Page 28 - Spielbox_2_2020

BOOKS
Board Games in 100 Moves
From Expert to Expert
Can you name one-hundred of your favorite games? How about just naming any one-hundred games? Games historian and inventor Ian Livingstone takes it one step further and has created a book chronicling what he considers the most important one-hundred games in the last 8000 years! Board Games in 100 Moves takes us from the earliest games – many still played and still sold today – to the most notable twenty-two games of the twenty-first century. Certainly, these one-hundred are not necessarily “favorites,” but many of the classics, such as Chess, Scrabble, Parcheesi and recent additions to the genre, are played by many – casual players and serious players alike.
has an impressive background as a game inventor, especially in the areas of role-playing and storytelling games, and in magazine publishing and the digital industry. So how does this latest venture measure up? Without stretching the sus- pense to the final paragraph, let me say now that Board Games in 100 Moves is exceptional, from its look right through its content.
Starting with the appearance, the design is excellent and the book is filled with glorious photographs – some of them game details expanded to a full page. The Table of Contents lays out a chronology for the 176 pages; beginning with a chapter on the earliest materials used for game boards, “Wood and Stone,”
And what makes Ian Livingstone qualified to come up with such a list? Livingstone co-founded Games Workshop in early 1975 (with John Peake and Steve Jackson), and in the 1980s, developed (again
with Jackson) the concept of
the Fighting Fantasy series
of gamebooks, with Living-
stone eventually authoring
at least thirteen books. Livingstone did design work for the video game publisher Domark in the 1980s, returning to the company nearly a decade later as a major investor and board member. He stayed on when Domark was acquired by the vid- eo-technology company Eidos Interactive and took on the role of product acquisi- tion director when Eidos was taken over by Sci in 2005; he secured many of the company’s major franchises, including Tomb Raider and Hitman. By that time, he
Special Award for outstanding contribu- tion to the computer gaming industry; in 2013 he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to the computer industry. How
h
e
a
d
w
d
w
o
o
n
t
n
t
h
h
e
B
e
B
B
A
A
A
A
F
F
F
F
T
T
T
T
A
I
A
A
A
I
I
n
n
n
t
t
t
e
e
e
r
r
r
a
a
a
c
c
c
t
t
t
i
i
i
v
v
v
e
e
Are these the most important 100 games in history? Who’s to argue?
and ending with “Blending physical and digital games” and “New ways to play.” Before we even get to the Table of Contents, Livingstone
h
a
unusual is that? Along the way (from 1970 into the early ’1990s), he authored a good number of board games.
I don’t usually pile on the biograph- ical background information about the author of a book, but in this case I felt it important to point out that this researcher-writer has been completely immersed in the game industry for over four decades and has made significant contributions. The book’s title page also credits James Wallis as co-author; Wallis
presents us with a Timeline that features the one-hundred games of the book’s title, shown in chronological order, each with one or two lines of text and pictur- ing almost all one-hundred. It is a visual summary, an optical treat.
Another unique design element appears on about half the pages: It is a summary of the particular game title fea- tured in the accompanying text, listing the year or period in which the game was cre-
26
spielbox