I’ll start the legitimate games second of this blog at the current endpoint of the story; with my latest on-line game: Fanorona. Fanorona is a traditional capturing game, played mainly on the island of Madagascar, where it is reputed to be the national game. It is pretty much unknown everywhere else. I discovered Fanorona while random-walking through the game space.
Some games require an effort to understand and appreciate; not Fanorona. The opening phase of the game is a flat-out massacre of most of the pieces. No subtle training is needed to appreciate what’s going on! After the massacre, cleaning up the remaining wreckage is a surprisingly subtle positional game.
Fanorona was an ideal candidate to add to my game site, Boardspace.net. It’s unencumbered by intellectual property issues, it’s a short game with immediate appeal, and it’s not widely known or available elsewhere. So it has been added.
Now a few words about Boardspace. I’ve been in the computer programming “game” for a long time, and at every stage of the industry’s development, I’ve been writing games for whatever computer equipment was current. For the last three years, I’ve been sole proprietor of Boardspace, a site devoted to abstract strategy games which you probably have never heard of. It’s strictly a hobby; not a business. There is no revenue, only expenses; but it not a very expensive hobby. Web sites are cheap.
I’ve seen a lot of smart people trying to combine fun and profit, but I haven’t seen any really succeed at it. The desire for profit always seems to drive out the fun. My solution to this conundrum is to separate them strictly. I do programming for a living, and I don’t complain too much if it’s not always fun. I also do a lot of programming strictly for fun.
