what do board games teach us?

[trenton]

I am an experienced chess player and I have participated in many tournaments. I find it interesting that world champions like Alekhine said that he applies lessons from chess to real life. It reminds me of Leo when he says mathematicians think reality is made out of numbers because when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I have looked into programs like chess in schools, hoping to find an opportunity, but I keep coming up short. These programs claim that teaching chess helps kids to concentrate better during class and they have improved grades in mathematics.

I understand that chess makes people feel dumb because of the stereotypes surrounding it. If you feel this way when you can't calculate 20 moves ahead like a genius, don't worry, almost nobody can. Most chess players are average and struggle to calculate 3 or 4 moves ahead. Maybe a grandmaster can calculate 20 moves ahead, but this requires a lot of practice. Sometimes young kids feel like they have chess figured out and they start getting cocky. This happens right before the dip when they realize that there is another dimension to the game. This happened to me as a young kid and I've seen it happen to other kids. In fact I have triggered the dip in young kids when I went to chess club. If they come back, then they have the potential to be very strong players.

A depressing lesson chess taught me is loneliness. When I first started playing chess, I was more interested and beat everyone in the family. Everyone gave up and I ran out of opponents. My chess development was limited for a long time because of this. Finally, I joined a chess club at school. eventually, I beat everyone in the club with such ease and confidence that they gave up and stopped playing me. I tried switching over to teaching chess, but most people were not interested in getting good at it. This made me feel like I had unusable skills. Occasionally, there were a few people interested in learning and I blew their minds wide open, but this was very uncommon. Sometimes my brother feels the same way when he is very interested in studying history, but nobody around him shares his interest. He has a lot of interesting knowledge, but nobody cares. When people fail to see the value that you see in something, they will get board quickly and they will not make all of the profound counter intuitive connections that you are making between the may complex systems active in life. It seems that in order to thrive in society you have to have deep knowledge of something people care about.

The most interesting thing I noticed in chess is that other people like me have used chess as a springboard into personal development and spirituality. Contrary to popular belief, brilliance does not come from hardcore calculation, but rather it comes from leaps in intuition. Although calculation is a factor, It is like having a eureka moment when you find something deeply counterintuitive that actually works. It can be like sacrificing your queen, compromising your King's castle, sacrificing an exchange to outplay your opponent's rook in a concrete situation, and other counter intuitive ideas. One of the reasons people get stuck in chess is because they get stuck thinking in the same way. Chess is not immune to dogmatism, and I would love to think independently of these rules. They become a habit and therefore a hinderance to stronger players. Finally, what I enjoy in chess the most is being fully absorbed in the task at hand. It becomes very peaceful and can become a form of meditation when nothing else in the world bothers you. For me and other players like me this became the springboard into spirituality through getting a taste of higher consciousness for a moment. This could probably be done with a lot of different board games.

 I have been looking into other board games to see what they teach.

I started with games like Shogi, Chinese chess, Go, and others. The core concept is that you are trying to outwit your opponent. Go is interesting because the leaders of the Chinese military say that America plays chess and they play Go. America prefers direct confrontation whereas the Chinese military prefers slow expansion and consolidation. Culture plays a big role in terms of how governments and militaries think about strategy. I found it interesting to think about board games through these different dimensions.

I looked into another interesting board game called Risk and I looked at some of the world champions playing. I think it does a good job of illustrating the politics behind world domination. Unlike in chess, there are more opponents, each trying to take over the world. In order to beat them, you have to give them deals which allow them to get more powerful armies as well. You need to compromise along the way by not taking too many bonuses and getting to strong. If you get too strong, then the other players will gang up on you if you don't spend your troops to progress the game. Strong players can't afford to turtle. In a sense it is better to be the second or third strongest player so that it is easier to manipulate other players into wasting their troops as you prepare to backstab them at any moment. If you give an opponent a deal, then you need to make sure it benefits you more then it benefits them. The strategy becomes very interesting until you reach the top level. By that point the strategy is so well done that luck starts to matter more and more. Usually it is smart not to take the risk, but this leads to a stalemate. The result is a lot of slow back and forth as the players consolidate into their own section of the map. It starts to resemble real life when the champions realize that it is too risky to try to take over the world unless somebody makes a mistake by breaking the balance of the game in your favor or through manipulating an alliance somehow. I think this is a more accurate depiction of war because it includes the politics of constantly trying to backstab each other, rather than a one on one chess or checkers match.

Right now I am learning more about money and I am looking into games like Cash Flow and Monopoly. These are games that rich parents play with their kids to teach financial literacy and how to leverage debt. It teaches you how to control your emotions when dealing with money. I am trying to access an online version of Cash Flow right now, but I'm having trouble. How effective do you think games like these are? It is oversimplified in terms of how to spot a good deal, but the general idea is to leverage debt rather than avoid it and pay it all off. It would be nice to learn how to build up passive income. My current habits are very conservative and I don't like taking a lot of risks, but I have some money in the bank doing nothing. I wish I could find a way to get this money to work for me.

What other board games do you think teach valuable lessons?

[trenton]

@lxlichael I thought about it a little more and I think it applies to all games in general. For example, Pokemon is strategically complicated game when taken as a competition. It is thought to be strategically similar to chess, but it is much more difficult for AI to learn because there is more uncertainty and variability.

Alpha star was a machine used in star craft 2. It eventually got really good at competing with master level players even though there was more uncertainty. The machine made unusual strategies which sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. I wonder what strategies a machine might come up with in a game like Pokemon when teaching AI to deal with uncertainty. In games like chess it is easy for computers to crush humans because they calculate millions of moves ahead. There is no uncertainty and the brute force of the calculation overwhelms any human player.

[King Merk]

Thank you for sharing. I found this quite interesting to read. 

[PenguinPablo]

what is your elo, OP?

[Julian gabriel]

Do you have a favorite chess piece? 

[trenton]

8 hours ago, PenguinPablo said:

what is your elo, OP?

Last time I took an elo test it was somewhere around 2000. My USCF is around 1900. My opponents agree that I'm under rated, but I haven't been getting into tournaments lately to get my rating caught up because of the hassle to organize them. In practice I often get better positions and win against candidate masters, but masters usually beat me. Relative to my opponents I can gauge my approximate strength to be a strong candidate master, but not quite a master. This would be around 2100 or so in USCF.

7 hours ago, Julian gabriel said:

Do you have a favorite chess piece? 

I think the knight is a good symbol for chess. During the game my favorite piece might switch between bishop and knight depending on the situation. If knights are more advantageous then I like giving up the bishops. If the board is open and I have good mobility, the I can outplay my opponent's knight with a bishop.

I like having a fianchettoed bishop to defend my king or a naturally developed knight near my king. When attacking I think I like the sudden knight checks and sacrifices a little more than the bishop maneuvers. When the knights are elegant it is beautiful. when the knights are clumsy it is inconvenient. There are pros and cons to the pieces, so it is hard to say which is my favorite piece. Practically, I prefer bishops, symbolically I prefer knights.

[trenton]

https://medium.com/@louisriantan/how-tic-tac-toe-can-teach-you-about-life-bdeee1ea3c9

This site discusses what tic tac toe teaches us about life. It is an easy game to master, so I never thought very deeply about it. This is referring to the 3x3 board.

There is a 3x3x3 board. On this board the first player always wins if he takes the center. There are too many possibilities for the second player to block. On thing this game teaches us is that a game with only one winner is a broken game.

There is a 4x4x4 board. I never tried to master that board, but I probably could. My grandpa played that version a lot. He said that the normal game was boring because it was a quick draw with very limited possibilities. Perhaps we could say that life gets boring in certainty because humans crave to understand more. The greater the possibilities, the more room we have for creativity. This is why I enjoy doing a lot of research sometimes. Understanding different aspects of mankind helps me to make more connections in how I understand the world. This bigger board could probably teach us more about life than the smaller boards.