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.

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.

It’s been great recently to see quite so much about games and puzzles in the media. There have been plenty of articles in the papers about boardgames (here, here and here, for example), and in particular it’s been encouraging to read articles in the mainstream media suggesting that there is life beyond Monopoly and Cluedo.

BBC Four is currently in the middle of its Game On Season, featuring documentaries on board games, outdoor play and crosswords, amongst others.

Last week BBC Four showed its eagerly anticipated documentary on Kit Williams, creator of treasure hunt classic Masquerade, which you can watch on iPlayer.

Also still available on iPlayer is James May’s recent BBC2 series Toy Stories, which each week took a classic toy brand from my generation’s childhood - Airfix, Plasticine, Meccano and Scalextric - and turned it into a giant engineering project.  Later this month, the BBC will broadcast the final episodes, on Lego (20th December) and Hornby (Christmas Day).

Add to this the current vogue for games manufacturers to team up with Hollywood for upcoming film versions of Risk, Battleship, Monopoly et al., and it’s clear that something is up.  I can think of three reasons for the renewed interest.  Firstly, although it’s unlikely that the traditional industry is ever going to claw back the lead that the video game industry has established over it, there does seem to be a renewed appetite amongst the public for games that have a more sociable element to them.  Secondly, it’s well-known that recessionary times lead to more time spent at home, for both economic and psychological reasons.  And thirdly - and I don’t know if this is oversimplification or not - but there seems to be a strong nostalgic element to this, most clearly seen in the Game On season and in James May’s series, and nostalgia is a state of mind to which even TV commissioning editors and Hollywood producers are susceptible.

All in all, it took about five months to decide exactly how it was all going to fit together, and to build the prototypes and test them.

I am a total lightweight.

Just go and read about the effort put in by Jason Smith at Puzzle Forge to build his own Petaminx. Designed by Andrew Cormier, the Petaminx is like a Rubik’s Cube in the same way that the Space Shuttle is like a Sopwith Camel.

Award-winning Eurogame designer Reiner Knizia has been involved to some extent with the design of the games. Even though it’s not clear how much he’s actually contributed to the games’ design, or whether it’s more of a PR thing, it’s an interesting development that LEGO clearly think it’s beneficial to have a name designer on board.

These aren’t the first games that Lego has published. A few years ago, my youngest and I played game after game after game of LEGO Racers, in which you built a racetrack out of interlocking cardboard pieces, then raced your LEGO cars around the track. Movement was determined by a spinner, and you could pick up various power-ups as you progressed around the track.

Good fun, but it didn’t really need to be LEGO. What’s different, and very interesting, about this new batch of games is that they are much closer to the brand values of LEGO, in particular its appeal to creativity and interchange.

Briefly, here’s how Minotaurus works. It’s a game for two to four players, and each has to navigate three pieces from one corner of the board to the centre. The board is a LEGO base with a simple labyrinth, constructed out of more LEGO pieces. The design of the initial labyrinth is set out in the rules (but more about that in a moment).

There’s a piece called the Minotaurus, which starts in the middle, and can be moved around by the players. If the Minotaurus catches a player’s piece, that piece has to return to the corner where it started.

The dice - also made of LEGO - has the numbers three to six on it, plus a grey face and a black face. Throw a number, and you get to move one of your pieces. Throw a grey face, and instead of moving you get to reconfigure a wall, either to block an opponent or to clear your own route to the centre. Throw black and you get to move the Minotaurus piece eight spaces, hopefully to catch or at least block an opponent.

So it’s really straightforward, and kids should have no difficulty picking it up. What’s interesting from a gamer’s perspective is that the rules actively encourage mucking about with the game. There are suggested tweaks, including changing the labyrinth layout, making the Minotaurus faster, or allowing players to jump walls if they throw a certain number, but implicitly the rules say: MAKE UP ANY RULES YOU LIKE. GO NUTS!

And this is what should make the LEGO games interesting to the specialist game community. It’s not that the game mechanics are particularly innovative, it’s that the game actively encourages variants and modifications, and because it’s LEGO, there’s no shortage of extra bits and pieces that can be filched from the toybox to make new pieces for the game.

From there, it’s only a short leap for kids to start using LEGO to make up their own games. What a wonderful opportunity for children - and their parents - to realise that they don’t need to be confined to the published rules. This approach to gaming is, of course, already recognised in the hardcore gamers’ world, but when a toy company with the reach of LEGO gets behind it, things could really get interesting.

He may be right, but perhaps not in the way he intended.  Here are Stephen Colbert and Jeff Golblum “auditioning” for the Battleship movie:

The problem is that there’s no narrative in most of these games, the exception probably being Clue/Cluedo.  Clue/Cluedo has at least the potential to work as a narrative, but only because its format is based on a narrative genre: the 1930’s country house murder.  OK, that’s a literary genre first, but also exists as a film genre.  In fact, Clue/Cluedo has already been made into a movie once , directed by Jonathan Lynn of “Yes Minister” fame and starring Tim Curry.  It’s played for laughs and it’s actually rather good.

But what can we expect from a movie based on Risk, for goodness sake? This? Probably not…

There’s no dramatic story arc in a boardgame.  Videogames ought to be easier to adapt, but Hollywood has had years of failing to deliver a decent film based on a videogame.  Boardgames are much harder to turn into a satisfying narrative - unless you don’t even try, and instead make a genre movie and just slap the name of the boadgame on top of it.  In the case of Risk, you can imagine an epic war film, maybe, with a load of enormous CGI battle scenes, Lord Of The Rings style, but there’s no artistic reason at all for an epic war film to be a Risk spin-off.  Exactly the same holds true for Battleship.  Expect a generic hunt-and-destroy submarine movie (though it would be great if they made a really good sub movie, of which there have been none for literally decades), but again, why not just make a really good submarine movie?

Well, there’s one obvious reason, of course.  The movie will sell a few more tickets based on brand recognition from people who play (or used to play) whatever game it’s based on, and Hasbro will sell an enormous number of extra copies of Risk and Battleship.  And you can’t blame game companies or film companies for trying to make money, because that’s what they’re for, but it’s hard to feel totally comfortable sitting in the cinema when it all looks so blatantly cynical.

The Monopoly film is going to raise a feeling of slight unease outside the US, because all the properties have different names in different territories.  Fair enough if they stick to the American names, which they surely will - it’s an American film, and Monopoly is an American game, after all.  But here in the UK we all know what Old Kent Road and Mayfair represent, and most people won’t know the difference between Boardwalk (which actually sounds a bit cheap and vulgar, doesn’t it?) and Mediterranean Avenue (which sounds kind of upmarket).

Having said all that, if there’s anyone from Sony or Paramount reading this who’s interested in the film rights for Army Of Zero - call us!  (We suggest Kenneth Branagh for Lord Icclestone).

So far - as far as we know - no-one’s cracked the whole thing, but we are in touch with a number of enthusiasts, some via email, some on the web, and it’s very rewarding to see how you’re getting on.

The components that are proving to be the most awkward to people seem to be the three lower shields.  In addition, I haven’t heard from anyone who’s figured out the overall objective.  The various sub-puzzles are coming together quite nicely, but figuring out where it all leads to seems to be evading people so far.  If you can deduce that, it might just let you approach the remaining items from a different angle.

Do please remember when you submit your entry to include the competition entry card, which you’ll find in the box.

These are rule variants for the basic game.  We’re still (yes, still!) working on a co-operative Army Of Zero game, using the existing cards but pitting players against a common foe, but it’s been hard to get the thing working as well as we wanted, so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a bit longer for that.  But have a look at the new, optional rules for the existing game, and see if you like them.

You can pick and choose which ones you want to incorporate into your games, but I confess that my favourite is the one we’ve called the “Champion” variant.  In this version, you don’t have to pre-order your characters and play through them in that order - you can choose any character from your hand to go into battle. We’ve found that if you play the game this way, it’s much more natural to develop favourite characters, and as a player you become rather more involved in your characters’ struggles.  You feel it more when they lose, but you also enjoy it more when they are victorious.  We like this variant so much that we used it almost exclusively at Game ‘09 in Manchester last weekend.

At Game ‘09, we also used the “Skirmish” variant, where each player receives five cards instead of the more usual ten.  We opted for this to make the games shorter, so we could get through more rounds with the show visitors who wanted a game, and it worked pretty well.  We didn’t use the “Carnage” variant, which replaces the game’s six-sided dice with eight-sided ones, because the standard game only comes with the six-sided dice.  We just wanted to present the game using whatever was in the box.

This coming Saturday and Sunday (17th and 18th October) you can come and meet us at Game ‘09 in Manchester!

Along with a whole host of board games, card games, RPGs and computer games, Point Zero Games will be there playing lots of Army Of Zero, and we’ll have copies of our Manchester treasure hunts on sale too.

Also, come and have a look at the great word game LeCardo, which we’re proud to be demonstrating as well.

You can get tickets on the door, or book them online at the Game ‘09 web site. Tickets cost £10 per adults (over 15s), £7 for over 10s and under 10s are free. Each entry ticket includes a £3 voucher to use at the show.