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Carambolages, huzzah!

Monday, March 14th, 2016

[ by Charles Cameron — a brilliant new exhibition breaks the usual museum rules to provoke prodigious & repeated leaps of imagination ]
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Carambolages Dominos

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Cath Styles, whose Sembl games are closely related to my own HipBone variants on Hermann Hesse‘s Glass Bead Game, recently pointed me to an exhibition called Carambolages that opened recently at the Grand Palais, Galleries Nationales, 3, avenue du General Eisenhower, Paris.

Strolling their website, I was struck by this double image, which in HipBone terms would be called a DoubleQuote, or a Sembl in Cath’s Sembl game:

Carambolages
(left) Sword, Kiribati, Micronesia Islands, Oceania, sd, Paris, Musée du Quai Branly
(right) Bertrand Lavier, Black & Decker, 1998 collection Giuliana and Tommaso Setari

It appears, indeed, that the exhibit in question features a Domino game of Sembls or DoubleQuotes —

Fascinating — and definitely a notable step in the expanding history of bead game variants — which I view, among other things, as an art movement that has yet to be written up as such.

Congratulations, Jean-Hubert Martin! The catalogue will no doubt be as close as I can get physically, but I’m all the way with you in spirit…

Bonne idée, bon chance!

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: four

Tuesday, September 8th, 2015

[ by Charles Cameron — cross-posted from Sembl — following parts 1, 2 and 3 with a fourth ]
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Back in my student days, I used to have a three dimensional tic-tac-toe board, 4 x 4 x 4, made of plexiglas sheets with holes drilled in them, and using colored golf-tees for markers. I could play pretty well on that board, but these ones would drive me nuts — whether for tic-tac-toe or for HipBone / Sembl.

with a chaser:

And that’s what I call a DoubleTweet.

Lotus board for a HipBone / Sembl type game

Saturday, January 4th, 2014

[ by Charles Cameron — simply blown away ]
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Cath Styles and her team have worked even more magic with the latest (at least to my knowledge) board for the Museum Game at the National Museum of Australia

Beautiful. Huzzah!!


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