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Topic: Well, as the forum title says ... (Read 2052 times) |
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qswanger
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Well, as the forum title says ...
« on: Sep 11th, 2009, 11:50am » |
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... I am saying Hello!
Quinn Swanger here from Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.
I have yet to play a game of Arimaa, but like a lot of people already, I have read about and researched the game from a variety of different sources and I'm now quite enthusiastic about diving in. I just hope that it lives up to all the hype. 
I have ordered the Z-Man game as well as the beginner's book. They should arrive next week ... even though I really only have one local gaming buddy that will entertain new, "unknown", 2-player head-to-head games with me.
A little background: I am a long time Chess and Go player of about somewhat better than average strengths. Highest over the board ratings attained in each have been ~2000 USCF and 2-kyu AGA respectively. In the last several years I have been getting into the huge influx of new multiplayer Euro designs and 2-player abstract strategy games (discovered mostly through BoardGameGeek). My favorites have been the GIPF series (especially DVONN), "Hive", and most recently "Ponte del Diavolo" (played on the Yucata.de server) where I won a sort of unofficial world championship in that game earlier this year.
I hope to meet you for a game soon.
Best,
Quinn
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Fritzlein
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Arimaa player #706
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Re: Well, as the forum title says ...
« Reply #1 on: Sep 13th, 2009, 7:48am » |
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Hi, Quinn! It's great to have enthusiastic newcomers who take their abstract gaming seriously. I am very curious to know how your experience of Arimaa compares to your expectations.
Everyone has a different breadth/depth comfort level, i.e. some balance between wanting to try out lots of different games and wanting to engage a single game enough to become very skilled at it. Both breadth and depth are necessary, because without breadth we couldn't compare games to each other, but without depth, we would never know which games are truly excellent.
I'm curious about your perception of DVONN, and how it compares to chess and Go. How much depth has the DVONN community discovered? Are there DVONN tournaments? Are there DVONN grandmasters? Are there strategy guides, annotated games, and puzzle collections? In short, I wonder whether DVONN devotees feel and behave the same way about their game as we here feel about Arimaa.
Again, welcome to the wonderful world of Arimaa. Please don't hesitate to ask any questions!
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qswanger
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Re: Well, as the forum title says ...
« Reply #2 on: Sep 14th, 2009, 11:44am » |
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Hi Fritzlein ... or perhaps I should call you "Mr. Arimaa" since you appear to live and breath this game.
"... How [my] experience of Arimaa compares to [my] expectations"? Well, I said that I was taking the plunge, but I'm also taking my time doing it! I *still* haven't played a single game yet (this probably will happen F2F on Thursday once my set arrives) but I have been going over a lot of the puzzles and reading everything about the game that I can get my grubby little hands on, including a large hunk of this very forum. I also intend to sit through that long, annotated video the new world champ made. I don't like floundering and want to do this right.
I see your points about breadth and depth. I tend to either do one or the other. When I was playing Chess, I would hardly play anything else, seriously or otherwise. When I was playing Go, same thing ... going in DEPTH. In the last several years it seems I have switched to breadth and have been fascinated and excited about just about all the other abstract games out there, some of which are obviously deeper than others. And I say deeper not because I have plumbed those depths necessarily, but because my experience of Chess and Go have giving me a good intuitive yardstick for gauging that without having a ton of empirical evidence in the new (for me) games.
Regarding DVONN, I believe that there were some tournaments held at some point, including the assigning of an unofficial(?) world champion, but I don't think the momentum was maintained and now I think the initial interest has tailed off ... but I could be wrong. I do remember this being mostly European involvement. This biggest site for playing I believe was Little Golem. Boardspace.net has had an implementation for a few months now, but Dave Dyer's site has had, despite all the wonderful work he has put into it, surprisingly little patronage. There is also a readily available, free, kick-ass computer program from some French site, the name of which escapes my memory at the moment. DVONN certainly has some depth to it, but it's hard for me to place it precisely on a scale. But if I had to venture a guess, I would put it somewhere between 9x9 and 13x13 Go. Resources for DVONN strategy can be found through the usual suspects: gipf.com and boardgamegeek.
Finally, regarding playing Arimaa and fostering enthusiasm, study, etc. ... If there are any players out there in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel-Hill/RTP area of North Carolina, I would love to get together to play face to face as that is still my most preferred method of playing games. Call me old fashioned I guess.
And calling this a club I think would be too ambitious at the moment.
Anyway ... enough babbling for now. Thanks again for your warm welcome.
--Quinn
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Fritzlein
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Re: Well, as the forum title says ...
« Reply #3 on: Sep 15th, 2009, 4:28pm » |
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on Sep 14th, 2009, 11:44am, qswanger wrote:| Hi Fritzlein ... or perhaps I should call you "Mr. Arimaa" since you appear to live and breath this game. |
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You forgot to mention eat and sleep Arimaa...
Thanks for your take on the DVONN community. I am intensely curious why interest in some games seem to tail off after a time. Is waxing and waning interest a function of the game itself, or attributable to the way the game is promoted, or some other factors? In particular, was there some flaw in DVONN that made some enthusiasts become bored with it? Or if not, i.e. supposing there is nothing lacking in the game per se, why is DVONN played less now? Were players attracted to it in the first place mostly because it was new?
I ask, of course, because I am trying to divine the arc of Arimaa's popularity. Will there be a boom and bust? Will there be a slow but continual ramp up? What could prevent Arimaa from becoming more and more beloved over the next seven years as it has over the previous seven years?
As a pure gamer, I look for the answers to these questions in the game itself. I would like to believe that as long as there are no problems with Arimaa, there is no reason for interest in it to tail off. But realistically, other factors weigh as well, which is why I'm so curious about the popularity arc of other games.
I actually prefer playing on-line to playing face-to-face, for the convenience and comfort. I suppose, however, that I am in the minority on this score, which makes me all the more glad that ZMan decided to produce the sets. Let us know how your face-to-face Arimaa works out.
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omar
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Arimaa player #2
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Re: Well, as the forum title says ...
« Reply #4 on: Sep 16th, 2009, 8:45pm » |
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Hi Quinn, welcome to the Arimaa community.
I think I read somewhere that how good a person gets at playing chess was more a function of how much they studied it as opposed how much they played it. This probably applies to other games as well. From the approach you are taking I can tell you will be a dangerous player someday
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chessandgo
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Arimaa player #1889
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Re: Well, as the forum title says ...
« Reply #5 on: Sep 17th, 2009, 7:19am » |
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Welcome Quinn!
I witnessed a live tournament of Zertz in Paris a few years ago, with like 15ish players. That was a pretty awesome sight, and I couldn't but wish the same would happen to arimaa soon
Edit: well, if Omar and Karl delocalize their arimaa meetings to Paris I guess my wishes will be fulfilled :p
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| « Last Edit: Sep 17th, 2009, 7:21am by chessandgo » |
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