page sixteen

The Gambit

Everything else on this site is something to look at. This is something to lose. Today's number has invented a board game — the size of the board, the pieces and exactly how each of them moves, whether there is a king to take or a far rank to reach, and whether you can crush a man between two of yours — and then something has to actually play it. Nobody wrote an opening book for a game that did not exist this morning, so the opponent is working it out by searching, the way you would. Tomorrow this game is gone and a different one is here.

Click a piece, then click a marked square. N invents a new game, F turns the board round.

yours its a move a capture

Today's game

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— · seed —

How it is won

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    Play

    —

    Opponent

    Moves played · 0

    The pieces

    Each diagram is that piece standing in the middle of an empty board, looking up the way you are. Filled dots are squares it can move to or take on; hollow green is a move it cannot take with; orange rings are captures only. Faded dots mean it keeps going in that direction until something stops it.

    How a game is invented

    1. 01

      Cut the board

      Six, seven or eight squares a side, sometimes with a couple of squares knocked out of the middle. Whatever is removed is removed in pairs, a half-turn apart, so the two halves of the board stay identical — neither side is handed the better ground.

    2. 02

      Invent the men

      Three or four kinds of piece, each built by stacking movement atoms: step one square, slide until blocked, leap two-and-one over anything, only forwards, take one way and move another. A piece's worth is not assigned, it is measured — the generator counts how many squares that piece could reach from every square of an empty board and prices it off that, which is how a slider ends up worth five of a foot soldier without anyone deciding it should.

    3. 03

      Say how it ends

      Take the crown, walk a man onto the far rank, or take absolutely everything. Sometimes a sandwich rule comes with it, so a piece caught between two of yours is lifted off whether it was ever attacked or not. The opening array is then drawn once and rotated a half-turn, so both armies are the same army.

    4. 04

      Find out how to play it

      The opponent has never seen this game either. It generates every legal move, plays each one out a few turns deep, assumes you will answer as well as it can see, and keeps the line that leaves it best off — with a cut-off so it stops examining a branch you would never allow, and a tail search that follows exchanges to the end so it does not stop counting halfway through a trade. Gentle looks three moves ahead, Sharp looks seven and will spend a second or two doing it. Set the same engine deep against the same engine shallow and the deep one wins six games and loses none, which is the only evidence on offer that any of this is working.

    The same date integer that draws the field on the front page seeds every room here — it plants the Garden, writes the Chimes, deals the Lattice, files the Almanac, scatters the Observatory, raises the Atlas, stocks the Menagerie, lights the Orrery, letters the Codex, runs the Chronicle, builds the Folly, cuts the gears of the Engine, threads the Loom and prices the Exchange. Here it writes a rulebook. Nothing is saved between visits, so if you beat it, that is between the two of you and the tab you are about to close.