Glass Bead Game Wiki: Glass Plate Game

The Glass Plate Game by Dunbar Aitkens is one of the earliest known PlayableVariants, and yet one of the most presently active -- "a conversation in the trappings of a board game".

There's also an older GPG site with lots of links to other people's ideas for a Glass Bead Game, and some descriptions of a few real Glass Plate Games.

For an example of a complete Glass Plate Game, see GlassPlateGame20040612.

Comments

I have found this game fascinating for a long time. Living on the East Coast, I wish I had more opportunity to play it. The attributes I would praise are:

Its enormous adaptability. Any player can invent new cards, so whatever topics or disciplines you're excited about, you can include them. For example, I've seen a whole deck about music. For another example, I've played in churches a few times, enough to know that the Bible has enough concepts for more than one deck, so the GPG has great potential for church use, which in turn invites speculation about what other types of organizations might get a lot out of this.
The colored squares and wooden cubes. The colors are so rich, and who doesn't love wood?
The compactness of the set. This whole big Game, with all its potential for depth and breadth of thought and talk, all fits in a little-bitty pocket-sized box.
Its intellectual range. I've played mostly at an ordinary conversational level, but there's no doubt that it can be scaled up to quite an erudite endeavor. On the other hand, if you use simpler concepts as cards, it can be played by school-aged children. --JPS in NJ

The game is easily meaningless and tedious if the players engage in the normal American conversational jousting, so a major fad it ain't, but in its appropriate place there is no substitute. The card making process is very good for note taking at a lecture or in a normal combative encounter in a coffee shop. This page offers an example (further down the page). Doing the game with the numbered dice and colors fits well in a group that seeks an event like a Quaker meeting but with continuous presentation and deliberate intimacy development, as when forming a household.

When played well, the game is invasively intimate, so it is best to begin with an established trust to which the game is added, rather than breaking the ice with the game. However, a relentlessly noncombative presenter like Dunbar can play it successfully with complete strangers.

--wolfe

please add yourself to WikiIndex? - http://wikiindex.org --Best, MarkDilley?