The Game of the Generals, also called Salpakan in Tagalog, and GG as it is most fondly called, or simply The Generals, is an educational wargame invented in the Philippines by Sofronio H. Pasola, Jr. in 1970. It can be played within twenty to thirty minutes. It is designed for two players, each controlling an army, and a neutral arbiter or an adjutant. It needs the use of logic. The game simulates armies at war trying to outflank and outmaneuver each other.
As in actual warfare, the game allows only one side’s plan to succeed.
Certain strategies and tactics, however, allow both sides the chance of securing a better idea of the other’s plan as the game progresses. Players can also speak with others during matches, hoping to make a false impression on where the flag is. History This game was invented by Sofronio H. Pasola, Jr. with the inspiration of Ronnie Pasola (his son). The Pasolas first tried the Game of the Generals on a chessboard.
Even then, the pieces had no particular arrangement. There were no spies in the experimental game; but after Ronnie Pasola remembered the James Bond movies and Mata Hari, he added the spies.
Making the pieces hidden was the idea of the Pasolas after remembering card games. The Game of the Generals’ public introduction was on February 28, 1973. Objective The objective of the game is to eliminate or capture the flag of the opponent, or to maneuver one’s flag to the other end of the board. The Pieces The player’s set of pieces or soldiers with the corresponding ranks and functions consist of the following 21 pieces.
A higher ranking piece will eliminate any lower ranking piece, with the exception of the spy, which eliminates all pieces except the private.
The pieces are bent at an angle in order to hide the piece’s rank or insignia from the opponent. In plastic sets, the colours commonly used in the pieces are black and white. There are also sets composed of wooden boards and steel pieces. Those pieces have insignias that are either coloured red or blue. In metal sets, the color of the board is commonly brown and the pieces are aluminum colored. The pieces are still bent. Apart from the flag (the Philippine flag) and the spy (a pair of prying eyes), the insignias used in the game are those used in the Philippine Army.
PiecesNo. of PiecesFunction Five-star General1Eliminates any lower ranking officer, the private, and the flag. Four-star General1Eliminates any lower ranking officer, the private, and the flag. Three-star General1Eliminates any lower ranking officer, the private, and the flag. Two-star General1Eliminates any lower ranking officer, the private, and the flag. One-star General1Eliminates any lower ranking officer, the private, and the flag. Colonel1Eliminates any lower ranking officer, the private, and the flag.
Lt. Coloneli Eliminates any lower ranking officer, the private, and the flag. Major1Eliminates any lower ranking officer, the private, and the flag. Captain1Eliminates any lower ranking officer, the private, and the flag. 1st Lieutenant1Eliminates any lower ranking officer, the private, and the flag. 2nd Lieutenant1Eliminates the sergeant, the private, and the flag. Sergeant1Eliminates the private, and the flag. Private6Eliminates the spy, and the flag. Spy2Eliminates all officers from the rank of Sergeant up to 5-Star General & the flag.
Flag1Eliminates the opposing flag as long as it takes the aggressive action against the enemy flag. NOTE:If both soldiers are of equal rank, both are eliminated. Challenging A challenge is signaled by placing one’s piece on top of the opposing piece occupying one of the squares. The arbiter then examines the ranks of the opposing pieces and removes the lower-ranked piece off the board and returns it to the owner regardless of who initiated the challenge. The arbiter must take care not to reveal the ranks of the pieces to the opposition. The game can also be played without an arbiter.
In this case, when a challenge is made, both players must state the ranks of their pieces before removing the lower-ranked piece. Therefore, the presence of the arbiter, though not compulsory, is especially important to ensure secrecy until the game is over. It should be noted, however, that official games are conducted with an arbiter. Determining Who Wins the Challenge Regardless of who initiated the challenge, their ranks determine which one is to be removed.
If it was challenged, the player loses. Scrabble Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a game board marked with a 15-by-15 grid. The words are formed across and down in crossword fashion and must appear in a standard dictionary. Official reference works (e. g. The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary) provide a list of permissible words. The Collins Scrabble checker can also be used to check if a word is allowed. The name Scrabble is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. n the United States and Canada. Elsewhere, Scrabble is trademarked by Mattel. The game is sold in 121 countries; there are 29 different language versions. One hundred and fifty million sets have been sold worldwide, and sets are found in roughly one-third of American homes. History Alfred Butts manually tabulated the frequency of letters in words of various length, using examples in a dictionary, the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Times. This was used to determine the number and scores of tiles in the game.
In 1938, architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on an earlier word game he invented called Lexiko. The two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out meticulously performing a frequency analysis of letters from various sources including The New York Times. The new game, which he called “Criss-Crosswords,” added the 15-by-15 game board and the crossword-style game play. He manufactured a few sets himself, but was not successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day.
In 1948, James Brunot, a resident of Newtown, Connecticut – and one of the few owners of the original Criss-Crosswords game – bought the rights to manufacture the game in exchange for granting Butts a royalty on every unit sold. Though he left most of the game (including the distribution of letters) unchanged, Brunot slightly rearranged the “premium” squares of the board and simplified the rules; he also changed the name of the game to “Scrabble,” a real word which means “to scratch frantically. ” In 1949, Brunot and his family made sets in a converted former schoolhouse in Dodgingtown, a section of Newtown.
They made 2,400 sets that year, but lost money. According to legend, Scrabble’s big break came in 1952 when Jack Straus, president of Macy’s, played the game on vacation. Upon returning from vacation, he was surprised to find that his store did not carry the game. He placed a large order and within a year, “everyone had to have one. ” In 1952, unable to meet demand himself, Brunot sold manufacturing rights to Long Island-based Selchow and Righter (one of the manufacturers who, like Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley Company, had previously rejected the game).
Selchow ; Righter bought the trademark to the game in 1972. JW Spears began selling the game in Australia and the UK on January 19, 1955. The company is now a subsidiary of Mattel, Inc. In 1986, Selchow and Righter sold the game to Coleco, who soon after went bankrupt. The company’s assets, including Scrabble and Parcheesi, were purchased by Hasbro. In 1984, Scrabble was turned into a daytime game show on NBC. Scrabble ran from July 1984 to March 1990, with a second run from January to June 1993. The show was hosted by Chuck Woolery.
The tagline of the show in promo broadcasts was, “Every man dies; not every man truly Scrabbles. ” In 2011, a new TV variation of Scrabble, called Scrabble Showdown, aired on The Hub cable channel, which is a is a joint venture of Discovery Communications, Inc. and Hasbro. Scrabble was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong in Rochester, New York, in 2004. Game details The game is played by two to four players on a square (or nearly square) board with a 15-by-15 grid of cells (individually known as “squares”), each of which accommodates a single letter tile.
In official club and tournament games, play is always between two players (or, occasionally, between two teams each of which collaborates on a single rack). The board is marked with “premium” squares, which multiply the number of points awarded: dark red “triple-word” squares, pink “double-word” squares, dark blue “triple-letter” squares, and light blue “double-letter” squares [In 2008, Hasbro changed the colors of the premiums squares to orange for TW, red for DW, blue for DL, and green for TL]. The center square (H8) is often marked with a star or logo, and counts as a double-word square.
In an English-language set the game contains 100 tiles, 98 of which are marked with a letter and a point value ranging from 1 to 10. The number of points of each lettered tile is based on the letter’s frequency in Standard English writing; commonly used letters such as E or O are worth one point, while less common letters score higher, with Q and Z each worth 10 points. The game also has two blank tiles that are unmarked and carry no point value. The blank tiles can be used as substitutes for any letter; once laid on the board, however, the choice is fixed.
Other language sets use different letter set distributions with different point values. Notation system In the notation system common in tournament play, columns are labeled “A-O” and rows “1-15”. A play is usually identified in the format xy WORD score or WORD xy score, where x denotes the column or row on which the play’s main word extends, y denotes the second coordinate of the main word’s first letter, and WORD is the main word. Although unnecessary, additional words formed by the play are occasionally listed after the main word and a slash.
In the case where the play of a single tile forms words in each direction, one of the words is arbitrarily chosen to serve as the main word for purposes of notation. When a blank tile is employed in the main word, the letter it has been chosen to represent is indicated with a lower case letter, or, in handwritten notation, with a square around the letter. Parentheses are sometimes also used to designate a blank, although this may create confusion with a second (optional) function of parentheses, namely indication of an existing letter or word that has been “played through” by the main word.
Sequence of play Before the game, the letter tiles are either put in an opaque bag or placed face down on a flat surface. Opaque cloth bags and customized tiles are staples of clubs and tournaments, where games are rarely played without both. Next, players decide the order in which they play. The normal approach is for players to draw tiles: the player who picks the letter closest to the beginning of the alphabet goes first (with the blank tiles taking precedence over A’s).
In North American tournaments, the rules of the US-based North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA) stipulate instead that players who have gone first in the fewest number of previous games in the tournament go first, and when that rule yields a tie, those who have gone second the most go first. If there is still a tie, tiles are drawn as in the standard rules. At the beginning of the game, and after each turn until the bag is empty (or until there are no more face-down tiles), players draw tiles to replenish their “racks”, or tile holders, with seven tiles, from which they will make plays.
Each rack is concealed from the other players. During a turn, a player will have seven or fewer letter tiles on their rack from which to choose a play. On each turn, a player has the option to: (1) pass, forfeiting the turn and scoring nothing; (2) exchange one or more tiles for an equal number from the bag, scoring nothing, an option available only if at least seven tiles remain in the bag; or (3) make a play on the board, adding its value to the player’s cumulative score. A proper play uses any number of the player’s tiles to form a single continuous word (the play’s “main word”) on the board, reading either left to right or top to bottom.
The main word must either use the letters of one or more previously played words or else have at least one of its tiles horizontally or vertically adjacent to an already played word. If words other than the main word are formed by the play, they are scored as well, and are subject to the same criteria of acceptability. When the board is blank, the first word played must cover H8, the center square. The word must consist of at least two letters, extending horizontally or vertically. H8 is a premium square: the first player to play a word receives a double word score.
A blank tile may take the place of any letter. It then remains that letter for the rest of the game. It scores no points regardless of what letter it is designated or its placement on a premium square. But its placement on a double-word or triple-word square does cause the corresponding premium to be scored for the word in which it is used. While not allowed in official or tournament play, a common “house rule” allows players to “recycle” blank tiles by later substituting the corresponding letter tile. After playing a word, the player draws tiles from the bag to replenish their rack to seven tiles.
If there are not enough tiles in the bag to do so, the player takes all the remaining tiles. After a player plays a word, their opponent may choose to challenge any or all the words formed by the play. If any of the words challenged is found to be unacceptable, the play is removed from the board, the player returns the newly played tiles to their rack and the turn is forfeited. In tournament play, a challenge is to the entire play rather than any one word, and judges (human or computer) are used, so players are not entitled to know which word or words made a challenge succeed.
Penalties for unsuccessfully challenging an acceptable play vary in club and tournament play, and are described in greater detail below. Under North American rules, the game ends when (1) one player plays every tile on their rack, and there are no tiles remaining in the bag (regardless of the tiles on their opponent’s rack); or (2) when six successive scoreless turns have occurred. (For several years, a game could not end with a cumulative score of 0-0, but that is no longer the case, and such games have since occurred a number of times in tournament play. 10]) When the game ends, each player’s score is reduced by the sum of his/her unplayed letters. In addition, if a player has used all of his or her letters, the sum of the other player’s unplayed letters is added to that player’s score; in tournament play, a player who “goes out” adds twice that sum, and the opponent is not penalized. Scoreless turns can occur when a player passes, when a player exchanges tiles, or when a player loses a challenge. The latter rule varies slightly in international tournaments. Scoring
Premium square colors SquareOriginal and international versionUS ; Canada version Double letterLight blueBlue Triple letterDark blueGreen Double wordPinkRed Triple wordRedOrange Each word formed in the play is scored this way:
Game-construction enthusiasts have disavowed this ruse. ) If a player uses all seven of the tiles in the rack in a single play, a bonus of 50 points is added to the score of that play (this is called a “bingo” in Canada and the United States, a “Scrabble” in Spain and a “bonus” elsewhere). These bonus points are added after totaling the score for that turn. When the letters to be drawn have run out, the final play can often determine the winner. This is particularly the case in close games with more than two players.
The player who goes out first gets the sum of all remaining unplayed tiles added to their score. Players with tiles remaining on their rack have the sum of their remaining tiles subtracted from their score. Acceptable words Acceptable words are the primary entries in some chosen dictionary, and all of their inflected forms. Words that are hyphenated, capitalized (such as proper nouns), or apostrophized are not allowed, unless they also appear as acceptable entries: “Jack” is a proper noun, but the word JACK is acceptable because it has other usages as a common noun (automotive, vexillological, etc. and verb that are acceptable. Acronyms or abbreviations, other than those that have been regularized (such as AWOL, RADAR, LASER, and SCUBA), are not allowed. Variant spellings, slang or offensive terms, archaic or obsolete terms, and specialized jargon words are allowed if they meet all other criteria for acceptability. Foreign words are not allowed in the English language Scrabble unless they have been incorporated into the English language – for example, the words “patisserie” and “glace”.
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