These last few days have seen me try to get a bit ahead with my other writing activity, namely mobile apps for Android or Apple mobile phones or tablets. So not too much on the word front this week. I did add a couple of reviews for numbers 3 and 4 in the excellent Fargoer series by Petteri Hanukkah (on Goodreads: Fargoer 3 – Of Fire and Stone and Fargoer 4 – The Roots of Evil, and also on Amazon.co.uk with Amazon.com pending) but otherwise it has been time spent in code development.

Coding is a funny thing, and shares a lot of oddities with writing. In both, you can sometimes see very clearly what you want to do, but actually doing it is a different story (ha ha). For reasons unexplained, the supposedly inanimate compiler or word processor seems to thwart you at every turn, twisting your fine and apparently clear intentions into a confusing mess! And it always takes longer than you expect…

Anyway, the next app target is a game which seems to have been popular across several parts of the ancient near east and elsewhere. There are rough outlines of what might be boards for the game in the city of Petra. The Greeks said they had learned it in Egypt, and passed it on to the Romans, and it eventually made it all the way north to Viking lands. It changed its name and some of the rules as it migrated, but the one I will release in a few weeks is called Seega. It’s a little bit like draughts in that pieces can only move one place at a time. However, you capture not by leaping over an enemy, but by sandwiching an enemy piece between two of your own. Also, the board starts out empty, and the first stage of the game is to take turns placing pieces into the empty squares. The later variations in other counties used different size boards, and different original layout positions, so you can expect to see other games in the same family come out through the rest of 2013.

To check Seega out (when it’s released) go to the major app stores – iStore, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, or Barnes and Noble – and search for DataScenes Development. More details and links will follow before too long. RIght now there are just two games in the stable – Senet and Aseb (also known as the Royal Game of Ur) but one of my goals for this year is to at least double the count. Senet is always the most popular across all of those app stores, presumably because more people know the name.

I have really enjoyed getting to grips with these ancient world board games for several reasons. Firstly, we do not have clearly defined rules for any of them, and we suspect that there would have been local variations or house rules in different places anyway. So part of the task has been to piece together several different opinions about the rules, and provide several play options so that people can experiment. Some are more interesting and challenging than others! Then there are problems of putting together some simple visuals and creating a reasonably strong AI strategy.

For the most part these games have not retained favour in the way that Chess or Go have done, but they have some really interesting features of game play and, at least in my opinion, deserve another airing. Enjoy!