Today is National Puzzle Day! (At least, it is in the United States, where they have a surfeit of such things.)  Why not mark the day by dusting of one of those jigsaws you’ve got stashed in the garage, or getting a free puzzle game for your iPhone/iPod/iPad, or, y’know, treating yourself to a copy of Army Of Zero?

But they do seem to have an awful lot of these days in the US, which started me wondering how something like this starts.  What needs to happen before a day gets widely recognised as what is correctly called a “commemorative day”?

Well, sometimes you don’t need to do anything official.  Some commemoratives, like National Puzzle Day or the more famous International Talk Like A Pirate Day have no “official” standing.  One day, someone just had an interesting idea and somebody else heard about it and mentioned it to someone else, and before long it was adopted as a de facto National Day.  It’s a lot easier to get support for an unofficial day like these nowadays, of course, because we’re all a lot more connected than we were even 10 years ago.

Greetings card companies take the blame for some of these days.  Faced with a blank square on the calendar, they do love to create a special day to drum up some extra business.  In practical terms, the existence of many of these special days can be seen as being due to an alliance between (a) the greetings card industry, (b) special interest groups looking for a bit of love and (c) the unlucky congressperson who doesn’t want to be dismissive of a particular under-appreciated demographic.  (See Administrative Professionals’ Day and Grandparents Day).

To have a day officially recognised in the US requires an act of Congress.  Typically the process begins with an interested person or interest group contacting their congressperson, and convincing them that a national day in favour of their particular cause would be a good idea.  The congressperson then attempts to get it onto the agenda for debate in Congress itself.  If they’re lucky, the day may become reality in a few years.

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that there are a lot of attempts to get particular people or ideas marked in this way.  This, combined with the fact that, unlike other bills, commemorative days tend to get passed without much in the way of opposition, meant that in the 1980’s and 1990’s, 30% of ALL PUBLIC LAWS signed by the President were for commemoratives!  There’s more on the subject at CNN’s site.

Just a quick heads-up for those not following us on Twitter… our Twitter messages include an Army Of Zero clue every day this week, just to help you along as the closing date for our prize competition approaches.  Anyone can see our Twitter messages at http://twitter.com/pointzerogames, but if you’re a Twitter user, please follow us @pointzerogames!

Ah, there we are.  We’ve been a bit lazy over Christmas vis-a-vis the old blog, haven’t we?  Ah well, if there’s one time of year when it’s permissable, if not expected, then I guess this is it.

Happy New Year, anyway, and I hope you had a terrific Christmas.  Ours was splendid, enhanced rather than spoilt by being snowed in for several days.  If you have places to be and things to do then of course that’s a thundering nuisance, but we didn’t, and the fridge was full of delicious food, so all in all it was very peaceful and festive. We watched some rather good telly too, some of it games-related, particularly BBC4’s short Games Britannia season.

The second episode dealt with the story of board games in Britain, and was a thoroughly entertaining romp through history of the subject, although it was a slight shame that its occasional (and perfectly informative and entertaining) wanderings across the Atlantic to talk about games like Scrabble, Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit, and even to Essen, had to be curtailed or spun whenever the programme makers remembered about the “Britannia” in their title.

Still, without the “Britannia”, it’s unlikely that the program would have paid much attention to a game that I’d forgotten about, but which I now remember rather fondly.  That fondness is probably nostalgia, because in honesty it isn’t a classic game, but Kensington was a big deal for about 25 minutes in 1979, when it garnered a lot of mainstream media attention and even won the UK Game of the Year award.  These days it’s out of print, but it was significant in that it was one of the first successful independently produced board games, and as such started a cottage industry that’s still going to this day.

Put together by two novice game designers, Brian Taylor and Peter Forbes, as a way of staving off the tough economic conditions of the day, the board of Kensington was inspired by a tiling pattern at the site of the Albert Memorial in London’s Kensington Gardens.  Taylor and Forbes did a brilliant job of getting themselves all over the newspapers and TV, and made some terrific marketing decisions, including distinctive packaging.  The game itself came in a flat sleeve, 12 inches on a side, so it looked like an LP record (and I kept my copy at the end of my row of albums).  You couldn’t mistake it for anything else.

Each player had 15 pieces.  The pieces were small plastic discs, and were all identical except that one player had blue pieces and the other had red.

The board looked like this:

The object of the game was to place six of your counters on the six vertices of one of the white hexagons or one of the hexagons of your own colour.

The game had two phases.  In the first phase, the players took turns to place their pieces on the board.  Pieces could be placed at any unoccupied vertex.  In the second phase, players took turns to slide one of their pieces from one vertex to any unoccupied adjacent vertex.

During either phase, players tried to occupy all the vertices of any triangle or square, and if they did so, they won the right to reposition their opponent’s pieces: one piece for occupying a triangle, or two pieces for occupying a square.

If you’re thinking Nine Men’s Morris on steroids, you’re not a million miles away.  The problem with the game was that the first person to occupy a triangle or square pretty much then had their foot on their opponent’s neck, and it became very difficult to get back into the the game for the other player.

As I said, Kensington is out of print now, but it’s possible to pick it up on eBay.  Or you can make your own.  It’s not a stayer, but it’s interesting enough for a while, and it’s an important footnote in the history of the board game because of its indie origins and as a lesson in the importance of getting good media attention.