It's a word game. It's a board game. It's the first word/board game I've found that makes the best of both. It's called, "BLURT!" target="_blank">Blurt!"
As a word game, it's simple enough. You read a definition. The first player to, um, Blurt! it out, so to speak, wins. This is fun, because the fact that you know what a word means often has little to do with the speed of your Blurt!
As a board game, it's a race, where you throw the die and move your pawn - a pawn that has the power to send others back. There's just enough chance to keep everyone guessing.
There's the "Showdown," or, as we called it, "Blurt-Off," when you land on somebody else and have to compete head to head for first correct Blurt! Failure sends you back - depending on the roll of the die.
And then there's the "Takeover." Land on a square that is the same color as your pawn and jump on anybody else, no matter how far down the track they are. Then comes the Blurt-Off, and the risk of being sent all the way back to the Takeover square.
The board game balances the challenge of the word game beautifully, creating an exciting social dynamic where everyone is involved and anyone can win, up until the very last play.
Rolling Ball Sculptures, Automata, curiosities and Virtual Mechanisms
Some call it "Kugelbahn." I, on the other hand, call it my connection to just about everything I could imagine wanting to know about Rolling Ball Sculptures, Automata, curiosities and Virtual Mechanisms. In fact, I wouldn't even have thought I needed to know anything about Rolling Ball Sculptures, etc., until I moused my way to the Kugelbahn.
A climb along the Kugelbahn takes you past monumental achievements in the art of playfulness, and the playfulness of art.
Rolling Ball Sculptures - you know, the kind you've seen in the airport, like maybe at the International Terminal at LAX? Or like the kind kids make, exercising their skills in engineering, logic, the scientific method, maybe even in design, but above all something actually fun to play with. And watch. And be fascinated by. And marvel at. Like the famous "Nerf Herder" of artist Andrew Smith. And get a gumball from.
And that's only the tip of it, iceberg-like-wise. And what about the curiosities and Virtual Mechanisms? The Kugelbahn is a delightful find, upon which you will find much, um, delight.
Mind Sports Olympiad is a board and card game competition. A serious one. Where you pay money to compete in, for example, Abalone, Acquire, Age of Steam, Boku, Continuo, Diplomacy, Entropy, Go, Intelligence, Lines of Action, Lost Cities, Mastermind, Othello, Oware, Pacru, Puerto Rico, Rummikub, Scrabble, Settlers, Snatch, Trax, and Twixt. Did I mention Backgammon, Dominoes, Draughts, Lines of Action, Mastermind, Othello, Oware? Chess? Not to mention Bridge, Cribbage, Poker, Skat, Chinese Chess, Go, or, for that matter, Shogi. All of which is cool. But this is what really caught my eye, and heart:
"Almost all of the tournaments at the Mind Sports Olympiad are run on the Swiss system. This means that you do not get knocked out of a tournament if you lose a game - you continue to play against opponents who have approximately the same score as yourself and you continue to play every round no matter what your score may be. "
The Swiss System. What a wonderfully sane way to compete!
This "Canstruction" is the 2003 "Jurors' Favorite." Its title: "Canned Tuna: Give a man a fish feed him for a day; Give a man 1,238 cans of tuna, feed him for 1,238 days." It is made of: 1,238 cans, 415 bottles. There is no mention of the significance of the bottles.
But what is significant, and mightily so, is the existence of Canstruction itself - "A National Charity of the Design and Construction Industry created by the Society of Design Administration." Here's the concept: "Competing teams, lead by architects and engineers, showcase their talents by designing giant sculptures made entirely out of canned foods. At the close of the exhibitions all of the food used in the structures is donated to local food banks for distribution to pantries, shelters, soup kitchens, elderly and day care centers."
As you take a virtual tour through some of the can-structions exhibited in the past years, you get a good taste of the humor, playfulness, ingenuity, and sheer fun of this project.
Canstruction so perfectly blends play and art with social awareness that it is its own paradigm - one which I hope gets imitated and propagated and diversified and variegated until it gives birth to hundreds of related playful, creative, socially conscious, charitable events.
The esoteric collection of objects appearing in the accompanying image is actually an assortment of handmade sports equipment.
Can you find the baseball?
Well, maybe not. But there's a surprisingly battable Paper ball, made of: "crushed paper bound with masking tape." And the soccer-worthy Sock ball - being a "sock, stuffed with other sock or paper and tied off." And of course, the footballish Foam ball, made of: "block or pieces of foam rubber, stuffed inside pantyhose." Not to mention the volleyball-transforming Garbage bag ball. Actually, "a garbage bag filled with balloons or crumpled newspaper."
And then there's the handmade hangar-and-pantyhose tennis-racquet-like thing, and the paper hoops for something quite Quoits-like, and the variety of wonderfully flingable sock-and-ball tether balls...
It's a truly inspiring collection - inspiring us to make our own stuff, and play our own sports with our own rules, just for the fun of it.
Because that's what sports are really for. The fun of it. Aren't they?
If you find yourself having to convince people about the multitude of connections between play and learning, you'd do well to refer them to NASAGA, or the North American Simulation and Games Association, "a growing network of professionals working on the design, implementation, and evaluation of games and simulations to improve learning results in all types of organizations."
And, if you find yourself planning to be in Montreal, Oct. 15-18, you might even consider "Joining the Circus" - the 2003 Annual NASAGA conference. The thing about NASAGA conferences is that they are actually invitations to learn and play, and learn through play, and learn to play more. There are sessions where you can get a genuine taste of some of the most delicious simulations around. A sample smattering of some of the topics: Aha! - Games for Creating Creativity, The (Almost) All Purpose Toy Metaphor Game, Who's Team is it Anyway? High Performance Teams the Improv Way, The Kite: Fast, Fun I.D.!, Checkmate in Zero Steps!, Demystifying Myst: 3D Games & Learning, Life is not rehearsed: Play to learn!
It has always amazed me how, when playing with animals, there's often such a powerful sense of equality. I mean, I'm superior to my cats, no? So how come when we play together it feels like they're making up the rules?
Thinking of cats as playmates is but a short pounce from thinking of them as artists. The museum of Non-Primate Art takes a bold leap into human-animal play, ascribing to birds, cats and soon elephants, termites, and dogs an aesthetic sensibility that goes beyond mere art appreciation. We contemplate, for example, the subtleties of "splay anatomy" - the designs made by bird droppings. The Anatomy of a Splay identifies five major Splay-forms: the Schplerter, the Schplutz, the Sklop, the Splerd and the Splood. Oddly, there's no mention of the Splat.
If all of this makes you wonder whether you should take this site seriously or as some kind of joke, then you can consider your visit to the Museum of Non-Primate Art a complete success.
Anthony Thyssen's Kite Gallery is a testimony to the power of fun. In pursuit of the pointless joys of flying things on strings, we see art, science, creativity and a profound sense of devoted playfulness.
Let yourself drift through these links and you'll find yourself afloat on winds of art and reason, design and technique, technology and meteorology, science, mathematics, and physics - all for the sheer fun of it.
The reason I find myself needing to emphasize this point about the true nature of Wikki Stix is that a set of Wikki Stix bears a startlingly close resemblance to a set of colored pipe cleaners. Which is what makes Wikki Stix so easily mistaken for a children's toy.
So moved have I been by the significantly mature play value of the Stix Wikki, that I have published a carefully wrought treatise on Stix-use as a training tool for executive and creative teams.
Yes, it is true, one could say that they are merely bits of colored yarn dipped in some kind of special wax that allows them to be so easily bent and stuck to each other on a piece of paper, and the wall, and mirror, and bathroom tile. But one must also acknowledge that the wax is really quite special, as are the people who manufacture, package and distribute Wikki Stix, and maintain a website-full of creative Wikki wisdom, adapted, of course, for the visually impaired.
Taprats is a site devoted to interactive, Islamic Star Patterns.
Islamic Star Patterns? As the author explains: "Over a thousand years ago, artisans in the Islamic world began to develop a system for constructing intricate geometric art based on radially symmetric starlike figures."
What we have here is an opportunity to play with this art - in a way its originators had never conceived of. By launching a rather sober-looking Java applet, we can shrink and stretch and widen and combine or way to works of wonder - interlacing, intricate patterns of knots and not and what not. It's solid evidence of one of the computer's major contributions to the art of fun, bringing us new, and endlessly fascinating tools for playing art.
The Rolling Ball Web is a portal to just about all things marble-ous. There are links to rolling ball sculptures and rolling ball clocks and toys and games with rolling balls, and rolling ball-influenced scientific apparatus, museums, movies, computers, perpetual motion and gumball machines.
"If you haven't seen a rolling ball sculpture," writes David M. MacMillan, the site's author, "then it's both very simple and very difficult to describe one to you. On the simple side: A typical rolling ball sculpture is one where many balls (marbles, billiard balls, ball bearings, spherical things) are raised to some height from which the individual balls follow one or more paths back down, encountering ingenious mechanisms on the way. On the complicated side: no written description is going to explain why it is that most people of any age just stop and watch these sculptures for a long time."
Rolling Ball sculptures are dances of art and technology and wonder and play. Rolling Ball Clocks are Rolling ball sculptures that tell time. And rolling ball toys and games are invitations to join the dance.
The site hasn't been updated in 4 years, so some web-spelunking will be required to get past the dead links. I can almost promise you that making your way to the world of rolling balls will be well-worth the climb, for it's where fun and art and science and technology all play so beautifully together.
It's a word game. It's a board game. It's the first word/board game I've found that makes the best of both. It's called, "BLURT!" target="_blank">Blurt!"
Some call it "
Mind Sports Olympiad
This
Anthony Thyssen's 
Wikki Stix
Taprats
The Rolling Ball Web