“…. we had a hard limit of 8 characters for player skills, enemy skills, and enemy names, and a generous 10 for item and equipment names. The hard part is that 8 characters in Japanese can give you enemy names like 憤怒の眼光主, which romanizes as “Fundo No Gankou-Nushi” and translates as the even lengthier “Owner of the Malicious Glare.”

That’s a lot to pack into 8 English letters. So in this case, we jettisoned the word “Owner” as being the least meaningful word in the name, and were left with “Malicious Glare.” Casting about for some shorter synonyms for “malicious” gives us words like “evil” and “bad,” which are both short enough to fit. But Evilglare and Badglare have that slightly clumsy air that went hand-in-hand with the old NES days, and we try to produce localizations more natural than that, even with character limits as tough as these.

Read more of the article for weapons workarounds and maintaining historical authenticity! Sigh - I so wish this was my job…

99 no Namida essentially does what it says on the tin. It’s an emotional development game (one might say… an EMO game?!) which creates a ‘personality profile’ based on your answering a few questions on the starting input screen, and then uses this profile to generate a story which should… make you cry! The point being that it is healthy to unleash your emotions and release stress, whether that is through a solitary tear rolling down the cheek or an all out bawl.

Whether this is true or not, I certainly can’t imagine playing this one on the tube. And how does it measure if you’ve cried or not? And if it doesn’t try and measure, then why not just read a weepy book? Or download aforementioned “1 Litre of Tears” into yr iPod? (Or in fact, read the actual true-life diary the story came from?). Can the crying game… really be a game at all? So - I seriously have zero clue on whether this will make it out of Japan. Can any of our Japanese correspondents confirm or deny swathes of salarymen sniffling as inconspiciously as possible into their briefcases on the tube each morning? Or… given the genre of the mag I saw the original ad in, swathes of schoolgirls gathered round in the playground, at the heart-rending stories of … ???

Well - I suppose emotional development is as important as mental development, given the popularity of Prof. Kawashima’s Brain Training — which has JUST dropped out of the UK charts! For the first time since release! Is this a sign that we’re ready to develop other parts of our mind, as well as arithmetic and logic? Hardly very Vulcan, is it…

—yog sothoth beyond the mountains of madness with the indescribable terror

—the winged fungus-beings in the outer dimensions with the unspeakable grimoire

—the crawling chaos at your study door with the aarrgh — !

(concept courtesy AL EWING and some foax playin the arkham horror rpg at the pembury last night)

So what to say about this little diversion, beyond it being the best game that wasn’t around in 1985? Actually you would feel a bit robbed if you paid 20p a game for this as some of the random jumps can leave you almost completely shafted. And it only took me about thirty goes to defeat it. But as a mash-up it feels a bit like playing WarioWare, lots of silly little rushes of excitement when you try and work out if it is
a) possible to win in this five second burst
b) possible to stay alive.
But considered as a copyright busting bootleg of goodness which manages to take all its component parts and make something exciting and new out of them, its a lovely little indie gem. (I know Sonic and Mario are like best buddies now, and taking part in the Olympics and probably oppressing Tibetan Game designers, but there is something about watching pac-man trying to work out how it can beat an asteroid which is great).

You can download it here from Farbs.org what made it.

*Indie Games don’t always fuss about quality or content of the games as this Japanese looking up ladies skirts game shows.

From an anonymous source close to the company, I’ve found myself in possession of the “Infocom Drive” — a complete backup of Infocom’s shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I’ve ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

If you want to play it here is the z-code file. You need an application that loads z-code files.

An April 1st (2009) release, but if it is another joke it’s an amazingly good-looking one! There have been previous fake Zelda movie trailers, mostly by fans, and you can tell.

The persistence of mazes in the text adventure genre of computer games is due perhaps for two reasons. Mazes seem to have an affinity with things literary - they can be used metaphorically or as entities in a magical realist settings, in ways that wouldn’t cohere in more ‘realist’ graphically-oriented game. There is also the metaphor of ’story as maze’ of which Borges ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ is the most well known.

More importantly, the genre just seems to attract game designers who like mazes as mazes, and as a historical ‘in joke’. In Graham Nelson’s Designer’s Manual he puts it bluntly: “it is designers who like mazes … players do not like mazes.” I would also go along with his description of mazes as the ‘locked room’ of text adventures. Provide a novel solution, and you please everyone.

So it goes that in modern text adventures, mazes in name and appearance only often have peculiar and map-free solutions:

SPOILAZ ALERT
* an unsolvable maze - you flip a crucial location through the FOURTH DIMENSION making it solvable
* hedge walls surround the maze centre - you go back in time and squeeze herbicide on a section of the not yet grown hedge
* a fantasy sequence stuck in an unending maze - you eventually notice you are a bird and fly out

Certainly that last one would be hard to implement in a graphical game.

Bonus links:

3D Monster Maze - you will need to refer to the ZX81 keyboard to find the ‘CONT’ key that starts the game.

“You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike” - the maze as decribed in the original text adventure

Updated bonus

A model of Knossus in the Herakleion Archaeological Museum

My pics| the worlds pics of Knossus on flick’r

Yes, he’s failed that final saving throw and the Official D’n'D site has a black front page today.

I had the first two, and never finished it as an actual adventure (even with the indestructible character cheating), and much like Sorcery it seemed that if you hadn’t picked up certain items in a previous book you would be unable to proceed*. It used slightly different stats to Fighting Fantasy and combat was harder (if you didn’t cheat - which everyone did). But the real complexity came down to the patronage system, where you were favoured by one of the gods. The problem this threw in was which ever god you picked, ALL THE OTHERS HATED YOU, so you were constantly being sucked into traps by Hera or having sex with Zeus disguised as a swan. I had heard, though I find this unlikely, that if you picked Poseidon as you patron the entire third book would be over in about ten minutes.

This makes sense because all of the books were loose appropriations of some actual Greek myths. So the first one has a bit of Troy, a bit of Marathon and then a Jason and the Argonauts subtext. The second riffs on Theseus heavily, and then you get stuck in that bloody maze forever (mazes in gamebooks = very cheap way of padding out the adventure). The final one rips off the Odyssey mercilessly, with you being bounced from island to island and having sex with Circe (like I say, apparently because I never played this one). I had given up on the third one after being stuck in the damn maze in the second. (Someone else’s frustrations here). I can’t say they were great, but they were diverting in the way most of the Fighting Fantasy books were, and they piqued a small amount of interest in Greek mythology in them. To the extent that later Hercules and Xena seemed a touch derivative of the BLOODFEUD OF ALTHEUS (top marks for that title anyway). But if I saw one in a second hand shop now, maybe, just maybe I’d have to make the choice between : if you steer towards the Scylla Go To 452, If you prefer to aim for the Charybdis go to 23.

*It was easy to tell what these items were, because if you bought At The Court Of The Crimson King Minos it had a section that told you what your equipment would be if you had bought it as a stand-alone adventure. Notably unusual in that equipment was a ball of wool which when you think about it makes perfect sense!

Well I love the PG Tips monkeys but you don’t see me throwing bananas on the pitch at my favourite tea loving footballers. As Marina’s piece goes on to say, the big problem is not just the racism (or lack of) that lies in these comments, it is that within cricket the concept of sledging is not just allowed, it is in some instances celebrated. Cricket is to some extent a psychological game, test cricket to the degree that the physical stamina in staying at the crease for eight hours subsides to the mental stamina of that much concentration. When you add in the personal insults, the false calls and the slurs upon your wife - you can see how sledging has become accepted despite the view in the laws of “The Spirit Of The Game“.

All of which is nothing compared to this quite frankly remarkable article from a New Zealand newspaper which protests Singh’s innocence on a completely different front. Namely that it was not racist to describe Symonds as a monkey, rather it was accurate, as Symonds does indeed look like a monkey. A claim not just undermined by being miles off beam, but also by pairing a photo of Symonds with a monkey which he bears absolutely no passing resemblance to.

(Link from Pete W on ILX whose cricket thread is always worth it)

I’m loving this game (about half way through I reckon), but if I have a complaint, it is that the visual resolution of where you are in all the magnificent 3D-ness is a little underdetermined by the graphics you see. Hence the shadow under your feet “as if light in Mario’s universe always falls directly toward the nearest source of gravity” is not only essential, but I find i spend more time fixing on the shadow than on Mario!

To be fair, the game designer recognises this as mentioned in this Gamasutra interview.

JANUARY:
More Cheese That’s Good To Fry: useful and nutritious.
“Maggie May”: where’s the chorus?
Jamie T’s Album Cover: this is our truth tell me yrs.

FEBRUARY:
It’s Hot!: the sleb comic strip lives on.
The All New SI Units Of Measurement: year’s biggest spam magnet! But a great post.
Shared Universe Comics: I was completely wrong about all this but I still like my idea better than the dire reality.
Your Own Private Quatre Bras: aka A Dalek Make Of Light Part 2.

MARCH:
“Vincent”: Don gets a 1.
Pomp and Circumnavigation: Pointlessness exalted at Wembley.
Sci-Fi for Kids: Andre Norton: big retrospective!

APRIL::
The Sex Pistols at the Manchester Free Trade Hall: pathbreaking pop archaeology.
Take The Brain: stupid chess.

MAY:
This Is The Review That Goes Like This: please don’t go and see Spamalot.
Worlds In Collusion: the problems of RPG worldbuilding.

JUNE:
Let’s Make Glastonbury Better: a sensible proposal!
“Mouldy Old Dough”: the heart of one 70s.

JULY:
“Oliver’s Army”: we could talk all night.
Moaning about Black Snake: psychological complexity EXPOSED.

AUGUST:
IHM Health And Safety Watch: no, Mike Scott, no!
Diet Water / The Scandal of Skinny Water: consumer watchdog on the prowl..

SEPTEMBER:
“Think Of You”: Whigfield’s only proper song!
Food Science: Mars Planets: the second law of thermodynamics - DEFIED.

OCTOBER:
“Waterloo”: A milestone for Popular
Radio Wrong: the horror, the horror.
Confused by Cerveza?: a linguistic lesson.
Yo DJ Pump This Party: Kat’s first gig!

NOVEMBER:
Whodiddit? - the rules of crime fiction, explained. 
Overgrown doorways: woods between the words
Burial - “Untrue”: writable music and the joy of the 6AM twix 

DECEMBER:
Self-organising systems in the London Bridge Pret A Manger: social physics! with diagram!
Spicy chocolate curry cupcakes: tasty yet controversial recipe!

GUILTY AS CHARGED! The prosecution indicts GABE SAPORTA!

But that is nothing compared to the complexity of the Cluedo characters fictional history. Material gathered for last nights Lollards, but unused, uncovered the following salient facts: which may be useful in your future sleuthing in the house with no toilet:

The murder of Dr Black (Mr Boddy / Snr Caddaver) took place on Saturday June 5th, 1926.
Miss Scarlett studied at Madame Puce’s School For Girls (like a badly painted Chalet School one assumes)
Mrs White’s real name is Blanche Chaulkley.

This and more mental detail can be found here. Including the names and plots of some of the 50 mysteries in Cluedo Mysteries (a spin off game). My favourite being:

12: The Scarlett Letter
Miss Scarlett’s letter is stolen.

The gag is a neat summary of assumptions about the gaming hobby. Firstly, it’s escapist, and enjoyable because of its escapism. But also, the people who play it are – or are going to become – accountants, computer programmers, admen, etc. There was very, very little counter-cultural about the early RPG hobby. It shared visual style and iconography with 70s head shops and underground comix but was a lot squarer, nervous (to say the least!) about the chemical and sexual pursuits the underground embraced, and it’s one of the few areas of late 70s/early 80s cultural activity where it’s extremely difficult to detect any kind of punk blowback.

The squareness carried over to the games themselves. D&D and most early RPGs aren’t simply games of escapism, they’re games of aspiration. D&D is an American frontier fantasy more than it is an attempted recreation of Tolkein – characters born under the innate democracy of the dice, using their abilities as best they may to make something of themselves. The rest of the gameworld generally admires the characters – they get rich, famous, powerful. They have Made It.

Not all games followed this model, of course. In Call Of Cthulhu, for instance, characters were ordinary 1920s people with ordinary skills, marked out by their gradual awareness of the Awful Truths about the world’s real cosmologies. This knowledge didn’t empower them, though, in fact it tended to hasten them to an early and horrid death. In the comedy sci-fi game Paranoia, players also tended to die quickly, victims of a universe just as hostile and absurd as HP Lovecraft’s. But in neither of these cases were the characters set outside everyday life – they just gradually discovered that the everyday life was a lot more inimical to humankind than they might have liked.

The White Wolf games – following the success of Vampire, they issued games based on werewolves, ghosts, fairies, etc. - were different. Here the characters had been – usually unwillingly – taken outside ordinary life, and found themselves in a situation where the mundane world became something to be rejected or actually preyed upon. The dynamic of the game had shifted from aspiration to rejection.

I had come to find the aspirational attitudes of games like D&D increasingly absurd – the constant, repetitive pursuit of experience points was fine in a competitive game but seemed pointless in a hobby which stressed co-operation and socialisation. But I didn’t like the White Wolf solution either – and this is almost certainly going to say a lot more about me than about the games, but here goes anyway. 

Vampire seemed to appeal to particularly self-indulgent impulses in its players. Whether this was implicit in the game or just in the players I encountered, I don’t know, but the base assumption seemed to be that vampires were in general a superior breed, noble cursed outsiders who were more sensitive, tortured and perceptive than the common herd. Which just happened to be the same common herd who confronted the players as they emerged blinking from the game room every week.

So adolescent game-players like to feel different from other people, and enjoy metaphors that let them fictionalise their loneliness? Big deal. I thought I was cleverer than most people too. The thing is I didn’t turn to RPGs and science fiction just because they flattered my cleverness, I also turned to them because I was bad at sports and socially awkward. Being socially awkward, I was coming to realise, probably wasn’t something to valorise, especially if the only way to valorise it was to denigrate the social ease of other people as some kind of con or self-deception and reclassify them as a herd or mass.

(And, yes, the period when I was wriggling in annoyance over Vampire was also the period when I was first getting really frustrated with indie music. No surprises there.)

(It’s suddenly struck me that my attraction to refereeing games, rather than playing in them, must partly have been that they force a certain level of even-handedness and empathy on you, or at any rate they do if you want the gameworld to seem alive and convincing to your players.)

All this was just part of growing up, and if the only choices had been D&D or Vampire I’d probably have ditched the gaming hobby a lot earlier than I did. It was around this time, though, that I started realising that this squarest of hobbies had somehow grown a thriving avant garde. And it had grown in part from an element of gaming most table-toppers mocked and despised – live role-playing.

(The next instalment of IWAG will go back and look at LRP and my experiences with it - photos sadly not included)

They also built into their systems a lot of modifications designed to make gaming more story- and character-oriented, correctly recognising that this was the one real point of difference the tabletop hobby now had in a world where videogames could handle the dice-rolling and levelling-up more efficiently and enjoyably. Characters in Vampire and its successors were created with personality traits and flaws to the fore, things that would make a real difference to how a game might progress – and there were game mechanics to allow decisive player interventions in the story flow that might override the throw of the dice.

I ought to have loved Vampire – it aligned with everything I wanted from a RPG and represented a major break from the wargaming tradition. But, though I played a handful of games, I never liked it, and its success marked the end of my involvement in structured, rule-led gaming. In one sense the reason was quite simple: I didn’t care about vampires. I’d never read Anne Rice, never read Dracula even, never watched many vampire films. I thought vampires were corny and unresonant, and the pseudo-literary tone designer Marc Rein Hagen* brought to his games – emphasis very much on dark nobility, suffering, vampirism as a curse incomprehensible to the common herd, etc – brought me out in hives.

There was something else, too. Vampire was – I think – the first successful RPG to be set in a recognisable version of the real, modern-day world. There had been historical, and near-future, RPGs, and games like Shadowrun which posited a real world transformed by magical events. But in Vampire the characters were vampires living in the shadows of present-day existence, which carried on as normal alongside them.

Modern-day RPGs make a wholly different set of demands on referees. In a magical or science-fictional environment the gravity of logic is lower – as a referee you can handwave players from action to action without thinking too much about the tedious details of their everyday existence. In a modern-day setting these details can wreck the credibility of the gameworld – where do players get their money from? What are the police doing about their actions? How about the press? What do they eat? (In Vampire this final question is rather central to gameplay, though quite easy to answer.) The need to think about these questions isn’t a bad thing, but it means you need referees (and players) with a good idea about how pretty everyday things – credit cards and banks, security systems, airlines, computers, criminals, other human beings – operate. And How Stuff Works isn’t always what the kind of people who play RPGs are expert in, especially when they’re gawky 19-year-olds.

In practise, playing a modern-day RPG was generally like wandering through a composite of half-remembered film sets – criminals out of Scorsese, skyscrapers out of Die Hard, security systems out of, erm, War Games most likely. It was fun, but not the immersive psychological experience the likes of Rein Hagen probably anticipated – in fact, it was generally less immersive than a good game of D&D, because as a player you were much more qualified to quibble with the referee’s version of reality.

That alone wouldn’t have made me dislike playing Vampire, though – RPGs are still fun even if they’re corny. But a modern-day game – or this one, at least – also demands a very different relationship between characters and gameworld, and here was where Vampire really turned me off. To be continued.**

* I took against Rein Hagen from the off, because instead of a hyphen between the two barrels of his surname, it always appeared with a solid black dot, like a bullet point. I will continue pettily ignoring this affectation, even though it’s somehow incredibly characteristic of the games he designed!

** Honest, it’s already written and everything.

At the time I was concentrating on creating my own worlds (in the maximalist, old-school, style), so I mostly experienced these second-hand, through friends who bought one or other of the many box sets or games based on these new creations. I don’t think many actually got played – a setting like TSR’s Dark Sun, for instance, best described as “post-apocalypse fantasy”, seemed designed to make life as harsh for the players as possible, and was probably better experienced through lone reading of the rulebooks. My feeling actually is that the hobby as a whole was peaking, and most new games and supplements were more admired than played. A glowing review in the games press might be given to something like Skyrealms Of Jorune, which came equipped with a hugely detailed (and admirably consistent) exotic setting, but I doubt many sustained games of it were run.

Maximalist worldbuilding had been based on giving the players and referees as much freedom of choice as possible – fancy fighting Viking-style berserkers one week, and Samurai elves the next? No problem, sir! Minimalist worlds worked to limit their options instead. The “Gothic horror” of Ravenloft, a supplemental D&D setting, was based on crude physical limitations – game mechanisms simply prevented the players leaving a region before certain victory conditions were fulfilled (a throwback to D&D’s wargaming roots, this). More successful were worlds set up to limit the players’ choices by enmeshing their characters in complex social or political structures.

Ars Magica, for instance, came out at the end of the decade and became a massive indie gaming hit. It was a game about wizards in medieval Europe, and its selling points were a highly flexible magic system and the background political structures of wizarding clans and houses, which could provoke inter-player tension as well as shared motivation. It was one of the first games to build credible long-term player goals into its system, rather than just letting them increase their abstracted power levels indefinitely. An Ars Magica character would find it much harder to significantly alter their game world than an overpowered D&D equivalent, but would also have a far greater chance of doing so in credible, satisfying ways.

Pendragon was even more stringent. A game based on Arthurian chivalry and knightly quests, here the game world was small and the events within that world largely set – Camelot would, over the course of a campaign, rise and fall, with little direct involvement from the players, who had quests to fulfil, obligations to carry out, and heirs to sire. One conceit of the game was that, if a character died, the player would begin playing a relative – brother or son – with duties of honour towards the dead predecessor. This was a neat way of furthering Pendragon’s main design aim – creating a gaming environment in which most player actions and choices would have consequences.

These were both excellent games, self-consciously sophisticated products of a more established hobby. Neither were designed for beginners – the assumption, though rarely expressed, was that players would reach them through dissatisfaction with D&D. But D&D itself was becoming bloated, overburdened with supplements and settings, and threatened by the increasing quality and complexity of computer games (the first really successful computer versions of D&D started to emerge at the tail-end of the 80s, for instance). The RPG hobby needed another source of new players, people whose sense of outsiderhood could find expression in gaming. Enter the goths.

ok so this is sort of true — except eg angel tube was thus named in 1901, bcz there on the corner since time immemorial (or anyway the 17th century) was a PUB called “the angel”… and “angel’ really IS the name of a DISTRICT as much as a teashop. You can’t build houses and hotels in a teashop! (Well you can but they would surely earn less rent even than those you built in the old kent road)

My in-laws also played it a lot.

My Aunt still does.

What is it? BRIDGE. And yet i) I have never understood it, even a little. ii) I know nobody of “my” generation (and let’s be pretty broad here and say 25-45!) who plays it. What is bridge? Is it really so difficult? What else is it like?

My brother advanced the notion that bridge has been driven out among The Kids by Poker. Is this true?

There was no need for the focus on Pikachu in the Pokemon cartoon - and indeed he’s been left behind by the franchise, foolishly in my opinion, just one among many common low level Pokemon who show up in game after game. But let’s face it, Pokemon would have not become the juggernaut it is if Pidgey or Caterpie had borne the branding brunt. The idea of brands having character ‘faces’ has become hugely unfashionable in recent years - maybe Pikachu is the last of the greats, but great he is.

What are the secrets of his appeal? He is excellently proportioned - with a satisfying solidity whether forming a plastic shampoo bottle or a soft toy. But at the same time he is nimble, eager and enthusiastic. He combines a cat’s curiosity with a terrier-like loyalty to his master, the hugely boring Ash, and is therefore the perfect pet, but has an adventurous spirit of his own. Perhaps crucially, even though he is claimed as an “electric mouse”, he looks nothing like a mouse, being instead a kind of cross between a hamster and a tiger but really his own species entirely. Along with Harry Potter he’s one of the genuine childhood icons of our era and deserves nothing but celebration.

The first two were for AD&D games, the third was for a freeform - i.e. largely ruleless - role-playing campaign. Each of them ran into two basic problems - one in-game, one out-of-game. The in-game issue - we’ll call it the Balance Problem - is that a role-playing world needs to accommodate the kind of adventures players are likely to have: if the characters are powerful enough and the adventures wide enough in scope, it’ll most likely affect the status quo of the gameworld. The out-of-game issue - we’ll call it the Botherd Problem - is that different players will have different levels of commitment to caring about the game world - and almost all of them will care about it less than you.

The first time I world-built I got round the Botherd Problem by ignoring it and not bothering having any kind of background beyond a vague “long ago the world was high-tech” thing. I dealt with the Balance Problem by introducing a big overall quest involving moving east and simply having the countries become more and more lawless and dangerous the further east one went. Sharp-eyed readers of fantasy books might recognise this solution from, well, almost all of them published before the 1990s. It makes worldbuilding extremely easy: you have the good guys at one end and the bad spooky evil guys at the other. This kind of basic world-creation worked very well and my friends and I had a good time with it, but the truth is the good time was nothing to do with my background work.

The second time I world-built I took it more seriously, and took a lateral approach to the Balance Problem - I intended my players to get powerful enough to affect the destiny of their world. I was aiming for epic - a lot of adolescent referees do. I ran smack into the Botherd Problem, which was that I’d gone to some lengths to think about what each country on the map was like and who was allied to who, and my players didn’t give a monkeys. But in order for them to play a part in an epic they need to care about that stuff. And if they don’t, in plot terms you end up railroading them into caring - forcing the gameplay along certain lines. In which case what they’re essentially doing is reading out a fantasy book you’re writing, and to pull that off you need to be a better writer than I ever was.

(Tellingly, I can’t now remember any details AT ALL of the actual world I put together for that game.)

The third attempt was something different, and an approach I’m still pleased with. Being a freeform game, the characters didn’t undergo big rules-mandated jumps in power levels, which made the Balance Problem only as big or small as we wanted to make it. We were able to keep things low-key and have a group bumbling around and barely resolving anything, having no impact on their setting at all. Instead of experience points, players would be rewarded with “knowledge cards” - index cards I’d written or typed out which had some details about the world on: a local legend, some political rumours, a bit of history. Some or all of this might turn out to be relevant: I myself had only the barest idea of where things might be going, but that didn’t matter as long as the players thought there might be a design behind it. It meant players could discover the background in a drip-feed, rather than be burdened with info and crash into the Botherd Problem.

Freeform games have their own perils, and this one collapsed into chaos, as many do. A particularly bad mistake was to introduce a parallel psychic world with a tenuous link to the ‘real’ one, mostly as an opportunity to play while drinking and/or smoking weed: it included as antagonist Sauron-figure a thinly disguised analogue of Bono. But in general this was my most successful attempt at world-creation, because I kept things small.

Big Trak
Top Trumps
War of the Daleks

though that last one sounds entirely made up to me.

The problem is….no, wait, the problem is that I am a nincompoop. But the idiosyncracy of Scrabble is that it is one of the most clearly designed boardgames ever: if you had never heard of Scrabble, and found a complete box - minus rules - on a desert island, then the game you and your Man Friday would create from it would actually be fairly close to the actual game. The letters, the numbers on the letters, the explicit idea on the board that you score for letters and words - it all fits together pretty easily. And certainly if you saw even a minute’s play you would feel you had the hang of it. Which is what, at some point, I obviously did. And since the swapping tiles thing doesn’t actually HAPPEN that often in Scrabble, I managed to play several games of it without ever being aware of this as an option!

Other boardgames which might pass the Desert Island test: Trivial Pursuit yes. Monopoly maaaaaybe. Cluedo surely not. Take the Brain? More so than Chess, obviously. Break The Safe? No chance mate.

An interesting side qn: which boardgames would fail the Desert Island Test in such a way that the derived rules would be more entertaining than the ‘real’ ones?

PS - I was always a Sonic/Sega person back then. But now I’m all about the Nintendo. The appearance of Tails was bad enough, but when KNUCKLES THE ECHIDNA came along it was just insulting. Never mind “Shadow” the Hedgehog. Stop making “dark” equivalents of good character brands! It hasn’t worked with Pokémon, it hasn’t worked with Sonic, it will NEVER WORK! Note there has never been a “Dark Mario” (there has been an actual ’shadow’ Mario in Paper Mario 2, but he was AN ACTUAL SHADOW which is different as any fule kno).