Randolph, Alex (1922-2004)

Alex Randolph—A Life of Games
by Bruce Whitehill

Alex Randolph, renowned American game inventor, was honored in 2002 on the occasion of his 80th birthday with a celebration at the “Spieltage,” the German games fair in Essen—an appropriate venue, as that is where game inventors present their new products to companies and the public comes to play the latest releases. This year, on May 4th (his birthday), the honor was posthumous as friends and colleagues gathered at the German Games Archives (Deutsches Spiele-Archiv) in Marburg to dedicate a room to him—the Alex Randolph Studio. In it, the games and tools from Alex’s workshop in Venice have been preserved and put on display for the many who knew him or his games, and those who will some day learn about this marvel of a man and the wonders he created.

In 1962, Alex Randolph and Sid Sackson were commissioned to start a game division for an unlikely employer—the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. The company, known as 3M, produced masking tape, reflective tags for highways, recording tape, fabric protector, and the world’s first waterproof sandpaper, among other products. When one of its divisions was looking for a way to expand revenues, employees came up with the idea of a game line aimed at upper middle-class buyers. A games unit was created, and the modern “bookshelf” box was born. (Large bookshelf games were around in the 19th century.) It was the beginning of a lifetime friendship between Alex Randolph and Sid Sackson, and the start of long careers for both of them as game inventors. “Sid was the first colleague I ever had,” Alex remarked. “We were the beginning of 3M.”

At 3M, Alex Randolph came up with Breakthru, Evade, Oh-Wah-Ree (a traditional mancala game), and the game for which he was to become famous, Twixt. 3M’s last game was his Mimicry. In 1966, 3M promoted the line of tactic games throughout the U.S. and Europe, igniting an interest in adult strategy games in the U.S. and reviving an almost extinct adult games market in Europe, mainly Germany.

This was an auspicious juncture for Alex Randolph, who would go on to become one of America’s two most prolific and well-respected game inventors—the other was Sid Sackson. Whereas Sid eventually turned to Europe as the best marketplace for his games, Alex followed his 3M games to Europe and moved to Venice, Italy, in 1972.

Alex Randolph died in Venice April 28, 2004, after a long illness. He is buried under a cypress tree on an island close to Venice, the adopted city that gave him so much happiness and provided much of his inspiration. He and his wife Gertrude (Jovana) were married for 52 years, the first 23 of which were spent in Boston. Alex left us not only a legacy of wonderful games translated into many languages and played around the world, he left behind a family of friends who valued and admired the way in which he connected with people. As a tribute to him, people wrote to him after his death. Over 150 emails—in Italian, German, English, French, Spanish, Arabic and other languages—appear on the website http://www.venice-connection.com/ under the wonderful heading, “Messages for Alex.” So many people said “Thank you!” Some just said “Good-bye.” One typical remark, posted by a Christian Möller, read “May your simply perfect work entertain us forever. You will stay in our memory and your spirit shall shine over all so many boards. Thank you Alex!”

When I last saw Alex at age 77, he danced around the canals of Venice with the movements of a pair of dice bouncing off the wall of a gaming table. His vigor kept him active not only as a game inventor, but as an advocate of all game inventors. In Europe, Alex was instrumental in getting recognition for game inventors, insisting that game companies put the inventor’s name on the box and instructions. Why should game inventors not be given the same recognition as the author of books? His clout led to the term “game inventor” being replaced by “game author” in Europe, and his success there is undoubtedly why game authors are much better known in Europe than are American game inventors in the U.S.

His Venice workplace was a winding walk of 15 minutes—or sometimes a boat ride—from his home, and contained a busy workroom, a storage room, and a packed office with a little window overlooking a tiny canal. He pointed to a wall of shelves filled with games, some with titles in an alphabet I couldn’t begin to read, and said, “These are my games.” He didn’t mean it was his collection of other people’s games, but that each game on shelf after shelf was of his own making.

Alex attributed his direction in life to what he described as “the overindulgence of rich American parents.” The rich “drop their children off (at private schools) where they are well nourished and stuffed with culture.” Born while his parents were visiting Czechoslovakia, he was attended to by an Austrian-German governess and educated in a Swiss boarding school. This may explain why his games cross cultural borders. He learned many languages. “My parents always figured that if I failed in life I could at least join the Diplomatic Corps.” But failure was never in the cards.

Alex described playing games as a child as a “sort of paradise.” “Madness, happiness would overtake me.” He went on to say, “I have a theory that all children are game inventors. If there is a possibility of playing a game, they will play. If the pieces are not available, someone will invent the game.”

This love for games he ascribes to “man’s need to make order….All the higher achievements of man—art, music, philosophy—begin with the need to order and inquire about the natural world….to simplify and make understandable all the elements of life around us.” But games are something else—they are “imitations of life…reproductions of life itself…we don’t know how it’s going to come out; games represent the chaos.” The rules of a game exemplify man’s attempt to make order.

But “games need some element in addition to rules.” An example of this can be found in the talk he gave in 1999 at the Board Games in Academia colloquium in Florence. In describing mancala games as games of pure calculation, he mused that, as whole populations love these games, there must be “some particularly attractive and captivating feature, in no way related to the mental efforts the games require, something that is pure fun. And what this is, I suggest, is the unique mancala gesture: scooping up all the seeds from one of the pits and then sowing them one by one in adjacent pits around the board. A remarkably satisfying gesture, also very elegant, and that anyone can enjoy regardless of the level of play, from calculating wizards at the top all the way down to very small children who may not yet know what they are doing, but have already discovered that it is fun. It is in fact irresistible, I find. And since it appears in all mancala games, without exception, the gesture itself must be extremely ancient, going back, perhaps, to the very origins of the game, two or three thousand years ago.”

To Alex, games could take on a life of their own. He loved to talk about how a bishop playing piece “on a table is nothing, but on a chess board, it takes on life; it can acquire tremendous power….It immediately seems to bristle with a desire to move, to be off in its crazy oblique way.” And what does it all mean? “Something that gives so much pleasure must be very deep….”

“What is your favorite game of your own design?” I asked.
“It’s always the last one I made!”
“And how do you know if a game is good?”
“It has to captivate you totally so the rest of the world disappears.”

Personable, wise and witty, Alex had also the creative talents to design dozens of good games that are still played around the world. Whereas most game authors acquiesce to the whims of game company R&D (Research & Development) reps, Alex often insisted they visit him in Venice. In one instance, he asked the young representative from a major company for information about himself before Alex would be willing to give his game to the company; he wanted to know who he was dealing with—what the attitudes and interests were of this important company official. Alex soon received a full résumé from the representative, detailing his qualifications, experience, and interests. The company later published Alex’s game—and many more.

Most of his games don’t have dice. It is not surprising that a man who thrived on mental amusements didn’t gamble and didn’t play dice games. When he did use dice, they were employed in a different way, so they were detached from the element of luck. But he loved dice. “When I see them on a table, I have to pick them up. (Throwing dice is a) wonderful way to hear the answer of the gods.” He finds it interesting that the Americans and Europeans place a wager and then throw the dice, but the Japanese use a dice cup, roll the dice, hold the cup over the dice and then wager. The difference, though difficult to explain unless you understood Alex well, is in what may be happening to the dice while they are sitting under the cup.

Alex referred to himself as—and undeniably was—“intellectually active” and even in his advancing years took pride in the fact that he expressed himself clearly. His wonderful use of language was inexorably mixed with his ideas and philosophical meanderings. In fact, though there is so much that can be said about Alex Randolph, the wisdom and humor of the man are best articulated in his own words. Here are some of his musings from his conversations with me and from his talk to the Board Game Studies colloquium:

On the difference between sport and games:
“We play them (games) with our imagination, not physically with our bodies. Without the slightest difficulty we accept that a board on the table represents a whole battlefield, or all of Europe, or the entire universe, for that matter…or else perhaps some fantastic chimera, a labyrinth in which hungry minotaurs roam and from which we must run for our lives.”

On what a game needs to have in order to be good.
“It must be easy to enter into the game immediately…(the game must) offer surprises…(it must have) a clear objective, (clear enough so there is) no arguing or questioning…(it must be) endlessly repeatable, always different.”

On rules that come into question during a game:
“If a question arises, there are always two additional rules:
Rule One: Anything not prohibited is permitted.
Rule Two: In case of controversy, doubt, or questioning, the right solution is the most amusing one.”

On games of chance:
“Most fascinating for me…are the games of pure chance, in which we have only one piece with which we can identify fully but over which we have no control, no power whatever. We are completely helpless, which is precisely what we enjoy, I suspect. We have no responsibilities. All we can do is look on anxiously and cry out when an enemy piece is at our heels and coming closer. We need a three to reach a safety: ‘Give me a three!’ we implore aloud, ‘Please give me a three!’ But we get a one and moan and bang a fist on the table.”

On the “enticement” of games at a “higher level of depth and complexity”:
“The deeper and more complex a game is, the more players are encouraged to intervene in it, to make decisions that affect its course. At the very top players may even feel, and rightly so I would say, that it is they who are creating the game as it progresses.”

On playing cards:
“There has never been a more ingenious, efficient, economical, ubiquitous playing device than playing cards. I find it actually exhilarating to know, when I put an ordinary pack of playing cards in my pocket, that I am carrying around fifty or more of the best games ever invented.”

On Monopoly:
“The great secret of monopoly is that you actually feel that you have that piece of the board, the ownership of real property…”

On games that last:
“…To survive, a game must be loved. But what must it contain to be loved, what are the minimum requirements? I would say tension, surprise, a smooth flow plus some identifiable and if possible inexhaustible fun element, such as the up and down feature in Snakes and Ladders, which is what will make it live forever.”

On the future of board games:
“I don’t believe for a moment that board games are endangered, certainly not the better ones….I believe that as long as there are tables and people who enjoy the conviviality of sitting around them, there will be games to be played on those tables.”

On the wonder of games:
“…after many, many years of very close involvement with board games, I still have not ceased to wonder and marvel at their very existence. How did they come about? And why? And when? These neat little self-contained systems…have the power, on occasion, to detach and absorb us perhaps more than anything else in our lives.”

Alex Randolph will be remembered for many things, among them his intellect, his humor, his love of life, and the special smile that made those around him feel the warmth of a friend, even if they had just met. He loved games, and thought about their meaning and place in a larger world, and yet he rarely played other people’s games. He didn’t have to. He had an innate understanding of all games, and his own inventions kept him happily preoccupied, as they will do for others for generations to come.

by Bruce Whitehill
Published in Knucklebones games magazine November 2006

A Day in Venice — Some time with Alex Randolph
by Bruce Whitehill
August 1999

Spending a day in Venice, California, with its beach-side body builders and its bikini clad roller skaters, doesn’t compare with pursuing a day in Venice, Italy, with Alex Randolph. I say “pursuing” because at age 77, Alex negotiates the canalside walkways and bridges with a pace that forced me to throw in a jog or two every five or six steps. On the run is about the only way you can spend an appreciable amount of time with the man who may be considered the most prolific and successful game inventor in the world.

Alex attributes his path toward game inventing, in part, to the overindulgence of rich American parents. The rich “drop their children off (at private schools and the like) where they are well nourished and stuffed with culture.” He was educated in a Swiss boarding school and attended to by an Austrian-German governess (and was born while his parents were visiting Czechoslovakia), which may account for the fact that his games transgress cultural borders. He learned many languages, and his parents always figured that if he failed in life he could at least join the Diplomatic Corps.

But failure doesn’t appear to be part of Alex Randolph’s past–a history filled with games–HIS games–played by millions of people around the world for decades. As a child, playing games was, as Alex describes it, a “sort of paradise.” “…Madness, happiness would overtake me.” Waxing philosophical, he remarked, “Something that gives so much pleasure must be very deep….” One of man’s compulsions, he continues, is the “need to make order….All the higher achievements of man–art, music, philosophy–begin with the need to order and inquire about the natural world….to simplify and make understandable all the elements of life around us.” But games are something else–they are “imitations of life…reproductions of life itself…we don’t know how it’s going to come out; games represent the chaos.”

The rules exemplify man’s attempt to make order. But “games need some element in addition to rules.” And what about rules that come into question during a game? Alex says that if a question arises, there are always two additional rules:

Rule One: Anything not prohibited is permitted.

Rule Two: In case of controversy, doubt, or questioning, the right solution is the most amusing one.

“Play means to really lose yourself; the only important thing is playing the game you are going to play.” Alex goes on to explain how a bishop playing piece “on a table is nothing, but on a chess board, it takes on life; it can acquire tremendous power.”

Alex Randolph doesn’t gamble, and he doesn’t play dice games. But he admits, “I love dice. When I see them on a table, I have to pick them up. (Throwing dice is a) wonderful way to hear the answer of the gods.” He noted that the Japanese don’t “throw” dice–they use a dice cup, hold the cup over the dice and then wager. Alex says he uses dice in his games, but in a different way, so they are not a part of chance.

“I have a theory that all children are game inventors. If there is a possibility of playing a game, they will play.” If the game or the game “pieces are not available, someone will invent the game.”

Alex’s first game was PANKAI, invented around 1959 for a small U.S. company called Phillips, the same manufacturer that produced the SPILL & SPELL game Parker Brothers made famous. I asked him what a game needs to have in order to be good. “It must be easy to enter into the game immediately…(it must) offer surprises…(it must have) a clear objective, (clear enough so there is) no arguing or questioning…(it must be) endlessly repeatable, always different.”

I asked Alex what his favorite game was. He replied that he rarely plays other people’s games. What about his favorite game of his own? It’s always “the last one I made.” His favorite classic game is SHOGI. “The original feature of SHOGI is the ability to reuse your opponent’s captured pieces.” And his favorite proprietary games still in print? ACQUIRE and ENTROPY. Friend and colleague Sid Sackson, inventor of ACQUIRE, and Alex were both responsible for 3M games, which is a story onto itself. The last 3M game was Alex Randolph’s MIMICRY.

Alex is more than a game player and game inventor. He is an advocate for all game inventors. He was the person most responsible for getting the inventor’s name on the game, a practice prevalent in Europe and mostly missing in the mass market games of the U.S.

Alex shares his Venice home with American wife Jovana, an equally independent and high-spirited partner whom he met in 1952 in Italy. They moved there in 1972. He keeps his workplace in a different part of Venice, with a work room, a storage room, and an office with a little window overlooking the water. I’ve been to the home of many collectors who would point to a wall of games, saying “This is my collection.” When Alex did that in his small studio, his collection on shelf after shelf were games all of his own making. He has two more card games expected out soon. And how do you know if a game is good? “It has to captivate you totally so the rest of the world disappears.”

–From Bruce Whitehill’s “It’s All in the Game” column, Games Games Games magazine, England

———————-
Alex Randolph’s Favorites:
Favorite classic game: Shogi. “The original feature of SHOGI is the ability to re-use your opponent’s captured pieces.”
Two favorite proprietary games still in print: Sid Sackson’s “Acquire” and Eric Solomon’s “Entropy.”
Favorite chess piece: The knight. “As a child I had a real passion for this piece, which I have always called a horse, since that is what it looks like.”
Some of the best known games of Alex Randolph include:

 

• African Queen (Abacus, 1991)
• Big Shot (Ravensburger, 2001)
• Breakthru (3M, 1965)
• Buffalo (Venice Connection, 1975; Piatnik, 1999; Lakeside; Pelikan; others; aka Trespass [Lakeside], Prärie [Pelikan])
• Casablanca (FX Schmid, 1977)
• Enchanted Forest (“Sagaland,” Ravensburger, 1981, with Michael Matschoss; winner of the Spiel des Jahres award)
• Evade (3M, 1971)
• Genius Rules (Winning Moves, 1997; “Eureka,” 1987)
• Ghosts (Milton Bradley, 1985; “Geister,” 1982; “Jeckyl and Hyde,” 1980)
• Halunken und Spelunken (Kosmos, 1997)
• Inkognito (Milton Bradley, 1988, with Leo Colovini; Winning Moves, 2001)
• Oh-Wah-Ree (Avalon Hill, 1976)
• Overboard (Lakeside, 1978; “Über Bord,” Ravensburger, 1977
• Pan-Kai (Phillips, 1961; “Universe,” Parker Bros., 1967)
• Raj (“Hol’s der Geier,” 1988; Winning Moves, 1996)
• Ricochet Robots (Hans im Gluck and Rio Grande, 1999)
• Scan (Parker Bros., 1988; “Indiscretion,” Piatnik, 1987)
• Sisimizi (Editrice Giochi, 1996)
• Square Off (Parker Bros., 1972)
• TwixT (3m, 1962; various others 1968-1998)

Twixt puzzles can be found on the gamerz.net website. To see them, click here.

Some Alex Randolph games in more detail:
Big Shot (Ravensburger, 2001)
Moving across town on the gameboard, players bid for cubes, the high bidder getting to place the cubes in an area of town. Eventually, the player with the majority of cubes in an area takes that property. Properties are sold at the end of the game and whoever makes the most money wins.

Breakthru (3M, 1965)
This early Alex Randolph strategy game for two has a similar style as Buffalo, in that each player has a different objective. One commands a fleet of a flagship and twelve escorts and tries to evade capture while breaking through his opponent’s blockade. The other player attempts to create an impenetrable blockade with his fleet and capture the opposing flagship.

Buffalo (Venice Connection, 1975; Piatnik, 1999; “Trespass,” Lakeside; “Prärie,” Pelikan)
This uncomplicated asymmetric abstract game (one in which each player has different types and numbers of pieces) is a super strategy game. One player moves the Indian chief and his four dogs, and the other player maneuvers the herd of eleven buffalo. If one buffalo breaks through the Indian’s line, that player wins; the Indian wins by capturing or blocking all the buffalo.

Casablanca (FX Schmid, 1977)
In this gambling-style bluffing game, players race around the board to accumulate cards. Your movement is governed by the number on a chit, but you can bluff about the number you say you have. Lying and getting caught costs you.

Enchanted Forest (“Sagaland,” Ravensburger, 1981, with Michel Matschoss)
In this simple children’s game, players move across the board—a forest—and look at treasures hidden under each tree. When the king asks for one of the treasures, players must remember where that treasure was, and then race to the castle. Sagaland won the 1982 German Game of the Year (Spiel des Jahres) award.

Evade (3M, 1971)
This early 3M “Gamette”—part of a series of small bookshelf style games—is another bluffing game, as two players try to slip past each other with a special (magnetic) piece that is the same in appearance as all the others.

Ghosts (Milton Bradley, 1985; “Geister,” 1985, Schmidt; others)
With a bluffing element to Evade, this two-player game allows you to win either by moving one of your four “good” ghosts off the board through your opponent’s territory, or enticing your opponent to kill off all four of your evil ghosts. Marketed as a children’s game by Milton Bradley in the U.S. (without giving any recognition to Alex Randolph), Ghosts! Is an absolutely wonderful “mind” game for adults.

Halunken und Spelunken (Kosmos, 1997)
You are trying to assemble a suitable crew of scoundrels to man your vessel. The only deck of this ship-theme game is a deck of cards dealt onto a circle of inns. You select movement card in secret, trying to best other players.

Inkognito (Milton Bradley, 1988, with Leo Colovini; Winning Moves, 2001, 2006)
As you move through the streets and canals of Venice, you question other agents in an attempt to find which is your partner, and together solve the code through the bits of information that each of you has. An unusual partnership game.

Oh-Wah-Ree (Avalon Hill, 1976)
A classic, traditional game, based on the ancient two-player mancala games (Wari and others), this variation can be played by two, three, or four players. Pebbles (“seeds”) are “sewn” in “pit” (holes) of this contoured folding board, with a player continuing to move until certain conditions are met, at which point the other player begins his or her series of moves.

Overboard (Lakeside, 1978; “Über Bord,” Ravensburger, 1977)
The board for this two-player strategy game has vertical and horizontal slots holding your pieces on the board—that is, until your opponent pushes you over the edge. This game is as simple as it is excellent.

Pan-Kai (Phillips, 1961; “Universe,” Parker Bros., 1967)
This 1961 game is one of the earliest successes of Alex Randolph. There is a puzzle element in which each player tries to place on the board twelve different pentominoes so that his or her opponent will be unable to play a piece. (A pentomino is five squares attached to one another to make different two-dimensional shapes.) Play alternates, and you are not allowed to close off an area of four squares or less. This game also offers a solitaire version requiring you to fill up the 10 x 10 grid by using only 20 of the 24 pieces.

Raj (“Hol’s der Geier,” 1988; Winning Moves, 1996)
This wonderful bluffing and strategy game allows all players to play simultaneously. Each player starts with the same deck of cards numbered from one to fifteen, but as players discard their cards to take or avoid tricks, who has what, keeps changing. And if you play the same highest or lowest card as your opponent, you cancel each other out and the next guy wins the prize.

Ricochet Robot (Rio Grande, 1999; “Rasende Roboter,” Hans im Glück)
A puzzle of a game, Ricochet Robot is not for everyone. But if you like this type of game, you’ll love this game. Two to 20 people can play because you’re not moving on the board, you’re making moves in your head, trying to figure out (in one minute) how to move robots (there are four of them) so that you can reach a target area on the board in the fewest number of moves. Robots move as far as possible until reaching a wall or another robot, at which point they turn and continue to move, until landing on the target area. You need to move one or more robots to serve as a “turning points” for another robot. Pure genius!

Scan (Parker Bros., 1988; “Indiscretion,” Piatnik, 1987)
Don’t get this confused with the wonderful Parker Bros. visual perception game, Scan, of 1977. This is the wonderful Scan game of the ‘80s in which an almost regular deck of playing cards has the added uniqueness of being marked on the backs of the cards so that your opponents know what suits your are holding. It’s a trick-taking, bluffing game, and the cards can also be used for variations of other standard card games as well.

Twixt (3m, 1962; various others 1968, 1998)
David Gale’s Bridg-It (Hasbro) from 1960 appears to be very similar to Alex Randolph’s most famous game, but it isn’t. Bridg-it, in which the object is to connect one side of the board to the other, placing pieces horizontally and vertically, has been solved—that is, with the proper moves, the first player can always win. Twixt, on the other hand, uses Randolph’s favorite “knight’s move,” as in chess, so the connections are made on angles. This is a highly-rated, excellent strategy game for two.

AND WE QUOTE:
Alex Randolph always spoke out, whether it was about games, playing, or the way game authors needed to be recognized for their work. Here are some notable quotes from this great man.

“Play means to really lose yourself; the only important thing is playing the game you are going to play.”

“The desire to win is the fuel that propels a game forward.…The holy rule is: if you don’t want to win, don’t play.”

“I do often feel that in all of civilization there is nothing quite as curious and intriguing as a board game.”

“Fascinating little objects (dice). Our symbols of the unpredictable. When I see dice on a table, I find it difficult not to pick them up and throw them at least once, and then be interested in the result. Eleven. But why eleven? Couldn’t it have been something else just as well? And if not, at what point did it become eleven—when the dice were still in the air? Or when they had landed but had not yet settled? Or was it before the launch, when they were still in my hand? Or long before that, long, long ago, all the way back to the beginning of time?”

“…All (games) are setups for confrontations. For make-believe conflicts. Taken from real life, for the most part, but drastically simplified and from which all the disagreeable and messy features of real life have been removed. Only the fun part is allowed to stay. And so, free of danger…we can batter each other…satisfy two very deep and contradictory social urges in us: one to be close together, the other to compete with each other.”

“…There are two crucial elements that keep games completely apart from …anything else in our experience.
One is uncertainty. We must not know what will happen next.…When we sit down to a game, the game is still in the future, has not yet begun to exist….In a game, as in real life, nobody knows how the story will end.”

“…In a classic war game…there is no device to move the game forward. What moves the game forward is the mind of the players, who are silent, composed, eyes fixed on the board. What are they thinking about? Mostly, I believe, each is asking himself what the other is up to. Which is the gist of a game of pure strategy: we play in function of the other player, of what we think is on his mind.”

ALEX RANDOLPH
by Bruce Whitehill
From a talk given at the symposium, “Game Authors in Our Time,” at the opening of the Alex Randolph Studios in the Deutsche Spiele-Archiv, Marburg, Germany, May 5, 2006.

“Sid was the first colleague I ever had,” Alex remarked.  Around the time that 3M brought out Sid’s ACQUIRE, Alex invented TWIXT, a classic strategy game.  “We were the beginning of 3M.”  By the latter part of the twentieth century, more and more smaller American companies were gobbled up, and both Sid and Alex turned to Europe as a marketplace for their games—Sid sold there; Alex also moved there.

Alex attributes his path toward game inventing, in part, to the overindulgence of rich American parents. He was educated in a Swiss boarding school and attended to by an Austrian-German governess (and was born while his parents were visiting Czechoslovakia), which may account for the fact that his games transgress cultural borders.  He learned many languages, and his parents always figured that if he failed in business life he could at least join the Diplomatic Corps.

As a child, playing games was, as Alex describes it, a “sort of paradise.” “…Madness, happiness would overtake me.” Waxing philosophical, he remarked, “Something that gives so much pleasure must be very deep….”One of man’s compulsions is the need to make order….All the higher achievements of man—art, music, philosophy—begin with the need to order and inquire about the natural world….to simplify and make understandable all the elements of life around us.”  But games are something else—they are “imitations of life…reproductions of life itself…we don’t know how it’s going to come out; games represent the chaos.”

“Play means to really lose yourself; the only important thing is playing the game you are going to play.” Alex goes on to explain how a bishop playing piece “on a table is nothing, but on a chess board, it takes on life; it can acquire tremendous power.”

“I have a theory that all children are game inventors.  If there is a possibility of playing a game, they will play.”  If the game or the game “pieces are not available, someone will invent the game.”

Alex was more than a game player and game inventor.  He was an advocate for all game inventors.  He was the person most responsible for getting the inventor’s name on the game, a practice prevalent in Europe and mostly missing in the mass-market games of the U.S.

Alex doesn’t gamble, and he doesn’t play dice games.  But he admits, “I love dice.  When I see them on a table, I have to pick them up.  (Throwing dice is a) wonderful way to hear the answer of the gods.”  He noted that the Japanese don’t “throw” dice–they use a dice cup, hold the cup over the dice and then wager.  Alex says he uses dice in his games, but in a different way, so they are not a part of chance.

I asked Alex what his favorite game was.  He replied that he rarely plays other people’s games.  What about his favorite game of his own?  It’s always “the last one I made.”  His favorite classic game is SHOGI.  “The original feature of SHOGI is the ability to reuse your opponent’s captured pieces.”  And his favorite proprietary games still in print?  ACQUIRE and ENTROPY.

My sense about the seriousness and humor of Alex is summed up in his answer to my question about rules and order.

He explained that the rules exemplify man’s attempt to make order.  But “games need some element in addition to rules.”

And what about rules that come into question during a game?

Alex says that if a question arises, there are always two additional rules:

“Rule One: Anything not prohibited is permitted.

Rule Two: In case of controversy, doubt, or questioning, the right solution is the most amusing one.”