Skip to content
Spark & Whetstonethe grown-up commons

← The Grammar of Games

The Grammar of Games

Three short lessons on how traditional games are built: a game is a handful of small rules, change one and you have a new game, and writing your family’s rules down keeps them.

Spark & Whetstone · sparkwhetstone.org/learn/the-grammar-of-games · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Answers are at the end, so you can try each question first.

Lesson 1. A game is a few rules

Researchers who study the world’s traditional games, in a project called the Digital Ludeme Project, describe each game as a set of small rule pieces they call ludemes: the board, how pieces move, how they capture, how the game ends.

A sowing game like mancala, oware or ô ăn quan is a few such pieces: how many pits, how many seeds, which way you sow, when you capture, and when the game stops.

Question. Which of these is a rule piece of a sowing game?

  1. The colour of the board
  2. How many seeds start in each pit
  3. Who brought the game to the party

Say it back. In your own words: what is a ludeme?

________________________________________________

________________________________________________

Lesson 2. Change one rule

Change one rule piece and the game can change a great deal. Oware, played across West Africa, captures backwards from the last pit when it holds two or three seeds. Congkak, played in Malaysia and Indonesia, lets you sow round again when you land in your own store.

Same board, same seeds, one or two different rules: a different game, with a different kind of thinking. This is why families who "play mancala" often find they play quite different games.

Question. Two families play on the same mancala board but one lets you sow again after landing in your store. What is true?

  1. They are playing exactly the same game.
  2. One rule differs, so they are playing different games.
  3. One family is playing it wrong.

Say it back. Say it back: why can one changed rule make a different game?

________________________________________________

________________________________________________

Lesson 3. Write it down

House rules live in people’s heads and are lost when those people are gone. Writing them down, in plain words with the numbers, keeps your family’s version of the game.

Heirloom Rules asks six questions in pictures and writes the card for you, then lets you play it on the screen with the closest rules the board knows, so you can see the game move.

Question. What is the best way to keep your grandmother’s version of a game?

  1. Trust that someone will remember it.
  2. Write the rules down with her, and play them while she watches.
  3. Look up the official rules instead.

Say it back. In your own words: why write a family’s game rules down?

________________________________________________

________________________________________________

At the table: Grandmother’s rules

Players: an elder who knows the game, and anyone who wants to learn it. You'll need: a mancala board, or an egg box and dried beans.

  1. Ask the elder to teach the game exactly as they played it as a child.
  2. Answer the six picture questions on Heirloom Rules together and print the card.
  3. Play one game from the card and see if the elder agrees it plays right.
  4. Fix the card where it is wrong; their memory wins.

Seat sheets and a run-through: sparkwhetstone.org/heirloom-rules

Answers

  1. How many seeds start in each pit — The starting seeds change every move that follows; the colour of the board does not.
  2. One rule differs, so they are playing different games. — A single rule like sowing again changes the strategy, so these are two real variants, neither wrong.
  3. Write the rules down with her, and play them while she watches. — Writing them with her and playing them back checks that the card says what she means.