Players construct and then vie for ownership of overlapping triangles in an effort to own a set of triangles that form a bridge from one side of the board to the other.

Each player chooses one of each triangles' three vertices by placing a peg in the board. Players use their "money" to "purchase" faces of the die and thereby weight their chances of winning ownership of the triangle. The die is thrown and whom ever owns the die's top face wins the triangle.

The winner encircles the triangle's three pegs with a rubber band of their color. When a set of overlapping triangles of one color spans the board, the player associated with that color wins.

In COLORCHESS the opposing sides are blue and red, and the tactical value of each piece is keyed to its saturation of color. Thus the pawns are the lightest tint and the kings and queens the most vivid.

Being of uniform size, with subtle differences in shape to aid recognition, color becomes the major distinguishing characteristic.

Set agaist the board's neutral grid, the colored pieces create changing patterns as the game progresses.

The open spaces and clusters of color become descriptive diagrams of the action.

Red and the green players arrange their pieces symmetrically in 4 of the star's 5 legs. Each space carries between 1 and 5 symbols. Pieces move in different manners according to their shape.

A piece's power is determined by whether the symbol that it carries matches any of the symbols printed on the space it occupies. A player's total power on a space is the sum of the powers of their pieces.

Players move their pieces in and between groups in an attempt to overpower and remove the opposing player's pieces. The surviving player wins.

Players choose to join Robin Hood, the Sheriff of Nottingham, the Noblemen, or the Fairies. They position their actors symmetrically on the board and place the arrows on certain unoccupied spaces.

Players take turns moving two of their pieces one space each in a race to pick up fallen arrows, carry them to judicious locations, and fire them at their adversaries.

The arrows continue flying around the board while other players take their turns, trying to pick up fallen arrows while avoiding those in flight. When an actor is hit by an arrow they're sent to nirvana. The arrow that dispatched them falls to the ground to be picked up by whomever gets to it first.

The last player to remain on the board wins.

Players chose a senior researcher, a university, a Final Theory of the Universe, and start with 2 Post Docs each. Each player sets their groups' focus value, which they can change with each turn. This focus value, the size of their group, the human forces that affect you on each turn, and how well you reward your Post Docs determines your research success each turn.

For each "publication" you get to draw a piece from "The Unknown" in an attempt to be the first to assemble your final theory. But you must also pay your Post Docs, and the amount of funds available depends on your success in winning NSF grants. This, in turn, depends on the manner in which present your theory to the public.

The search for truth may be pure, but the forces that affect you are not. Just how does one play the game of science, anyway?

Players position their actors symmetrically around the corners of planet Ugluk, placing the arrows on pegs at certain unoccupied vertices of the colored paths.

Players take turns moving two of their pieces in a race to pick up fallen arrows, carry them to judicious locations, and fire them at their adversaries.

The arrows continue flying around the globe while other players take their turns, trying to pick up fallen arrows while avoiding those in flight.

When an actor is hit by an arrow they're sent to nirvana and the arrow falls to the ground to be picked up by whomever gets to it first.

On this surface the geodesics change direction in odd ways as they cross surface boundaries, so the problem is to figure out how the arrows will fly, and how to sneak up on other players without being noticed.

The last player to remain on the board wins.

Concept: the board is a 6 sided, non-Platonic solid whose surface is covered by 3 mutually and multiply intersecting paths. This shape is mounted on a wooden pole and can be spun around its axis.

The game developed when my brother looked at "Robin Hood," shown above, and asked, "Why is it flat?"

Summary: A complex civilization-type game where each player guides 6 nomadic tribes through a landscape of scarce resources adopting a diffuse or centralized strategy. The game frames the question : "is it better to act as an individual or to form a collective?"

Each player gets an equal number of squares with which to build their part of the world before the game begins. Players locate their tribes and resources are then scattered to equal advantage.

Tribe movements depend on tribe size, their strength, the terrain they choose to cross, and the exogenous situations prevailing at their location.

To survive and prosper tribes need energy, which they can get through mining resources, building industry, collaborating with or stealing from other tribes.

Larger tribes are more efficient in production and they can develop military forces, but smaller tribes travel more quickly to exploit opportunity.

Whichever player has more energy at the end of 15 rounds wins the game.

Concept: Civilizations develop differently according to the resources on which they depend. This game explores issues of growth and stability that arise from different forms of resource dependence.

The terrain board is a rearrangeable set of 7 hexagons whose colored spaces show mountains, forests, valleys, rivers and lakes. The air board is assembled in pieces as the game proceeds and represents calm air, cloud streets, sunny days and dangerous thunderstorms. This air board, carrying the up and down drafts, drifts in varying directions carrying all airplanes with it.

Pilots race a 3-point course through the peaks and valleys, while navigating the vertical air currents and the prevailing winds to avoid getting too low or hitting the ground.

The best lift will require you to stray off-course, and the faster you fly the faster you sink. Spend too much time trying to stay high and you'll be left behind. Push too hard for speed and you won't make it over the next hill!

Concept: This fully accurate presentation of soar plane racing makes it clear that the contest involves only two variables: one's height above the ground, and one's speed through the air. The player who best optimizes these in the context of what he or she knows about their environment will win the race.

Anotomically correct players move their disconnected parts around a 1-dimensional world trying to conjugate.

Cogenital pairings gain both players 4 points; other pairs score less. A third player can win points by adding their eye to a couple's intimacies. One can lower one's score by "slaping" another's part in nonamorous contact. And one can even score alone by paring one's own hand and genitals, but this results in the loss of an eye.

The game ends when the sum of all players' points reaches 40. The player with the highest points is a loser because, as we all learn sooner or later, there is more to life. The lowest scoring player looses for Darwinian reasons. The two middle-scoring players win by virtue of their moderation.

Pieces: 4 players, each of a different race, are represented by 9 magnetized pieces : 2 eyes, 2 breasts, 2 hands, lips, genitals and a pair of buttocks. The pieces are loosely attached to a metal hoop marked off like a ladder into 36 spaces. The game starts with each player's pieces naturally ordered.

Play takes place on all sides of the hoop. Players must spin the suggestively undulating hoop to see who's monkeying around on the other side. Score is kept by moving pegs whose color matches the players skin. Over-intellectualizing is prevented through the use of a 30-second timer.

Concept: A pure strategy game that highlights the essential question of gaming: "Where does a game's meaning come from?"

Each player associates him or her self with one of the 4 colors and stands in front of the symetrically arranged "home strips" of that color, moving their beam and leveling it above their strip. The round, hook-covered, colored disks are placed symettrically in the quadrants of their color. Each player holds a drinking straw in their mouth.

Players simultaneously race around the table moving their balance arms only using the air blown through their straws. Each player tries to be the first to pick up a chip of each of the 4 colors and bring it back to their home strip.

Chips are picked up by blowing the beam's velcro foot down to touch and attach to the velcroed chips. The beams are then blown back to deposit the chips on the player's home strip.

Players must not touch the beams, except to disengage chips from them, and players must not jostle or elbow each other.

The first player to gather all four color chips on their home strip is the winner.

Concept: a game that is sculptural, kinetic, and physicsally engaging.

Players choose their avatar and place it on one of the 4 "birth" spaces at the center of the board. In the "conscious" part of each round players move their avatars in steps from the inner rings outward, choosing one of the 3 paths available to them at any space. Once they've chosen a new space, players write down the sentence written on the space and mark the positive and negative attributes embedded in it.

In the "dream" part of each round players chose to enter either the intellectual or the emotional dream maze. They locate one of their negative character traits in the maze of their choice and then start the timer.

Each player has 30 seconds to move away from this negative trait, past sentence fragments and images, to reach some other trait. Whatever trait they reach is exchanged for the negative trait from which they started. Each player must then write a sentence describing this transformation using the sentence fragments they've encountered in their passage through the maze.

Players' lives end after 5 rounds. They're scored according to how successfully they've transformed negative into positive attributes. The winning player is the one who has most improved him or her self.

Concept: Text authors inflexably engage readers because readers' power to reinterpret the text is limited to nonexistent. How can we enable the reader to write their own story without abandoning or coercing them? Since readers generally do not know how to create a story how do we faciliate the creation of their journey? This game suggests an answer.

Each player builds coral animals of their own color by placing pieces representing different hard and soft tissues such as anchor, spine, nerve, heart, and stomach.

Within each turn player's animals grow and spawn. Animal can attack each other resulting in minor damage that requires repair, or major damage that severes the animal from its anchor at the edge of the reef causing it to float away and be lost in the current.

Structurally complete animals with fully developed organs can eat and thereby create fat cells. The more efficient the animal's structure, and the better its location, the fatter it gets.

The player whose coral is fattest when any one player runs out of pieces wins the round and gets a score equal to the fat that all players' corals have grown in that round. The player with the highest total score after four rounds wins the game.

Since one wins by both fattening oneself and one's opponents, this game is a combination of conflict, race, and cooperation.

Pieces:
Each of up to 4 players has 165 square, magnetized pieces whose 10 different types correspond to 10 different kinds of cells of a coral organism. The icon on each type of piece shows how the piece is connected.

The metal board, with 945 squares, represents the reef habitat: the edges are the reef, the interior the water.

One D6, D8, and D10 die, used at the start of the game, locate where each player's eggs attach to the reef.

Concept: The game began as pieces arranged to form computer algorithms - complete with loops and conditionals - which ran, at least in theory, to generate game points. But since the resulting automata look like corals whose competition models reef ecology, the entire computer programming structure is absorbed within the living system metaphor.

The group is divide into speakers and musicians. The speakers examine and then select a topic from the deck of topic cards. Each speaker is to recall or invent a 2 minute story related to this topic. Speakers should avoid their familiar stories and find new and uncertain stories that may be affected by the music and the audience.

One person, designated as the host, has the job of cueing the next pair of performers, and alerting each speaker when their two minutes are up. Speakers present their topics one after the other, without break or interrupton.

Musicians accompany speakers by inventing a rhythm on the Zoundz to match the story being told. Each of the Zoundz's sculptures triggers one of three prerecorded rhythms of a type specific to that sculpture. For example there is a strings sculpture, a percussion sculpture, a bass, and so on.

Lift a sculpture from a site and its rhythm fades away. Brush a sculpture over a site and a single beat is played. Continuously add, remove, or replace sculptures in any fashion to create a sound scape for your speaker's story.

When speakers and musicians listen to each other something new and unexpected can be created.

Pieces:
Speakers select a topic from a deck of 56 topic cards, whose topics include:

Being naked; A love story; Happy childhood event; Something you stole; Your worst outfit; A story about birth or creation.

Each speaker is to speak for 120 seconds on the selected topic saying, or acting, in any way they want.

Each musician, in turn, will play a toy rhythm machine called a Zoundz, which plays 1 to 3 simultaneous rhythms depending on which of 7 sculptures you place on each of 3 electrically sensitive sites. Musicians are shown the Zoundz and taught how it works immediately before the game.

Concept: How is the speaker influenced by the musician, or the musician by the speaker? How are you influenced as a listener? What will you remember?