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aozeba
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Wooden Arima Sets Coming Soon
« on: Aug 18th, 2010, 3:32pm » |
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Over the last few months, Omar and I have been developing a high end, handmade wooden Arimaa set to be produced by a woodworking cooperative in rural Mexico. I'd like to show you what we've come up with so far, talk about the goals of the project, and hear what you think! Its going to be a longer post, but I'll break it up into sections so you can skip to the parts you're most interested in.
Comments on the overall project, board design, piece design, and any questions you have at all are welcome and will help us get this thing going!
Check out the pictures of Protoype Zero here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/aozeba/NewForestArimaaSet?feat=directlink
Who We Are And Why We're Doing This
My name is Andon Zebal and I work for an organization called New Forest Earth. Our goal is to help people in Latin America make a living from their forests without destroying them. As part of that mission, we help people get more value out of a smaller amount of wood, so that they can cut fewer trees down and still send their kids to school. By creating jobs and economic incentives, we also make it less likely that people will take the risk of migrating to the US illegally.
In this case, we are working with a small artisan cooperative called "Agua y Monte" (Water and Wilderness) in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. A few years ago, they all made large pieces of furniture, but then they began to notice the fact that they had fewer and fewer trees to work with. The government noticed too, and decreed a large natural reserve in the nearby mountains (Los Tuxlas Biosphere Reserve).
With some of the only remaining forest under protection, the furniture makers decided to form a cooperative and dedicate themselves to making smaller crafts such as spaghetti forks, candle holders, puzzle boxes, and, now, Arimaa sets. In order to ensure that their children have enough wood to work with in the future, the cooperative participates in reforestation efforts during the tree planting season in late summer.
New Forest Earth is interested in helping these folks to continue and expand their work, and as part of that effort we decided to create the first hand crafted, artisanal Arimaa set made from native Mexican woods. We will donate a portion of each sale to the cooperative's reforestation program.
Design Concepts
From a design standpoint, the original goal of the project was to create a beautiful, polished wood Arimaa set that could be proudly displayed in a living room. A decorative Arimaa set would make a great trophy for an Arimaa tournament, a teaching tool for a school Arimaa program, or the perfect gift for the Arimaa buff in your life. In chess and other classic strategy games, such sets have been available for hundreds of years, but at the moment there is no such set available for Arimaa.
The next goal was to make the rules of Arimaa easy to learn and intuitive through the design of the set. It should be obvious that the elephant is more powerful than the camel, that the camel is more powerful than the horse, and so on. It should be obvious that the traps are traps. The identity of each piece should be clear ("Is that a dog or a cat?"). This is all so that teaching the game to new players becomes a much simpler, more intuitive, and even enjoyable task.
The size of the set was a huge driving consideration in design. Too small and it would be difficult to make by hand, too big and it would be difficult to play. We also wanted to make the pieces storable within the set.
Most of the design work happened on the ground at the cooperative with the folks who will be making the set. The materials, tools, ideas and abilities of the cooperative affected the final design and gave it its distinct artisanal look.
Piece Design
For the pieces, we opted for full body animal figurines rather than chess like pieces. This allowed us to use the animal's body rather than just its face to distinguish it, and gave the set a more original look. The main concerns were recognizability and size difference. In other words, making sure it is obvious to a lay person that the dog is a dog, and that a dog is bigger than a cat which is bigger than a rabbit. There's a few things which will definitely need to be improved in the next set, like the size of the horse's head (its too small) and the shape of the camel's head (it looks a little like an ostrich at the moment).
The pieces are made of two different colors of wood, red and yellow/gold, which distinguishes the teams. Obviously we cant do silver and gold, so I would just have red take the place of silver in the rules. They are polished to a glossy finish and coated with local beeswax.
Since the size of the pieces (specifically the elephant) would determine the size of the board, we tried to make them as small as possible. I was impressed by how small the bunnies got. The smaller the piece, the harder it is to make and polish because of the detail involved. The goal was to make the set large enough to decorate your coffee table but not so large that its difficult to see what your next move should be.
Another consideration that I had read about was wind resistance, so to make sure the pieces would hold up in an outdoor game I blasted a fan on them from several angles at full speed (sort of a rural wind tunnel test). They passed the test and you should be able to play outdoors in any whether that you would want to be in (please find shelter during hurricanes and tornadoes, though, your life is more important than trapping that last cat).
Board Design
The lines on the board are cut in carefully and deeply with a router, rather than painted or etched, so that they will not fade or wear out. The dimensions of the board surface are 46 * 46 cm (18.1 inches), including the border. Each square is 5.5 * 5.5 cm (2.2 inches) including the trap squares, which were cut out of the board (more on that below).
We had two colors of wood to work with, a Red and a Yellow/Gold wood. Since we used these to distinguish the two teams, I didn't want to use either to make the board, so at first I thought we would use a third wood, which is a basic light brown.
The guys at Agua y Monte (the cooperative we're working with) don't like to use much of the third wood though, because its harder to work with. So one of them suggested that we divide the board in half, one half red, one half yellow, and place the pieces on the opposite colors.
I like the idea and I think the board looks beautiful! I realize this is a divergence from the traditional board design, so let me know what y'all think about a two color board. It doesn't seem to affect gameplay, except maybe by making the player more aware of the two sides of the board.
Real Traps!
This is possibly the most awesome feature of the board. I came up with it while I was dreaming up board designs one night, and was unable to sleep afterwards because of the sheer glory of it.
The trap squares are cut out of the board to allow the pieces to fall through when the trap is activated. Below the board are two sliders. These can be pushed or pulled to open the any one of the four traps, sending the unlucky cat (or camel, or even elephant if you can manage it) into the storage droor below. The droors contain padding to prevent damage to those unlucky pieces that get dropped into them.
See the video here (taken before we put the padding in):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6a_fOQA8Ns
Because one slider is red and the other yellow, and they are perpendicular to the colors of the board, each trap has a different color combination with the board around it when closed. This means you can refer to the traps as (board-trap) red-gold, red-red, gold-red, and gold-gold. Although this was a completely accidental feature (we didn't even notice it until the set was finished), I think it will be helpful to identify the traps while a game is going.
For more traditional games, we will be providing four wooden blocks that can be placed in the traps to maintain a level board. These will match the colors of the trap sliders below so the traps can still be distinguished from each other.
Pedestal and Droors
To make sure our Arimaa board was as glorious as the game deserves, we put the board on a curving pedestal that doubles as a box to keep the pieces in.
The pieces can be stored in two droors within the pedestal. We extended the two color design concept to the pedestal, so that one droor and one wall are yellow and the other droor and wall are red.
Testing and Teaching Experience
Its difficult to convey everything through pictures, so I would like to share a little of the experience of using the physical board. We've played several games on the board, and have tested it for size, playability, and wind resistance.
Since they cut through the thickness of the board, the trap squares are quite deep. This of course makes the player very aware of the traps immediately and consistently, and made teaching the game more intuitive. For players used to a more two dimensional board, this may take a little getting used to, but I can assure you that actually dropping an opponents piece into the trap will make it worthwhile.
While I was at the Agua y Monte cooperative, I had the opportunity to teach Arimaa to the workers and local kids there. When I first explained the game to one of the kids, Cosimiro, he was not immediately impressed until I pit two of the local kids against each other. Soon, we had a veritable tournament going, with about 6 boys arguing over who was going to play winner, whether or not a move was legal, and what the current player should do for his next move.
The people of this community speak Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, and the competitive spirit and intelligence of their ancestors is alive and well. Even when I had the adults play against each other, the competition was fierce. I tried hard to only focus on telling them the rules and let them figure out the strategy on their own. They came up with the elephant block, used freezing to disable an opponent while flanking around them, and began trapping pieces as a secondary objective, all within minutes of learning the rules.
People in the Pictures
In the pictures, you can see Antonio in the yellow shirt. He was interested from the start, and many of his ideas were incorporated into the board design, such as the two color board, many of the piece designs, the use of the router to carve the squares, and others. We actually made an entire set of yellow pieces that was too big, so we had to try again with smaller templates. Across from him is "el guero" (his nickname means "the white one"), who eventually won the game pictured and helped put the finishing touches on many of the pieces and the board.
In the link are a couple of extra pictures. One is of the local kid champion, Cosimiro Martinez Garcia, playing with the red pieces on a cardboard board we used to get an idea of scale. The landscape is of the Los Tuxlas reserve. The mountain in the background is where the cooperative does their reforestation work.
The last picture in the album link is of a puppy that was wandering around the woodshop while we were working. We actually used this picture to design the dog piece, see if you can see the resemblence!
Tell Us What You Think
We're working hard to make this board as amazing as the game that will be played on it, and would love to hear what you think and how we can make it better. Please respond to this post with any questions or comments you might have. Keep in mind that exact pricing and release dates have not yet been decided.
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| « Last Edit: Aug 20th, 2010, 11:30am by aozeba » |
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Hirocon
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Re: Wooden Arima Sets Coming Soon
« Reply #1 on: Aug 18th, 2010, 4:21pm » |
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This looks awesome.
I have one concern about the real traps. It seems like as the game progresses and lots of pieces are captured, the pieces will pile up beneath the traps, perhaps preventing new pieces from fitting. Did you have this problem when play testing?
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aozeba
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Re: Wooden Arima Sets Coming Soon
« Reply #2 on: Aug 18th, 2010, 5:36pm » |
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I wondered about that too, and tried dropping a whole bunch of pieces to see if they would pile up as you describe. Turns out they bounce slightly away from the trap when they fall, enough that I couldn't get it to happen.
This continued to happen even when we padded the bottom of the droors.
The smaller pieces bounce more than the bigger ones, of course, so if you were to put the bigger pieces in first, I'm sure you could get them to pile up... I'm mainly thinking of the Elephant here, though its extremely rare for them to be captured.
We had to make the droors roomy enough that the elephant could stand in them, so there's a lot of space down there. I didn't try this (and cant right now because I don't have th board with me), but probably the only way to cause a jam is if you were to put all of the large pieces into the same trap.
The pieces fall into a droor, so if you ever do get a jam like that the solution might be as simple as to pull the droor out slightly and give it a little shake.
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megajester
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Re: Wooden Arima Sets Coming Soon
« Reply #3 on: Aug 18th, 2010, 5:39pm » |
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Oh this is just so cool. It just gives Arimaa a whole new feel, much more than just "chess reloaded". (Though that might make quite a good slogan actually...) It's fun, childlike, minimalist, trendy, rustic, righteous, all rolled into one...
Of course it looks VERY expensive. I'm having trouble affording the bog-standard set what with being the other side of the pond and all. If I ever lose my job can I be the official Arimaa distributor for Turkey? 
Here's another solution I actually thought about a while back but never got around to looking into. There's a material readily available in Turkey called meerschaum, it's a kind of soft white stone that's very easy to carve. If you ever come to Turkey you can see pipes and trinkets made of the it in touristy markets in Istanbul and the coastal attractions. It just so happens that my wife's hometown, Eskisehir, has more of the stuff underground than anywhere else, so there are a lot of meerschaum artisans there. In fact, the governor there presented a meerschaum chess set to the Japanese ambassador when he visited. I found a site online selling very detailed meerschaum sets for about 220 lira including tax, which is about 150 USD. But as I say it's very detailed set and they're always more expensive online, so I guess you could get a more minimalist kind of thing like what you've got there done for more like 50 dollars. But not with the funky traps.
You can't beat wood though. Wood rocks. Especially when it's got such a good cause behind it. Nice work!
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| « Last Edit: Aug 18th, 2010, 5:44pm by megajester » |
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FireBorn
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Re: Wooden Arima Sets Coming Soon
« Reply #4 on: Aug 18th, 2010, 7:32pm » |
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Awesome. Very, very cool. Any idea on the price? I'd really like to buy one.
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Fritzlein
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Re: Wooden Arima Sets Coming Soon
« Reply #5 on: Aug 18th, 2010, 11:22pm » |
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Absolutely gorgeous set. For me the price will determine whether on not I buy one, but for others I am sure price will be no object given the beauty of the set.
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Arimabuff
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Re: Wooden Arima Sets Coming Soon
« Reply #6 on: Aug 19th, 2010, 12:22am » |
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This belongs in a museum! I could swear I saw an identical one in Rameses' tomb! 
This is a magnificent set.
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ocmiente
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Re: Wooden Arima Sets Coming Soon
« Reply #7 on: Aug 19th, 2010, 1:55am » |
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This set looks great!
Looks like the guys playing need more training though. Did the guy on the right make an illegal move?
Regarding the dog, I think using a dog with floppy ears is a very good idea. Should help to make it easier to distinguish the pieces.
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omar
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Re: Wooden Arima Sets Coming Soon
« Reply #8 on: Aug 20th, 2010, 1:54am » |
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When Andon first emailed me and proposed this idea of making a wooden Arimaa set and said it would help forest communities that are less privileged I almost fell off my chair. I had to reread his email a couple of times to make sure I wasn't dreaming. I showed it to Aamir right away and he was also very excited about the idea. In the past I had considered the idea of making a wooden Arimaa set, and I think others had mentioned it in the forums here or on BGG. But, having an idea is one thing and implementing it is another. If Andon hadn't come along this idea would have sat on the back burner with the pile of other ideas  So I was very thankful that Andon came across Arimaa and chose to make these sets and support our fledgling community. Knowing that these sets would also help to support the less privileged was an added bonus.
It might be a bit early for Andon to put a price on the sets. Right now I think he is just looking for feedback on how the sets should look. It's not often that we get to provide input on the products we buy, so please take advantage of this opportunity and give Andon your honest feedback on how you would want the sets to look if you were going to buy it. Of course he will have to weigh in everyones input and the other constraints as he tries to finalize the design of these sets.
Also, I don't think our community is large enough that we can expect to have the products for Arimaa be as low cost as what you would find for Chess. Our products just won't have the volume to allow that. We have to be thankful that we at least have the opportunity to buy this product and be willing to support vendors who support our hobby.
Besides, if Arimaa becomes as popular as Karl predicts in his book, it won't matter what you paid for these sets, because these early wooden Arimaa sets will become collectors items and be worth much more. Even if Arimaa doesn't become popular, you can count on our fiat currencies continuing to depreciate and still these sets will be worth more in the future  So I would strongly suggest everyone to buy one; if not for yourself than as a gift for someone you love.
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aozeba
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Re: Wooden Arima Sets Coming Soon
« Reply #9 on: Aug 20th, 2010, 11:39am » |
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Quote:| Looks like the guys playing need more training though. Did the guy on the right make an illegal move? |
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I don't think so... he moved his elephant forward, pushed the horse closer to the trap, and then moved his rabbit forward.
Keep in mind that I'm a bit of an Arimaa noob and this was their first game lol.
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Janzert
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Re: Wooden Arima Sets Coming Soon
« Reply #10 on: Aug 20th, 2010, 12:48pm » |
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Wow these look really nice. So nice I'm afraid it will be out of my price range as well. I really hope the Arimaa community proves to have a large enough market for you.
Regarding the move in the video, it looks like they are probably counting the combined push as one step instead of one step for the pushed animal and one for the pusher. Because he uses the elephant to physically push the horse it would be quite understandable to think of it as one step. If put in standard notation the move played appears to be:
Ea4n Ra3n hb5e Ea5e Ra4n
Thanks for creating these sets,
Janzert
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chessandgo
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Re: Wooden Arima Sets Coming Soon
« Reply #11 on: Aug 20th, 2010, 1:07pm » |
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Looks more than awesome! I'm definitely going to want one
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jdb
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Re: Wooden Arima Sets Coming Soon
« Reply #12 on: Aug 20th, 2010, 3:40pm » |
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on Aug 20th, 2010, 1:07pm, chessandgo wrote:| Looks more than awesome! I'm definitely going to want one |
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+1
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aozeba
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Re: Wooden Arima Sets Coming Soon
« Reply #13 on: Aug 20th, 2010, 4:00pm » |
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Quote:Regarding the move in the video, it looks like they are probably counting the combined push as one step instead of one step for the pushed animal and one for the pusher. Because he uses the elephant to physically push the horse it would be quite understandable to think of it as one step. If put in standard notation the move played appears to be:
Ea4n Ra3n hb5e Ea5e Ra4n |
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Oh no, I see it now... sneaky sneaky guero. I hadn't noticed that he moves his rabbitt two steps in the move. But hey, like I said, this was like their first game. Thats one major difference between physical and online play - on the computer its impossible to make an illegal move, on a board someone must be watching to make sure it doesn't happen.
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rabbits
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Re: Wooden Arima Sets Coming Soon
« Reply #14 on: Aug 27th, 2010, 8:39pm » |
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Awesome! I'll definitely buy one!!!
(I just set the close up of the rabbit pieces as my desktop background.)
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