Sid Sackson, Prototyping, and Mexico

Sid Sackson (1920 - 2002) was a great American game inventor. "Acquire" is probably his most famous game. In my opinion, even his worst game ideas are inspiring. Several years ago I was lucky enough to get a copy of "A Gamut of Games" (1969) fairly cheap.

I've probably read the book a dozen times already. A while back, I even implemented a couple of games from his book: Bowling Solitaire and Solitaire Dice. They were done during the early stages of Torque Game Builder (an early Beta if I remember correctly). They are getting played on a fairly regular basis by strangers (which I consider a success in my book).



I'm now heading back to San Carlos, Mexico to finish the last of the paperwork for my new house down there (which once again, I blame Joshua Dallman for making me look down there). While there, I'm going to be prototyping another Sid Sackson game called "Last Word". One problem I have with word games (like Scrabble) is that a computer (or human) player will put out "cacoepistic" and you will have no freakin' clue as to what that word means (it means "of or related to mispronounced words"). I will fix this with "Last Word". I downloaded Wiktionary and am in the process of writing a program which parses the list into reasonable words (2 characters or more, no capital letters, no punctuation, no slang) and puts each word with a few of its definitions into an SQLite database. (This will be available on my web site when it is done.) I will then use it in my game so that you can look up the definition to a word you don't know. (Of course, I will only be allowing you to look up words that are already completed so that you cannot test random words.)