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posted by n1 on Thursday November 19 2015, @02:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the snake-eyes dept.

Pieces from a mysterious board game that hasn't been played for 1,500 years were discovered in a heavily looted 2,300-year-old tomb near Qingzhou City in China.

There, archaeologists found a 14-face die made of animal tooth, 21 rectangular game pieces with numbers painted on them and a broken tile which was once part of a game board. The tile when reconstructed was "decorated with two eyes, which are surrounded by cloud-and-thunder patterns," wrote the archaeologists in a report published recently in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics.

We finally know what happened to Andy when he disappeared after casting Time Warp...


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The Game Mastermind Turns 50 this Year 12 comments

The simple codebreaking game Mastermind turns 50 this year. Vice goes into some background regarding the now classical game and its heyday.

If you only know Mastermind as a well-worn and underplayed fixture of living room closets and nursing home common areas, you may have no idea just how big this thing was in its early years. Invented in 1970, Mastermind would sell 30 million copies before that decade was up, and boast a national championship at the Playboy Club, a fan in Muhammed Ali, official use by the Australian military for training, and 80% ownership amongst the population of Denmark. "I never thought a game would be invented again," marvelled the manager of a Missouri toy store in 1977. "A real classic like Monopoly."

[...] If you don't know Mastermind at all, i.e. you never lived in Denmark, it's played over a board with a codemaker who creates a sequence of four different colored pegs, and a codebreaker who must replicate that exact pattern within a certain number of tries. With each guess, the codemaker can only advise whether the codebreaker has placed a peg in its correct position, or a peg that is in the sequence but incorrectly placed. According to the game's creators, an answer in five tries is "better than average"; two or fewer is pure luck. In 1978, a British teenager, John Searjeant, dominated the Mastermind World Championship by solving a code with just three guesses in 19 seconds. (In second place was Cindy Forth, 18, of Canada; she remembers being awarded a trophy and copies of Mastermind.)

Mordechai Meirowitz, an Israeli telephone technician, developed Mastermind in 1970 from an existing game of apocryphal origin, Bulls and Cows, which used numbers instead of colored pegs. Nobody, by the way, knows where Bulls and Cows came from. Computer scientists who adapted the first known versions in the 1960s variously remembered the game to me as one hundred and one thousand years old. Whatever its age, it's clear nobody ever did as well out of Bulls and Cows as Meirowitz, who retired from game development and lived comfortably off royalties not long after selling the Mastermind prototype to Invicta, a British plastics firm expanding from industrial parts and window shutters into games and toys.

The story relates a couple of tales of intrigue related to the game.

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2015, @04:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2015, @04:42AM (#265254)

    More propaganda fron that China has the oldest civilization blah blah

    • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2015, @12:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2015, @12:43PM (#265319)

      cowards and/or asian pride suckers probably modded you down.

      i don't see anything wrong with your comment. everyone is entitled to an opinion.

  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday November 19 2015, @07:37AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Thursday November 19 2015, @07:37AM (#265280) Journal

    Exactly what game was this alleged "Andy" playing when he supposedly cast a so-called "time warp"? I hardly think it would have been Chinese, especially not Han Chinese, because time travel was not a meme in that time and place. More to the point was reading the "chi". You know, the chi that tells you what might happen, so you can handle problems when they are small and not have to confront a whole and adult Indomitus Rex with a pack of Velociorapters of dubious allegience. Problem too big, should have dealt with it earlier. And on Sirius note, from the Dog Star in Canis Major: gaming, as in war-gaming, was a major part of ancient Chinese culture. Read your Sunzi. We wargame, based on accurate intel, to determine the outcome. If you cannot see the outcome, it is foolish to enter the ground of battle. Poor Andy. We will miss him, and remember him when his shield is carried to the wall tonight.

  • (Score: 1) by WalksOnDirt on Thursday November 19 2015, @08:46AM

    by WalksOnDirt (5854) on Thursday November 19 2015, @08:46AM (#265289) Journal

    Hey! How about telling us what form the 14-sided die was. Maybe a cubooctahedron [wikipedia.org] or a truncated cube [wikipedia.org]? Were all faces equally likely to come up?

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2015, @03:28PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2015, @03:28PM (#265365)
      Hey! How about following the article link you you could see the picture of the 14-sided die right at the top of the damn page!
      • (Score: 1) by WalksOnDirt on Friday November 20 2015, @04:20PM

        by WalksOnDirt (5854) on Friday November 20 2015, @04:20PM (#265856) Journal

        What? Read the article?

        Ok, now I have and it is a truncated octahedron. It looks close to fair.

    • (Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Thursday November 19 2015, @03:30PM

      by The Archon V2.0 (3887) on Thursday November 19 2015, @03:30PM (#265366)

      Or a dipyramid like a d10.

      That reminds me, I need to get a blank or 3d-printed d16 so I can make a 2d4.

  • (Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday November 19 2015, @10:03AM

    by Nuke (3162) on Thursday November 19 2015, @10:03AM (#265300)

    a poem written ......... gives an idea as to what the game was like:

    "Then, with bamboo dice and ivory pieces, the game of Liu Bo is begun; sides are taken; they advance together; keenly they threaten each other. Pieces are kinged, and the scoring doubled. Shouts of 'five white!' arise"

    Sounds a blast. High fives as well.

  • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday November 20 2015, @10:47AM

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Friday November 20 2015, @10:47AM (#265757) Journal

    So it's kind of like this in reverse: https://xkcd.com/593/ [xkcd.com]