The World's Most Popular Board Games

Board games have been in existence over centuries ago. The oldest known board games trace as far back as 5870 B.C. This just proves the human necessity to be entertained and challenged at the same time. Board games, more than any, requires mental strategizing. Unlike sports, where the mind is challenged as well but concentrates more on the physical capabilities of the player, board games requires the competence of the player's thinking process and quick-wittedness to win. This is one of the attributes that set apart board games from many other games.

Board Games Live and Die

This does not mean, however, that all board games are successful. Board games live and die depending on their popularity. If there is an art in playing them, there is even greater art required in creating them. Senet and Mehen are board games traced back in ancient Egypt, but their existence in contemporary or popular culture is almost nonexistent, but their evolution can be more recognizable today. Truth to be told, it is the applicability of the game towards the modern times that, most of the time, decides if the game will live on or wither away.

Grandparents of Board Games

Backgammon, Go and Chess are probably the oldest games still played today. Backgammon is considered as a race game. It requires moving one's pieces across to the other side of the board. This game needs to roll dice to determine the moves of the game. This game dates back to ancient Egypt, around 3000 B.C., and it's believed to have evolved from the ancient game of Senet.

Go is believed to have originated in China back in mid-2000 B.C. specifically, it can be traced to Emperor Yao, and subsequently its popularity spread to Korea and Japan. Chess, on the other, was believed to have originated in India in the 6th century. Scholars consider chess to have evolved from an ancient game called Chaturanga.

Clearly Go predates chess a few thousand years back, but they have their similarities. Each only requires two players, and they have to outwit one another. It is not surprising to know that chess originated from India, a country that shares a border with China. However, one glaring similarity both Go and chess have is that they are both war games.

Ancient forms, yes, and nearly incomparable to the war strategy games modern times have to offer in video games. It is believed that both these games came from tribal warlords who used same looking pieces to strategize their attack plan.

In retrospect, having war games as the oldest, still popular board game in present times does give people an idea why it is still applicable today.

Modern Times, Contemporary Board Games

There have been countless board games that have come into existence in our time. But little have the shelf life as the most popular board games still being played today. The exclusive list includes:

* Monopoly

* Clue

* Risk

* Life

* Snakes and Ladders

* Checkers

* Scrabble

Of course, Monopoly is almost recognizable across the globe. This is strange because Monopoly isn't exactly the easiest game to understand. Yet, despite this, the Guinness Book of Records recognizes Monopoly's worldwide appeal, with over 750 million having already played the game. To think that it has been in existence since 1935, Monopoly's staying power is a testament how real estate, business, banking, and investment is applicable in our times.

Clue, on the other hand, relies on murder and mystery to keep players interested. Risk is a perfect example of how ancient games like chess came about and Go have evolved to adjust to their cultural environment. Life, in contrast, predates Monopoly. It was created in 1860 and simulates, well, life. Marriage, career, and so on are part of the game, and people find it enjoyable to imagine what life would be like, or what life could have been, in this game.

Snake and Ladders is also another popular board game. The trouble with this game is many adults do not find it appealing. That is why it is nearly exclusive only to children. Adults normally find games depending on chance boring. Relying solely on the dice to determine the player's fate is not as challenging as most adults would want from board games. The player's fate in Monopoly is also determined by the dice, but unlike Snakes and Ladders, it still requires players to strategize.

Checkers, or English draught, is another popular game believed to have stemmed out from the form of chess and Go. Still, it is still considered as one of the most popular board game today. In fact, it is more popular than Go, which is commonly associated with Japan.

Lastly, there are the word games. Scrabble is the most popular among all word board games. Like chess or checkers, there are even world competitions for Scrabble. Word Factory, which can be loosely considered as a board game, is also a popular word game.

Visit Board Games Store A Place Where You Can Find Huge Selection Of Popular Board Games You Can Also Find More Board Games Articles

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Create Computer Games - Get Started on Creating Your Own Virtual Worlds

I’ve always loved video games, ever since I first played them on a friend’s computer in the afternoon after elementary school. There’s something almost magical about the fact that we can move images around and interact with virtual worlds, a living fantasy presented for us to interact with however we please. I’ve also always wanted to make games myself but, until recently, didn’t have the technical knowledge to do so. Now, I’m a second year software engineering student, so if I weren’t able to code a game without too many dramas there’d be something drastically wrong. But what about the common person: the person for whom the term ‘memory leak’ conjures up images of their grandfather, ‘pipeline’ is where the water flows, and ‘blitting’ is unheard of? Well, everyone can get in on the game creation process, and you don’t even need to learn ‘real’ programming to do so.

So where do games start? With an idea. Games, like all fiction, require an idea to be successful. Sure, in the same way you can just sit down and write a story without foresight, you can jump on in and slap a game together. However, unless you get ridiculously lucky, the best works are usually the ones that have been well thought out beforehand.

There are two methods of planning a project. You can start from a known technological standpoint and build your project on top of that or you can just go for the design, add as many features and ideas as you like, and then remove the ones that you can’t use when you’ve decided on the technology you’re going to implement the game with. In general, the second type is probably the best one to go with when designing games. When you’re first starting out however, the first option will save you many headaches.

So, for a first game you’re going to want a pretty simple idea. Don’t get me wrong, crazy-go-nuts game ideas are fantastic, and there should be more of them out there, but you’re not going to be able to create a real world simulator with fifty billion virtual people all interacting real time with your actions having a butterfly effect on the future of the virtual universe when it’s just your first game. Really. Many people try it; none that I know of have succeeded. Imitation is the best way to start out. Simple games such as ‘Space Invaders’, ‘Tetris’, ‘Pacman’ or even ‘Pong’ are great places to start. All are largely simple to create but have some inherent challenges. ‘Pacman’ for example, requires path finding for the ghosts. I recommend that you start even simpler than that for your very first attempt. ‘Space Invaders’ is a nice point to jump in. You can make a simple, complete game without much effort and it’s almost infinitely extensible.

If you’re stuck for an idea, pick a genre that you enjoy. Do you love adventure games such as ‘Monkey Island’, ‘Grim Fandango’, ‘Space Quest’, ‘King’s Quest’ etc.? Design one of those. Are you into fighting games like ‘Street Fighter’, ‘Tekken’, ‘Soul Calibur’, ‘Mortal Kombat’ and so on? Come up with an idea for that. Do you like first person shooters such as ‘Quake’, ‘Half Life’ or ‘Doom’? I don’t recommend it as a first project, but you can always give it a go. Feel free to be as generic as you like, this is a learning experience after all.

Now that you have your idea it’s time to flesh it out. Don’t worry about the technology or the fact that you may not know how to actually implement a game just yet, just grab yourself some paper and a pencil and go crazy with ideas. Describe the main characters, game play, goals, interactions, story, and key mappings, anything you can think of. Make sure you have enough detail so that someone can read through the notes and play through the game in their head with relative accuracy. Changing game design during the coding process is almost always a bad idea. Once it’s set, it should remain set until the tweaking phase (I’ll go into this more later) or you’re likely to enter ‘development hell’, where the project goes on and on; more and more work is done with less and less outcome.

At the end of this period of your game creation, you should have the following:

- A written outline of the game’s characters and possibly a sketch or two (be they space ships, yellow circles, cars or the prince of the dark kingdom of Falgour, you need to know who or what the player will be and who they will compete against)

- A written outline of the story (if there is one, this isn’t too vital for ‘Space Invaders’ or ‘Tetris’, but for ‘Uber Quest: An Adventure of Awesomeness’ it’s a really good idea)

- A description of game play, written or storyboarded. Storyboards are visual representations of ideas. Draw your characters in actions, with arrows showing the flow of action and short written descriptions detailing the events occurring in your image (because some of us aren’t fantastic artists and our images can be a little… open to interpretation…)

Now that you have a fleshed out idea, it’s time to work out how this will all get put together. If you’ve gotten to this point and are worried that you’re going to have to spend years learning complex programming languages in order to implement your idea, fear not! Others have already done the hard yards for you. There are many RAD (Rapid Application Development) Tools available for game creation, a number of which are available for free online. Some of them still require you to learn a ‘scripting language’ (a simplified programming language made for a specific task) but in general this isn’t too complicated or involved. I’ve compiled a brief list of some of these I have found at the end of the article. The free ones are listed first, organized by game genre.

Well, that should be enough to get you started in the creation of your game. The most important thing to remember once you’ve gotten this far is that you need to complete your game. Many people start a project and then lose interest and it fails, or they keep moving on to one new project after another without finishing anything. Start small, build a working (if simple) game that is, above all else, complete. When you get to this stage you will always have a huge number of things that you wish to change, fix etc. but you’ll get a great feeling from knowing that it is, in its way, finished.

From this point, you can start the tweaking phase. Play your game a few times and ask others to do the same. Take note of what isn’t fun or could be better and change things here. At this stage, it is more important than ever to keep backups of previous versions so that if a change doesn’t work you can go back and try something different without losing any of your work. It is at this point that you can add all new features, improve graphics and sounds, whatever you please, safe in the knowledge that you’re working on a solid foundation.

When you’re happy with your game, why not share it with the world? There are many cheap or free places out there for you to host your files on and then you can jump on link lists and forums and let everyone know about your creation. Well, I hope that this has been a helpful introduction into the art of creating games. It’s a great deal of fun, and can open whole new avenues of creative expression for you to explore. Jump in and have fun!

Links:

General Game Creation:

(Tools that allow easy creation of many different game types)

Game Maker: http://www.gamemaker.nl

MegaZeux: http://megazeux.sourceforge.net/

Adventure Games:

(Games such as Monkey Island, King’s Quest, Space Quest etc.)

Adventure Game Studio: [http://www.bigbluecup.com]

AGAST: http://www.allitis.com/agast/

3D Adventure Studio: http://3das.noeska.com/

ADRIFT (for text adventures): http://www.adrift.org.uk/

Role Playing Games (RPGs):

(Games such as Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, Diablo)

OHRPG: http://www.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/

RPG Toolit: http://www.toolkitzone.com/

Fighting Games:

(Games such as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Soul Calibur etc.)

KOF91: http://sourceforge.net/projects/kof91/

MUGEN (unfortunately the site is largely in French): http://www.streetmugen.com/mugen-us.html

Side-Scrolling Games:

(Games such as the 2D Mario Games, Sonic the Hedgehog, Double Dragon etc.)

The Scrolling Game Development Kit: http://gamedev.sourceforge.net/

There are many others available as well. One particularly useful site for finding game creation tools is: http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html

Also of note, although not freeware, are the excellent game creation tools available by Clickteam at: [http://www.clickteam.com/English/]

Klik and Play and The Games Factory in particular are the programs to have a look at and download the free demos of.

If you really want to do things right and program the game yourself, there are some excellent programming resources available at the following locations:

Java Game Programming:

http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/jg/

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1262.asp

http://javaboutique.internet.com/tutorials/Java_Game_Programming/

Visual Basic Game Programming:

[http://markbutler.8m.com/vb-tutorial.htm]

C++ Game Programming:

http://www3.telus.net/alexander_russell/course_dx/introduction_dx.htm

http://www.rit.edu/~jpw9607/tutorial.htm

General Information:

http://www.gamedev.net/

http://www.gamasutra.com/

Daniel Punch M6.Net http://www.m6.net Daniel Punch is a university student learning how to make a living through having fun.

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