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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

The simple codebreaking game Mastermind turns 50 this year [vice.com]. 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.”

This was the good time.

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.)

Previously:
Magic the Gathering: The World's Most Complex Game [soylentnews.org] (2019)
Essen 2017: Best Board Games from the Biggest Board Game Convention [soylentnews.org] (2017)
Google DeepMind's AlphaGo Beats "Go" Champion Using Neural Networks [soylentnews.org] (2016)
Ancient Board Game Found in Looted China Tomb [soylentnews.org] (2015)

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