MakeUseOf » chess

Play-By-Mail: Play Fun Games via Email Casually

Tina Sieber — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:00:31 +0000

As the name suggests, play-by-mail offers a number of popular games that can be played via mail.

Chess is a historic example for a play-by-mail board game. The game known as correspondence chess even kept the greatest figures of history entertained. A match was said to be played between King Henry I of England and King Louis VI of France in the early 12th century. Also Voltaire and Frederick the Great were engaged in play-by-mail chess during their time. In 1943, the FBI allegedly suspected Humphrey Bogart to be sending secret enemy codes to correspondence chess players overseas.

Today, eMail and websites make play-by-mail games quicker and more convenient than ever before. However, eMails play only a minor role. However, play-by-mail remains a fun way to find fun games to play online throughout the day, without devoting too much time to it. Besides, you don’t have to be online at the same time your match partner is. Here is a small selection of online games.

SoundChess

The SoundChess website is the link between you and your partner. Either one of you can set up the game and make the first move. With each move you can also include a message to your partner. The site shows the current board and provides some resources on possible chess openings.

After you made your first move, you will see the history of exchanged messages on the very right of the site.

ItsYourTurn

Here a hub for play-by-mail games, including Backgammon, Halma, Checkers, Jamble, and many more. There are 13 standard games, and dozens of variations to many of the games. To play, you must sign up.

You can get into a game in several different ways. You can start a new game and post it to the waiting room. You can also go directly to the waiting room and see which games are seeking a partner. A screenshot of the waiting room is posted below. The time limit refers to the time each player has to complete one move. The minimum is 3 days.

If you already know who will be your partner (they must be registered), you can start a match with a specific player.

Finally, you can be auto-matched for up to 5 different games of any type and at the same time.

Communication happens through ItsYourTurn‘s internal mailbox. However, notifications of new messages are sent to your eMail. All games and standings are listed on the game status page.

For my example I picked Halma. All moves are recorded and shown below the board. With each new move you can add a message for your opponent.

With the free account you can play up to 20 games at once and make 15 moves per day.

Phoenix

Phoenix is an incredibly complex play-by-mail strategy game.

Due to its complexity, the game has a very steep learning curve. However, sufficient material and an active community is available to guide players through each step. If you don’t mind reading and communicating with other players through forums, this game is for you.

After signing up and defining your mission preferences in a short questionnaire, you start out with your own ship. Head over to > Turns > Access and access your ship. It will then appear under > Turns.

To get familiar with your ship, its options, and available orders you should start a training session. Carefully read the mission, then head over to > Orders and give the first orders, so your ship takes off and heads to its first destination.

My mission was to dock in Balmoral on the planet Shiloh and issue a special action applying for the job as courier for the reserach labs of EEM Balmoral.

After making your orders you have to wait for the mission to progress.

When you play games via email you hardly ever know your partner personally and you cannot control how fast the game will progress. The advantage is that you can sit down and continue with your moves whenever you have time.

Have you ever played games via mail? Let us know in comments!

Image credits: lusi

3 Cool Sources For Free Printable Fill-In Puzzles

Simon Slangen — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:08:09 +0000

To Jack Thompson’s great dismay, I will not deny it – playing computer games is a ton of fun. However, if your computer is your only source of entertainment, you’ll be missing out on a lot of other fun things. Offline fun.

Offline fun is what’s to be had when there’s a power outage for example, and your beloved PC will not boot up. In the past month, Paul already wrote an article about the Top 10 Activities to do When There’s a Power Outage. For more alternatives, be sure to read on.

But even when your system is up and running, it pays to take a little break once in a while, and enjoy something else with some of your friends – play a game of football, basketball, or rugby. Or chess.

Today we’ll focus on – the irony! – online sources for free, printable fill-in puzzles and other offline fun. We’ll skip the conventional stuff, like popular sports and lying in your bed all day, and focus on good old puzzles. Even if you already spend a lot of time offline, this post still ought to be a decent source of inspiration.

1. The National Puzzler’s League

Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? I hope so, they’ve been around since 1893, and aren’t planning on leaving.

On their site, you’ll find a lot of ‘advanced puzzlers’ information for composing flats and puzzles, but also quite a few sample printable fill-in puzzles like cryptograms, crosswords and anagrams.

Nevertheless, there’s something else I want to shove under the spotlight; chat and con games. These are quite literally games that can be played over the chat (we’ll ignore these for now to keep the article’s concept up) and on conventions. In other words, ‘simple games that can be played without any preparation and often just with your voice.

2. Printable Fill-In Sudoku Puzzles

Do you like sudoku puzzles? So do we. Most cellphones, and even MP3-players have sudoku games these days, but if you’re to play on paper, you can always grab the nearest newspaper. Another option is to print some printable fill-in puzzles on Printable Sudoku Puzzles.

The available sudoku types include kid-sudoku’s (4×4, 6×6, 9×9), samurai sudoku’s (as displayed above) and X-sudoku’s, which also have to add up diagonally. Hell, if you want, you can even print blank grids and make your own sudoku’s!

Each type counts multiple difficulty levels, and there are literally thousands of available sudokus – to get a new one, you just have to refresh the page. Each sudoku has a number, so the next time you get online, you can check if you’ve made any mistakes. Have fun!

3. Printable Free Board Games

Technically, these aren’t puzzles, but because they’re ‘intellectual board games’, I’m going to include them as well.

Do you know those ‘traveler’s chess boards’? Way too bulky! Why don’t you just print your own? A simple google search shows up a multitude of printable game boards, including Checkers and even snakes and ladders!

Download a free printable Chess/Checkers board here – playing pieces included. Or are you looking for something more special? Try downloading a Go board!

Do you have some other cool ideas? Tell us all about them in the comments section below.

A Quick Look into New iGoogle Social Features

Mark O'Neill — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:01:43 +0000

So far I have looked at how Google Reader is turning into the major lynchpin of a possible Google social network, which could eventually prove worthy to seriously taking on rivals such as Facebook and Friendfeed.

But now I am going to take a look at another link in the Google network chain by discussing a new iGoogle feature – social features.

This newly introduced set of features, which are still rather in the spartan stage, allows you to add social features to your iGoogle page. This could be anything from playing chess with another Gmail user to sharing and collaborating information.

Let’s take a look at what there is. I can’t cover them all but I can give you a broad overview.

The one I like the most is being able to play chess with another Gmail user. When you add the chess module, this is what it looks like on the main page :

The little crowd logo in the top right hand corner shows that the module belongs to the social gadgets group. Now when you open it up, these are the options you will find :

You can start a new game (either by inviting a Gmail user from your Gmail Contacts or starting a game and waiting for someone to come along and accept), see your current games and you can even be taken to chess rules and techniques on Chess.com if you feel you are getting your butt whipped by your opponent.

There seems to be no limit to the number of games you can take part in and each game has various limitations on how long you have to move. If you started the game, you can choose or if your opponent started the game, they get to decide. It’s a lot like “ItsYourTurn” which I have profiled twice in the past here and here..

But chess is not the only thing you can do on iGoogle. You can also play scrabble with other Gmail users but for some inexplicable reason, this game is only restricted to US users. Bah! Google, please remove this stupid restriction – I want to play Scrabble!

Moving swiftly on, you can also show your Flickr and/or Picasa photos and see others which your Gmail Contacts are also showing under “shared photos”.

As far as collaboration tools are concerned, the only current one is a basic yellow notepad where you can add tasks and then share it with other Gmail contacts who presumably can add to it or delete from it. The collaboration column is to the right where you can specify who you want to share with but they must have this app installed too on their iGoogle page – or it won’t work.

If you wanted any further proof that Google is snipping away at Facebook, then take a look at iGoogle’s new “TimeLine” where you can say what you’re reading, listening to, watching and where you are at that moment – and read the same from your Gmail contacts.

When you start typing, you will start to get a drop down list of possibilities :

and eventually when you have filled in everything, it should look something like this :

As you start to play around with everything, you’ll see that it is all fully functional, but nevertheless a bit rough around the edges. The notepad collaboration is nothing to rave home about but obviously with a bit of improvement, this could turn out to be a lot better. They should also expand their list of social gadgets and maybe ditch some of the useless ones (a tile game is perhaps a bit pointless – at least to me anyway).

But once again, we are seeing another piece of the Google social network being slotted into place alongside Reader. What will be coming next?