Cups

Now here is a great game: from Sid Sackson’s classic book A Gamut of Games, Cups is a very simple Mancala-style game that can be played with any materials and adapted to any size game. It was designed some time in the sixties by a father-son game creating duo consisting of Arthur and Wald Amberstone, who would go on to found the New York Gamers Association. Yes, the New York Gamers Association. I hadn’t heard of it either. Then again, I am very much not from New York. So there you go. Here’s the game!

Equipment

As the title suggests, this game is played with...cups. The beauty of the game, however, is that you can use as many cups as you’d like. The standard sized game is four cups for each player, and that is what I will be teaching here, but if you want to play a longer game, replace four with X every time you see it in these rules. So for 10 cups, you would have 100 beans each and could sow up to 10 beans per turn. Just...that’ll make sense.

Okay, so: each player needs four cups and one bowl, as well as forty “beans” (any small token that you can put into the cups -- the term is a remnant from Mancala games). I use pennies, but beads or go stones or small rocks or even actual beans will work fine. Or Mancala stones, if you have enough. Whatever. They don’t have to be differentiated in any way (both players can use the same color beads and cups and whatnot).

For cups, you can literally just use cups or small bowls or just draw circles on paper and stack pennies. Cups are more fun, though, because you get to tump them out. That’s a word.

Rules

The game is set up as shown, with the cups arranged in two rows with the bowls to the right of each player’s cups. All the cups start empty.

 Setup

Each turn, players can either drop beans from their reserve into the cups or sow beans already in cups. Let’s worry about dropping first.

You can drop between one and four beans each turn. You always drop the beans from left to right, starting at your first cup and moving forward. So if you drop three beans, the first goes in the leftmost cup, then the second in the second cup, and the third in the third cup, going towards your bowl. You can’t drop multiple beans in one cup -- they always go in order like that.

If you do a drop move and you end in an empty cup, you steal all the beans from your opponent’s cup that is opposite yours. So say, in the previous example, that your third cup was empty. Since you ended there, you would steal all the beans from what is your opponent’s second cup (since you are reversed) and place them in your bowl.

 For example, if your opponent had one bean in his second cup

The other type of move is to sow beans already in your cups. This consists of picking up all the beans in one of your cups and placing them, one at a time, in the cups to the right, until you reach your bowl. However, you can only do this when you have exactly as many beans in your cup as required to reach the bowl -- no more, no less. So that would be four beans in your first cup, three in the second, etc. The last bean will always land in the bowl, in other words.

 If you had four beans in your first cup and sowed them, you would get this.

As a general rule, do not put too many beans in your cup! A cup containing more beans than required to reach the bowl is called a “blocked cup,” and it is bad. You will have to sit back and watch the beans accumulate until your opponent decides to capture them. Don’t block your cups.

 A blocked cup

When a player has dropped all of his beans, he must continue to make sowing plays. If you can’t make a sowing play, you must forfeit your turn (there is no voluntary passing), and your opponent will continue taking turns until he also runs out of moves. At the end of the game, whoever has more beans in their bowls is the winner -- all beans in cups are ignored.

An example endgame. That isn’t even real.

Nim

Nim is a very famous mathematical game (bear with me) that can be played just about anywhere with anything. It’s extremely simple, and has spawned a number of variations -- I will be presenting three here -- all based upon the simple principle of removing tokens from stacks. Sounds thrilling, right? The game is perhaps more interesting from a mathematical standpoint than a, you know, playing one, but it is still fun, and will provide an excellent challenge for fans of logical strategy. It’s just about as pure as you can get in that regard.

Equipment

Nim requires no board, only tokens. Any number of tokens will do, although you’ll probably want at least 15 or so for an interesting game. You can use pennies or checkers or buttons or matches or whatever. They don’t have to match in any way; you just need objects.

I can also be played as a pen and paper game -- just draw lines or circles or whatever and cross them out as they’re removed.

Rules

The general idea behind Nim is that you have “heaps” (rows, for our purposes) of tokens that players take turns removing. Whoever removes the last token loses (it is very occasionally played where whoever removes the last token wins, but this creates shorter games with the same number of tokens, so I will be disregarding it -- the strategy and gameplay is essentially the same either way).

In standard Nim, you arrange your tokens in rows -- the number of rows doesn’t matter, nor does the number of tokens in the rows. There are usually a different number of tokens in each row, though.

 Rows of length 5, 4, 3, and 4

Each turn, you take as many tokens as you want from a single row. You can take all the tokens in a row if you want, but you can’t take from multiple rows in the same turn. And that’s it -- as I said before, whoever takes the last token loses.

Circular Nim

I much prefer this variant of Nim -- first of all, once you know the secret to standard Nim, you can win every time, which kind of defeats the purpose. There’s surely a similar secret to Circular Nim, but I don’t know it and chances are neither does anyone I might happen to play against, making the game more fair. Also, it’s just prettier, and I think it’s a neat idea.

Instead of arranging tokens in rows, they are arranged in a circle. Each turn, you can remove 1, 2, or 3 adjacent tokens from the circle -- that is, they must be right next to each other. As tokens are removed, gaps form, and you cannot remove tokens across the gaps -- so if every other token has been taken (token, space, token, space, etc.) you could only take one token at a time, as none are adjacent to any others. As before, whoever takes the last token loses.

The game can also be extended with multiple circles, where you take out 1-3 adjacent objects from just one of the circles. This would provide a longer game and add variety to the strategy once you figured out how to win at standard Circlular Nim.

21

This is technically a Nim variant, although it’s probably the most different. For one, it uses absolutely no equipment. You can play this anywhere, provided you have two people who can communicate numbers to one another.

The game begins with someone saying a number between 1 and 3. The next person adds a number between 1 and 3 to it and calls out the sum. Whoever is forced to say a number 21 or higher loses. So, for example, a possible game could be:

2 (5) 6 (7) 9 (10) 13 (16) 17 (20) 21

And the first player would lose.