Great Games with Marginal Websites

A key part of my philosophy is that it is important to stretch your mind in a lot of ways. Just like a runner could justify swimming, weight training, and other fitness activities in order to maintain total body fitness, someone whose primary asset is their brain should use it for lots of different thinking tasks.

With that in mind I'm often looking for novel games, and over the years have come to appreciate certain games and/or certain publishers. Today I want to focus on two, which used to have something in common: a great game with a marginal website.

The first of these is Tantrix, whose physical game tiles are almost impossible to find in stores except for the tiny 10-pack. This is a great game which has been out for years, and in 2000 it had a website which looked like it was designed in 1993. Now, however, the website is looking more modern and professional, and I wonder if it's made a difference to the adoption of the game. In any event, it's well worth a visit, especially to try your hand at playing it online. It's what I'd call a traditional partial-information strategy game.

The second of these is Set, a novel card game which is easier to find in stores but whose website looks like it arrived at the same time as Mosaic (for those who don't know when that was, we're talking before there was any real content on the WWW). Nonetheless Set is a unique game in that players of all ages can play on an even playing field, because the ability to do the pattern match is about as well established in 9 year olds as it is in 40 year olds. As such, it's a unique game for parents who can play their best against children, with the children still having a good shot at winning. It's also easy to play in teams if you have children younger than 9 in the game.