James Marshall's Games and Puzzles Page

I've split this up into a few categories: puzzles, video games, gamebooks, Magic: The Gathering, interactive fiction, board games, role playing games.

Puzzles

In general, I enjoy logic puzzles such as the very popular sudoku, but my favorite ones are other types of pencil puzzles created by the Japanese company Nikoli in Japan. The Nikoli Wikipedia article and list of Nikoli puzzle types are good places to get information about the types of puzzles they create. If anyone reading this knows Japanese and could translate or explain the rules of some games to me, please let me know. Most books I have don't include English explanations, and I could use the help in figuring out how to solve the puzzles in them. Thanks. To help others, I've started to create my own page of Nikoli puzzle rules in English with brief descriptions of how to play some of Nikoli's puzzles. I hope this is helpful, and please let me know if anything is unclear or incorrect so that I can fix it. A number of web sites have games to play online (or print), with the number of games available varying by site. For some sites you can submit a free registration to get access to more games, but others require you to pay for a subscription to get more games. Here are some puzzle sites I found that looked interesting: Nikoli's Everbody's Page, Griddlers.net, Java and Puzzle World, Conceptis Logic Puzzles (but only weekly puzzles seem to not show solutions in advance), Puzzle Laboratory (in Japanese; try the honkaku page or the honkaku graphical index), http://indi.s58.xrea.com/ (also in Japanese). A few other places that seem interesting are PuzzLinks.com, which covers all sorts of puzzles, Zotmeister's blog posts with a "puzzle" tag, Grant Fikes' puzzle blog who also owns glmathgrant's blog on LiveJournal, but no longer posts there (this link will get you the first 100 puzzle-tagged posts there), grandpascorpion's blog with some interesting puzzles that are variations/hybrids of Nikoli puzzles, Puzzle Picnic which focuses on logic puzzles that you can play online, The Art of Puzzles blog by Thomas Snyder who has won the World Sudoku Championships and develops new puzzle ideas (many in the Nikoli style), Mellon's Puzzles with Nikoli-style puzzles and variations. Also, you might be interested in Simon Tathma's Portable Puzzle Collection, which contains many Nikoli-style puzzles (I have a version of it on my smartphone).

Video Games

The way I'd classify these video/computer/electronic games are into online games, computer games, and video games. And for reference, here's info about video game genres.

Online Games

I enjoy playing games online now and then. I find about them from various sources, but here are a few sites, listed alphabetically, that have many games (primarily, if not all, Flash-based): 1Cup1Coffee.com 2DPlay, Addicting Games, Armor Games, GamesOnline.fm, Jay Is Games, Kongregate, Miniclip, MMOGame, NewGrounds, Physics Games, The Indie Game Database (TIGdb). A few specific games I like include Neopets and Flash Flash Revolution (FFR) (here's the FFR's main page and a link to the FFR forum), but I'm not very active on either of them anymore. You might be able to find something you like at this very large list of Free Online Games, and sites like c64s.com have old video games available online, but you can always web search to find more.

Computer Games

Including any games played on a computer, my favorite ones are the Myst series of games (Myst, Riven, Exile, Revelation, and End of Ages are the main line) described at Myst Worlds. There are also realMYST (original Myst remade in full 3D) and Uru which takes place off the main line of the others. Here's a pretty good Myst discussion board, and check out Myst Online: Uru Live, which is now available to play for free. Also of interest might be The Abandonware Ring for links to sites with older computer games that have basically been abandoned by the companies that made them. Home of the Underdogs is a great site and used to have some gamebooks (it seems they're no longer on the site since it changed domains). Make sure you read a FAQ on abandonware first though so you know how it works. There's also a set of games (generally for download) referred to as Rogue-like games after the original game of this style. These are sort of a single player, roam the dungeon type RPG, normally in a text or low-graphics interface. Angband and NetHack are two of the most popular games, but ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery) is nice because it's not all dungeon. In my experience, you pretty much have to read spoilers for these games to survive, so try this List of NetHack Spoilers, Angband Spoilers, and the ADOM Guidebook. You might also want to check out the Game Giveaway of the Day site, a great place to pick up free licenses for computer games, with one new game being offered every few days.

Video Games

Perhaps console games is a better term, but I'm not very big in this particular area of gaming, so I don't know. However, I do have a Nintendo Wii, which my wife and I bought. I particularly like the rather unique user interface where the controllers are used in essentially real-life actions to control the on-screen actions. For example, in a baseball game, you hold the controller and swing it as you would a real baseball bat to make the game character swing his/her bat. We have a few games for it, but don't use it a lot. It is still a good way to pass the time now and then though, and we enjoy it.

Gamebooks

For the most part, these were single player games in a book where the story was split into small numbered sections and you'd flip around between them, making choices as needed to keep the story going. Some like the Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf series were much like role playing games, with statistics for you to track and battles to fight. Others like the Choose Your Own Adventure series were more like interactive stories where you chose what happened. Computer and video games kind of pushed gamebooks aside, but they're still good and making a bit of a comeback with reprints of old classics. In general, I prefer the ones that were more like RPGs, and I should note that Project Aon is producing full, legal copies of the Lone Wolf books, one of my favorites. Also, the Fabled Lands series has just started being reprinted. This is a great series from what I've read, and sadly incomplete (only 6 of the planned 12 books were published in the 1990s). Maybe if these reprints sell well, the authors will be encouraged to write and publish new books, so please support this series (books available at Amazon). If you want to know some more about gamebooks, Demian's Gamebook Web Page is a very comprehensive source of information on the subject with a huge checklist and lots of book/series reviews, and thus an excellent place to start. If you want an idea of what some books are like, maybe to see if you'd be interested in getting them, I typed up some back of the book blurbs from the Lone Wolf, World of Lone Wolf, Fighting Fantasy reprints, scans I found of the Fabled Lands covers, Be an Interplanetary Spy, and Cretan Chronicles books. I might add more later.

Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering (MTG) by Wizards of the Coast is the original collectible/trading card game. Its introduction in 1993 started the whole genre of games where you collect cards of different types and rarities to create your own unique deck to play with. I started playing about a year after it came out and I've been following it ever since, mostly on a casual level, and less lately than before. For more information about the game, try the links at Yahoo's Magic page. You can discuss the game on the Wizards Community Board for Magic and find news (and rumors) about the game at MTGNews.com. Lots of good information like rules and card rulings are available at Crystal Keep and one of the semi-standard price lists for Magic cards can be found at MagicTraders.com.

Interactive Fiction

Interactive fiction (IF), also known as text adventures, are games where everything is text and you have to solve a series of puzzles in order to complete the game. The biggest site for downloading games is the Interactive Fiction Archive, also accessible through Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive which gives reviews, etc. and provides links to the games at the archive site. You can also play online at iFiction, but if you're not sure where to start, you'll probably want to check out a Beginner's Guide to Playing IF. This Recommended Playing List that organizes games by especially notable features and the IF Rating Stats page are great sources for getting ratings and rankings of lots of games if you're trying to decide what to play. I'd also suggest checking out the annual IF competition which has been running annually since 1995; the community-chosen winning games are always good. For more general information and news, try Brass Lantern, the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games (SPAG), or XYZZYnews. One of the biggest companies to produce interactive fiction was Infocom, now owned by Activision. Peter Scheyen's Infocom page is a great starting point (download the classic Zork trilogy for free), some scans of the original materials are on The Infocom Gallery, and The Infocom Documentation Project is trying to collect copies of all the original docs. Info about Scott Adams' games can be found at Scott Adams Grand Adventures and IF-Legends.Org hosts a number of other nice sites. Some older games came with "feelies", small items such as a coin, flyer, picture, etc. that related to the game and were nice souvenirs. There was a web site selling items for some of the games you can download from the IF Archive, but unfortunately it appears to be gone now.

Board Games

These aren't always big on my list of things to do, but once in a while, I do enjoy playing or doing them. I tend to prefer games with strategy and logic, such as chess and variants of it like shogi (Japanese chess; also check out Shogi.net), xiangqi (Chinese chess; this looks like a good tutorial on tactics and such), and janggi (Korean chess, derived from Xiangqi). These three have entries at the ChessVariants.org site, where you can find even more variations. If you already know chess, I'd suggest starting with this intro to shogi and this intro to xiangqi for info on those games. I haven't really learned any of these variants, but they are interesting, so maybe I'll learn the basics eventually. For fun, I have to mention Taikyoku shogi. The sheer size of this game is truly awesome -- each player gets 402 pieces of 208 different types and the board is 36x36. :) Along the lines of taikyoku shogi being a huge version of shogi, check out this RPS-25, a version of the classic rock-paper-scissors game with 25 different gestures and 300 outcomes. For more about the classic version, try the World RPS Society. I started looking into go (also called igo, weiqi, or baduk); Sensei's Library is a good place to get more information on the game and GoBase.org looks good, too. And for what it's worth, I'm not very good at any of the games mentioned here because I play them so rarely or haven't really learned them (e.g., go and the Asian chess variants).

Role Playing Games (RPGs)

These are basically games where you play the role of some character in it. Dungeons & Dragons is my favorite, but I haven't played it in ages. If you like paper and pencil RPGs, there lists of free RPGs at John Kim's Free RPGs on the Web and The Free RPG Compendium. There are also play by e-mail games, but I find the action there too slow. There are all sorts of online RPGs, and one I've been on for a long time is Realms of Despair I usually only visit now and then to read notes and see what's happening, but I contributed a number of pages to the Official Guild Of Mages web site. If you're looking for other games like this, try Top MUD Sites for rankings of the most popular MUDs. Similar are persistent browser-based games (PBBGs), which seem to be like RPGs played in your web browser with a memory to store the state of your game. I tried out Sryth for a while, so if you join the Sryth's Adventurers Guild like I did, please say that Dronak referred you.

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