A quick guide to all the games, ancient and modern

MASTERMIND

Olympiad championship: Aug 23-24 (pm). Prize fund: £500. Two player code-breaking game based on the Victorian game Bulls & Cows. Invented by Marco Meirovitz and first marketed by Invicta Plastics a quarter of a century ago, the game has sold many millions worldwide. Components are a peg board with pegs in eight colours. One player, the code-setter, secretly sets a code, left to right, of four colours which may include repeated colours. The second player, the code-breaker, attempts to solve the code by placing four colours in sequence, continuing attempts until the code is broken.

MEMORY SKILLS

World championship: Aug 26-27 (day). (Prize fund: £5,000).

MENTAL CALCULATION

World championship: Aug 24 (eve). (Prize fund: £500). Test in which contestants have to write down only the answer to each question - no intermediate calculations or notes may be written and calculators are banned. Questions are graded:from easy to difficult.

MIND MAPPING

World championship: Aug 22 (day). (Prize fund £500).

OTHELLO

European championship: Aug 21-22 (day). Olympiad championship: Aug 23-26 (pm). Five-minute championship: Aug 27 (am). Beginners' tournament: Aug 28 (pm). (Prize fund: £7,000). Two-player abstract board game "perfected" by Goro Hasegawa in 1971 and named after his fav-ourite Shakespearian character. Except for a small rules change, the game is identical to Reversi, invented by Lewis Waterman c.1880. Waterman was later sued by John Mollett, who claimed that it infringed his patent of an earlier (c.1870) game called Annexation. The "relaunch" generated new interest. The British Othello Federation was founded in 1977 and the first British and International championships were held in that year. Other countries with championships are Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the US. Board 8x8 has 64 men, one side white, the other black. The centre four squares are "dressed" with two pieces of each, colour uppermost, placed diagonally one to the other. A play consists of placing a man on any empty square with own colour uppermost. If a piece or pieces of opposite colour are trapped between it and a piece of the same colour, the opponents' men are reversed to create a line of men of the player's colour. There is no capturing. When the board is full, the winner is the player whose colour is in the majority.

OWARE

Junior (to 11) International championship: Aug 21, 10am-9pm); Junior (to 18) International championship: Aug 22, 10am-9pm; International championship: Aug 23-27 (eve); teach-in and beginners' tournament: Aug 25 (day). (Prize fund £500).
Oware ("fours"), also known under a variety of names, is but one of the 200-odd mancala games. It is played by two players using a 12-cup board. The royal game of the Ashantis, it is mainly confined to Ghana and Sierra Leone.
The game starts with four beans or stones in each of the 12 cups. The players face each other with the board lengthways between them. The first player picks up all the stones from any cup on his side of the board and sows them one at a time, anti-clockwise, into succeeding cups.

PENTAMIND

World championship. (Prize fund: £1,000). Anyone taking part in five or more tournaments for different games or mental skills is automatically entered for the Pentamind Championship. No extra time or effort is involved on the part of the participant. If you play more than five tournaments your best scores will be taken.

POKER

World Amateur championship: Aug 21-27 (am). A tournament without money, this is played in seven sections, each with a different form of poker. The sections are: Aug 21: five-card draw; Aug 22: Hold'em; Aug 23: Razz; Aug 24: Canadian stud: Aug 25: London lowball; Aug 26: Omaha; Aug 27: seven card stud. The world champion will be the player with the best aggregate result from any four sections. Texas Hold'em No-Limit championship: Aug 28-29 (am).
Hold'em is the form of poker used at the annual "World Series of Poker" in Las Vegas, where every player sits down with $10,000 to start with. (Note: There are no cash prizes in poker tournaments as it is against the law in England.)

QUIZ

British Quiz championship: Aug 22 (am). Entry by pre-qualification only. The quizmaster for the final is Magnus Magnusson. {Prize fund: £500).

RUMMIKUB

Olympiad championship: Aug 25 (day). Rummikub is a multi-player tile game based on the card game rummy. Invented, or at least developed, by Ephraim Hertzano, it was first marketed in Israel in the early Fifties and now enjoys a worldwide popularity. It won the German game of the year award in 1980. It is probably best with four players. There are 106 tiles, numbered 1-13, two of each value in four different colours, plus two jokers, with racks on which players stack their hands, screened from the other players. The object is to assemble tiles in melds or runs, as in rummy. Exposed tiles can be juggled by players in order to accommodate their unwanted tiles. The object is to be the first to dispose of all one's spare tiles.

SCRABBLE

Olympiad Championship: Aug 21-22 (day). Weekday tournament: Aug 23-27 (am). Evening tournament: Aug 23-25 (eve). (Prize fund: £6,000).

SHOGI

(Japanese chess) Pan Atlantic championship: Aug 22 (pm); Aug 23 (day); Aug 24-25 (am). (Prize fund: £5,000). Japan is exporting an esoteric, indigenous pastime as increasing numbers of Westerners take up shogi, the distinctive home-grown Japanese national board game and their version of chess. There are 15 million regular shogi players in Japan. It is played on a board with 20 flat, wedge-shaped pieces a side, and has many elements in common with chess. In both games the aim is to checkmate the opposing king. Shogi players each have a king, rook, bishop and nine pawns, all of which move in the same way as their chess counterparts, but the knights are more restricted. Shogi also sports romantically named golds, silvers and lances, whose moves have no chess equivalent.

SKAT

Olympiad Championship: Aug 21-22 (day).

SPEED READING

World championship: Aug 23 (am). (Prize fund: £500). Speed reading tests are primarily based on the reading of novels. The reader has to read an entire novel as quickly as possible, subsequently giving a presentation to people who have already read the novel in depth. This presentation has to include knowledgeable comments about and integration of the main areas: characters, setting, plot, philosophy, symbolism, language level, literary style, metaphor, themes and historical context.

STRATEGO

(L'Attaque) World championship: Aug 26 (pm), Aug 27 (day). World team championship: Aug 28 (am) (Prize fund: £5,000). Two-player war game; inventor unknown. Quite possibly based on The Jungle Game, which has a longer and even more obscure history. It was first marketed as L'Attaque in France towards the end of the last century and by HP Gibson & Sons in the UK in the early Twenties. In 1961 it was relaunched in the US as Stratego with a slightly enlarged board and added pieces. Board 10x10 has 40 men a side. Players set up their forces freely on their own side of the board with the ranks of pieces concealed from the opponent. Combat is hand-to-hand with lower-ranked pieces eliminated. The aim is to capture the opponent's flag which, once placed, cannot be moved.

TWIXT

World championship: Aug 25 (am). Prize fund: £500. Two player path-forming strategic board game of the type pioneered by Piet Hein in the Forties with Hex. Invented by Alex Randolph and first marketed in the US by 3M nearly 30 years ago, the game has never been out of production. Square board with a regular pattern of holes and pieces in two colours. Players place a peg in turn into an empty hole. Pegs of the same colour that are a (chess) knight's move apart are physically joined. The aim is to form a linked path across the board. Linked pegs cannot be crossed so only one player can win.

XIANGQI

(Chinese Chess) Speed tournament (10-minute): Aug 21 (pm), Aug 22 (day); Olympiad Open championship: Aug 23-26 (day); European championship: Aug 27-29 (day). Prize fund: £6,000. The object of xiangqi, or Chinese chess, as with shogi and Western chess, is to checkmate your opponent's king. Unlike Western chess, where a stalemate is a draw, one can also win in xiangqi by forcing your opponent into a position where there is no legal move. Chinese chess has more possible first moves than Western chess. Double checks are extremely common, with occasional triple and even quadruple checks. xiangqi was banned during the Cultural Revolution but prospered outside China. First of seven Asian team tournaments was held in Singapore in 1968.

ZATRE

Olympiad championship: Aug 26-27 (day). Prize fund: £500. This modern proprietary board game has attracted an increasing band of enthusiasts on the Continent. It is mathematically based, with the pieces represented by tiles carrying numbers between one and six in the manner of dominoes. The board resembles that of Scrabble.


For a booklet explaining MiniBridge write to the EBU, Broadfields, Bicester Road, Aylesbury, Bucks HP19 3BG; tel: 01296 394414, marking the envelope "Times MiniBridge".