#abstractgames — Public Fediverse posts

Sprouts 2025 will be on April 12, 2025. Sprouts is a #CombinatorialGames conference with a focus on undergraduates.
We traditionally have a focus on math and computer science, but are very willing to broaden our scope. The homepage with the Call for Talks is: https://kyleburke.info/sprouts/sprouts2025/

We will have talks for and by undergraduates and human and AI tournaments. Our game this year is: Toppling Dominoes, which you can play here: https://kyleburke.info/DB/combGames/topplingDominoes.html

The AI tournament is held in JavaScript. Instructions for submitting a player are here: https://kyleburke.info/sprouts/sprouts2025/sprouts2025ComputerTournament.php. I have had recent success with students training their players in Python, then using #TensorFlowJS to port it over to JS.

Registration is free! Please see the homepage for instructions to register.

#Sprouts2025 #SproutsConference #AbstractGames #BoardGames #UndergraduateResearch

An enduring interest of mine is “game systems” — that is, game components which can be used to play multiple games. A deck of cards is the canonical example, though there are others. One game system which I haven’t seen but believe would be fairly flexible: a collection of small colored bowls and colored stones. Beyond the obvious mancala games (of which there are many), circular bowls can be arranged into square or hex grids to play a variety of abstracts. #boardgames #mancala #abstractgames

At the beginning of the year i had an itch about making an abstract game in which captured pieces must be placed back on the board. Well that itch lead to CLAUSTRO, feel free to try it out at home (you only need a 5x5 grid and 2 sets of 4 pawns).
I hope you'll find it engaging and compelling as I wanted it to be.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/391334/claustro

#GiochiSeri #abstractgames #gamedesign #boardgames #pnp #giochidatavolo #AbstractGame #tabletop #tabletopgames