills bearing Chuck Woolery’s picture instead of Ben Franklin’s.

What truly made the game special was the brilliant clue writing, supervised by former Hollywood Squares writer and future Jeopardy! head writer Gary Johnson. Each puzzle opened with a misleading, often punny, clue that made contestants scratch their head while amusing viewers and often bemusing Woolery.

A five-letter word: “She lives in the White House”—VANNA

A six-letter word: “It makes kids smile”—CHEESE

A seven-letter word: “It keeps your feet on the ground”—GRAVITY

An eight-letter word: “A man who likes people”—CANNIBAL

A nine-letter word: “After years of only seeing his own, Robinson Crusoe was shocked when he saw Friday’s”—FOOTPRINT

Scrabble enjoyed enough success that Selchow & Righter adapted it for a home version, officially titled TV Scrabble —a board game based on a game show based on a board game. A revival briefly popped up on NBC in 1993, while reruns of the original series were a hit on USA Network. The Hub cable channel managed to come up with another twist on Scrabble with an entirely different game show format; Scrabble Showdown ran in 2011 and 2012. This fall, the CW network will unleash another all-new Scrabble game show in prime time.

DO YOU REMEMBER…THESE OTHER GAME SHOWS BASED ON BOARD GAMES?

TABOO (TNN cable channel, 2003): Contestants played a game similar to Pyramid, with the caveat that each word came with a list of five “taboos,” seemingly obvious clue words that couldn’t legally be given. For example, a player conveying “PRISON” might be told that they weren’t allowed to say “jail,” “arrest,” “inmates,” “bars,” or “warden.” Chris Wylde was the host.

BALDERDASH (PAX, 2004-05): Contestants heard celebrity panelists answer various questions, having to decide each time if the panelist had given them “truth” or “balderdash.” Elayne Boosler hosted.

THE GAME OF LIFE (THE HUB cable channel, 2011-2012): Families drove their cars along the virtual game board, having to answer trivia questions every time they came to a fork in the road.

The post Scrabble: A Television Hit? appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

Kennard and Bond left the Ouija Novelty Company soon after its founding, each creating his own knock-off Ouija board to cash in on the game’s growing popularity. Meanwhile, the trademark for the original Ouija board landed in the hands of William Fuld, who gained a reputation for litigiously defending it against copycats. Charles Kennard attempted to sell a variety of knock-off boards until Fuld finally sued him into submission, but Bond was smarter. He waited until just after Ouija’s original patent expired to launch the Swastika Novelty Company’s Nirvana board, using symbols that were then associated with Indian religions rather than fascist regimes. Fuld routinely claimed to be the “inventor and exclusive manufacturer” of the Ouija board in his ads. Perhaps afraid of ending up like Kennard, a year after the release of the Nirvana talking board, Bond dedicated one-third of his ad in the industry trade magazine Playthings to correcting Fuld’s interpretation of the patent:

Reference the notice of William Fuld, which appears on page 121 of the February issue of “Playthings.” Would say, that William Fuld is not the inventor of OUIJA. The Ouija talking board was invented by Elijah J. Bond, and said invention was patented by him February 10th, 1891, under patent No. 446,054, application for which was filed by said Elijah J. Bond May 28th, 1890, serial No. 353,410. William Fuld never had any title in said patent, by assignment or otherwise, and had no legal right to manufacture same prior to February 10th, 1908, the date of expiration of aforesaid patent. We make the above statement to the trade in the interest of honest competition and fair business methods, and to protect our business from any injury that might be caused by falsifying the facts in regard to the original patent.

By the time Ouija reached the height of its popularity in 1920, Kennard, Bond, and several other former employees of the Ouija Novelty Company had all written into the Baltimore Evening Sun claiming to be the original inventor of the Ouija board. None of them were. The most likely candidate for the inventor of the Ouija board is actually a cabinet maker named E. C. Reiche, who, having died in 1899, was unable to defend himself in the paper. By staying out of this public debate and steadfastly asserting his own claim to the Ouija board, Fuld managed to make Ouija his legacy. From 1978 to 1989, Parker Brothers’ product magazine cited William Fuld as the inventor of the Ouija board in its advertising copy.

Like his predecessors, Fuld was no Spiritualist. When asked if he believed in the Ouija board by the Baltimore Sun in 1920, Fuld responded, “I should say not. I’m no spiritualist. I’m Presbyterian.” However, though Fuld’s advertisements were careful to never mentioned spirits, after his death, his son made one concession to the public’s perception of Ouija as a way to speak to the dead. In the year 1941, the Fuld company introduced a new box design that featured a blue ghost, modeled after the 1909 sculpture Eternal Silence by Lorado Taft, a monument that stands in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery. The Fuld family manufactured Ouija boards from 1898 to 1966 when they sold Ouija to Parker Brothers. While Parker Brothers continued the tradition of leaving ghosts out of their advertising—focusing instead on Ouija’s ability to answer questions and, later, insisting that it could tell the future—the blue ghost on the box remained.

Throughout the years Fuld spent protecting his legacy, Ouija had developed a legacy of its own, mired in ghost stories and eventually tales of demonic possession. What’s most surprising given modern perceptions of Ouija is how recently its reputation soured. While it always had its detractors, for most of its history Ouija was seen as harmless haunting fun. The year Parker Brothers bought Ouija, it was so widely adored that it outsold Monopoly, but five years later Ouija was on people’s minds for a different reason. In 1971, William Peter Blatty wrote a novel based on a 1949 case where a child was allegedly possessed by a demon after using a Ouija board with his Spiritualist aunt. The Exorcist sold 13 million copies and cemented the Ouija board as the dangerous demonic pop culture symbol it is today. The blue ghost had been synonymous with Ouija for three decades, but the year after The Exorcist was published it was gone, as were the other divination-based games Parker Brothers had been advertising alongside Ouija for the previous two years. The new box featured an image of two people’s hands on the board and absolutely no suggestion that Ouija was remotely supernatural in nature.

Today, Hasbro holds the patent for Ouija and occasionally releases movie tie-in special editions of the board, like 2017’s Stranger Things Edition Ouija Board. But the company doesn’t sell the Ouija board as part of its regular line of products. If you search “Ouija” on the Hasbro website, nothing comes up. Despite Ouija’s 130 years of notoriety—or perhaps because of them—even the most stalwart board game manufacturers have been scared off.

By Dorian Cole, 2023 Mary Valentine-Andrew Cosman Research Fellow

The post S-T-R-O-N-G: Investigating the History of the Ouija Board at The Strong Museum appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

We know that the ease with which objects are perceived also predicts positive engagement (known as perceptual fluency). So if game components are to be fun, these objects must be designed in the most fluent way possible. A nice example of perceptual fluency exists in the various iterations of the board game Candy Land. Given the young age of the target audience, movement is communicated with cards containing 1 or 2 colored squares rather than the more complex interpretations involved in dice throwing.

We also know that the brain processes certain combinations of information more effectively due to things called “correspondences.” For example, we must build a physically large musical instrument if we want to produce low pitches (compare a violin with a double bass). From this, we predict that large objects correspond to low pitches. By spending time at a piano, we learn that lower pitches come from hitting leftward keys, but higher notes come from hitting rightward keys. As such, we predict low tones should come from locations on the left and high tones from locations on the right. As a final example, as we walk outside (perhaps to take a stroll around the Hasbro Game Park at The Strong) we see that the grass is beneath us and the sky is above us. For this reason, we might regularly expect the color blue to be above the color green.

As part of my fellowship, I asked whether any of these correspondences related to color, location, and sound existed in the classic electronic game Simon. In the basic game, the player must reproduce an ever-increasing tonal sequence by pressing one of four colored quadrants in the correct order. If the player successfully reproduces the pattern, Simon adds one more element to the sequence.

The first observation that took me by surprise was that Simon was actually inspired by an earlier arcade unit by Atari. As described in the notes of game developer Ralph Baer: “Touch-Me was in a waist-high cabinet with four large dark buttons facing the player . . . during the game, the buttons lit up in random sequences. . . . It was the player’s job to follow the light sequence of the buttons . . . nice game idea, terrible execution . . . visually lousy, miserable sounds!”

While The Strong has one of these Touch-Me cabinets in the museum’s collection, it was in the process of repair and I never got to experience the “‘lousy” sounds and colors of this inspirational design. Happily, a hand-held version of the Atari game was available, enabling comparison with an incredible range of hand-held Simon-style units.

Just comparing the ways in which colors corresponded to location, there were lots of variation in design choice. For example, in the original Touch Me unit, blue is top-left and green is bottom-right. So this particular design contains one correspondence that we have learnt to expect: grass below, sky above. What is intriguing then is the reversal of this correspondence of most Simon variants where green is now above blue. The exception here is very cute Pocket Simon (1980), which reinstates green on the bottom and blue on the top.

Thanks to a healthy supply of variously sized batteries, I was able to make these units shine and sing again. The sounds were not as strident or as confident as you might have expected from an electronic game. The tones were often frail or uncertain, reminding us all that there is a delicacy in maturity. While listening to the sounds, I continued to pore over the notes of Ralph Baer that tracked the development of the initial Simon game. Indeed, much of the writing looked quite similar to my own laboratory notebooks: ideas sketched, hypotheses generated, data collected, and fed back into the next iteration of ideas. A quite beautiful document was the sketching of the four “bugle” sounds (and the error or “razz” noise) that made it into the final version of the game. But how did these sounds correspond to locations?

Sound-location mappings were inconsistent across units, and not in line with my predictions that lower sounds should be associated with lower and leftward locations. For example, the original 1979 version of Simon (and the more contemporary Simon Swipe from 2014) gets the vertical mapping “correct” in that lower tones are associated with lower quadrants (yellow and blue), but gets the horizontal mapping “incorrect” in that lower tones are associated with more rightward locations (red and blue).

Further surprising correspondences were also waiting for me on the exhibit floor of The Strong. In particular, I was delighted to find a huge, aerobic version of Simon outside in the Hasbro Game Park. As you can see from the picture, color-location is again in the canonical, but curious configuration where green is above blue. On playing this large-scale version however, I noticed that the sounds had been rearranged from the hand-held version—low tones now came from the high locations and high tones came from the low locations!

In reviewing Simon games with a scientific lens, I was struck by the disconnection between psychological principles and gamification principles. I predicted that the organization of color-location-sound elements in the Simon game would have been set up in a way that reflected how the brain processes information: play is—after all—our brain’s favorite way of learning. But is it appropriate to call these mappings “correct” or ”incorrect?” From a player point-of-view, perhaps there is additional fun in the incongruency between the elements in this game. Indeed, play might be the very best environment in which to experience the world not as we expect it but as it could be.

As a scientist, the “perfect” design of a particular game can be approached empirically. Processing fluency can be measured using speed and accuracy, and much of my laboratory’s future work will be in the use of games as scientific paradigms. Simon is essentially a measure of working memory capacity, and we will directly study the effects that correspondences have on game performance. It is my hope that in the same way games may reveal something novel about science, the application of science may provide us with novel opportunities for play.

By, Ben Dyson, 2023 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow at The Strong

The post Stimulus Correspondences and Game Design: The Complex Case of Simple Simon appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.