Links: On Deciphering the Rules of Ancient Games and Not Terraforming Mars

Browne and his colleagues are working on a general-purpose system for modelling ancient games, as well as generating plausible rulesets and evaluating them. The system is called Ludii, and it implements computational techniques from the world of genetics research and artificial intelligence...

The first part of the process, Browne said, is to break games down into their constituent parts and codify them in terms of units called "ludemes" in a database. Ludemes can be any existing game pieces or rules that archaeologists know of. Once a game is described in terms of its ludemes, it becomes a bit more like a computer program that machines can understand and analyze for patterns. Cultural information, such as where the game was played, is also recorded to help evaluate the plausibility of new rulesets.

Using techniques from the world of algorithmic procedural generation, the team then uses the information in the database to infer and reconstruct rulesets of varying plausibility and playability for these ancient games.

We are just a bit behind where we expected to be at this point in the process. We have not yet replaced the income from cutting back on the number of games we publish and [from] selling Love Letter, but almost all of our releases this year have out-performed our projections and are individually more profitable than past games.

The plan to give each game more attention at launch is working. From last year, Space Base and War Chest have continued to be strong sellers. From this year, Tiny Towns has been a mega hit, Point Salad is a treat that sold out in one day, and early buzz and pre-orders on Ecos: First Continent tells us that it will also be a winner.

Hitting your schedule is even more important when doing fewer games, especially with Kickstarter. We continue to learn the hard lesson that weeks matter. Our schedule slides have cost us more in cash flow than any other mistake this year...

Perhaps the collection's most prized item is a chess set carved by renown ivory sculptor Oleg Raikis from 20,000-year-old mammoth ivory found in Siberia and heartwood ebony, valued at $27,000. When employee Connor Locklin first saw the set was made of ivory, he thought it'd be an issue — the commercial trade of elephant ivory has been banned in the United States since 2016.

"I looked it up and found its saving grace — it's mammoth ivory, not elephant ivory, which you can sell," Locklin said, pointing out that the mammoth elephant has long been extinct.