The HipBone Games

Charles_Cameron?'s HipBone Games are probably the most popular PlayableVariant on the Internet.

You can play it alone, or with other people. You take turns putting ideas onto the board. The board is an interconnected collection of spaces, arranged in an aesthetic pattern.

When you put an idea on a space on the board, the idea has to match the ideas in the connected spaces.

So for example, you could put "robot" between "work" and "computer." It is simple for one or two ideas, but when you get more and more ideas to connect with, it gets trickier, and more interesting.

You get a point for each matching connection, and you can store multiple points for connections if you can think of many connections.

Trivial connections get no point. (For example, noting that two words are arranged with letters, or noting that two people are people.) What is "trivial" or not is informally determined by good sportsmanship, precedence, dealing, and any other form of persuasion.

Read more about the game at Charles_Cameron?'s HipBone Games site. In particular, read an example of game play.

Discussion

Hipbone here:

Thanks, Ron, for this wiki and for this page. I hope to be able to contribute more to your effort here shortly. For one thing, plans are afoot for web-based HipBone Games software -- and more generally, I warmly support your effort to get a GBG center up and running. I miss Gaile's old site, and wish William Horden's Intrachange was still available, too.

It should be pretty easy to run a game of HipBone on wiki.

Put numbers in a game map. 2. Link to the image from a wiki page. 3. Players take turns, once a day, putting a concept "on the map," by telling the number of the entry, and what the entry is.

-- LionKimbro [[DateTime?(2004-04-21T17:38:19Z)]]

Welcome, Charles. It's nice to see you posting here. I wrote about it on my blog. Meanwhile, I think it's worth mentioning that you have a blog too: Glass Beads and Complex Problems. I wasn't aware of it until a couple of weeks ago.

-- Ron_Hale-Evans? [[DateTime?(2004-04-25T22:01:48Z)]]