as an example check out "Color Lines" - amazingly addictive despite a rather simple concept and a small board. http://www.gamesforthebrain.com/game/colorlines/ what's your favorite addictive puzzle/strategy game?
addictive, least favorite game has to be 'mine sweeper'. That game is evil...you want to freakin finish the board but inevitably you come down to a bunch of crapshoot picks and end up wasting a shitload of time. It wasn't long term addictive, but for a short while it was.
Anyone remember the game Chip's Challenge? I think it was Windows 3.1. Or possibly Windows 95. Classic puzzle game.
I think of the market as a giant puzzle. Nothing really comes close to trying to "figure out" the ES. Barring that, if you have real live people that will play games with you, head over to boardgamegeek.com and soak up the thousands of games most people have never heard of. Some of my current favorites are Agricola, Ingenious, Hive, Hammer of the Scots and Imperial. A lot of these are also playable for free online against human opponents if you can't get people together. Nothing wrong with the classics like Go and Chess either. After spending time with the market and playing against human intelligence, playing against an AI in a puzzle or strategy game I usually find pretty boring.
does anybody play this one? what's your top score? who has superior pattern recognition skills around here? recently i got 812 but i am sure others can do better than that. i have played >200 games. so my score is enhanced by experience.
There is no question in my mind whatsoever that the most beautiful intellectual pursuit in this world is mathematics, a "game" in pure logic and imagination. My favorite branch is Number Theory, in particular Algebraic Number theory or Algebraic Geometry. Here is a pretty proof of something extremely elementary but interesting non-theless: <object style="height: 344px; width: 425px"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/oFUKFI9B9II"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/oFUKFI9B9II" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="425" height="344"></object> Mathematical Physics is also extremely interesting. For example, here is something that often helps people imagine the entire universe and current theories. The Gabriel's Horn is an object naturally studied in elementary calculus. It has finite volume, but infinite surface area. That means you could take a finite amount of paint to paint it! This is a simple model of how our universe could be infinite and still finite at the same time. This idea is important in String Theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel's_Horn http://curvebank.calstatela.edu/volrev/volrev.htm (scroll down)