YORKTON - Regular readers will know abstract strategy games are a definite sweet spot for this Meeple Guilder, so coming upon the 2021 designed Mur was immediately of interest.
That it comes from a Canadian designer; Desmond Davies the interest grew.
To start Mur is played on a circular board, in itself which makes it a bit different than most games.
The two player game is noted on its webpage as a “synthesis of Go and Mancala with all the tactics of chess amplified,” which you can chalk up to hyperbole without even looking at, or playing the game. No offence to those behind Mur but to start by even mentioning it in the same breath as three ancient and massively played games is really setting players up for likely disappointment. There might be some passing similarities to the big three mentioned, but a lot of games have those three in the lineage but few have ever really lived up to the trio.
So, Mur is played with 15 stones. Seven for each player, plus the mur stone, which is red and is a neutral stone.
The goal of the game is to be the first player to trap the mur stone or trap their opponent three times.
There is something of a Nine Men’s Morris to Mur – more than Go in my mind, with enough of a twist to create interest.
To learn a bit more about Mur and its development a few questions were emailed to its creator.
I was initially surprised to learn Davies doesn’t see himself as a gamer.
“I am not a gamer at all,” he stated. “For me it's only been about one game: chess. I've been an unmotivated chess player all my life. Although I vaguely remember learning chess maybe a year earlier, my dad bought me my first wooden chess set when I was in Grade 4.
“In my mind, chess was the best game and so that's what my brother and I would play growing up. We just played chess. No other game.
“Once in a blue moon I'd play Monopoly or Clue but not very often.
“I truly loved chess. My love for the game was not dependent on whether or not I won; in fact, my brother, Renaud, won for a year straight but I just kept playing because I was in love with the Staunton design and the beauty of the tactics.
“So I was not interested in competitive chess; just enjoying the game was enough for me. It was during Junior High school that I studied Bruce Pandolfini's book Traps and Zaps. Years later, during my 30's I would devour his other book 'Bobby Fischer's Outrageous Chess Moves'.
“I should mention that I fell in love with the simple rules of Go at that time as well. Although I didn't take to the game because it was too abstract and not tactical enough for me, I still treasured the simple rules of Go in my heart.
“This would later play a huge part in the design of Mur.”
So, how did Davies go from a deep love of chess with it’s varied pieces to a much simpler design with Mur.
“It was the third day after Christmas in 1998 that I began to wonder what a Risk-like version of chess would look like,” he began. “You see, I had been very fond of all of the various chess sets on display at the time around the Historic Properties in downtown Halifax. They had different themes for different chess sets.
“I remember one was an Alice in Wonderland chess set with characters from the story of course and there were other themes which I can't remember at the moment but I found it all very fascinating.
“So I thought, wouldn't it be neat to have a chess set with 18th-century-style cannons, cavalry and soldiers. But to make the game different from chess I would have an army in the middle of the board and an attacking army surrounding all along the perimeter area -- a siege!
“And since it was an army which had encircled the center army, I thought well why not have the game a circle since that would be even more unique. But then the checkered tiles just ended up giving me a headache so instead of having a completely darkened tile like in chess, I would just mark it with a pip like on a dice.
“So the first ring had alternating tiles with single pips, the second ring with alternating tiles having two pips and so on up to the seventh ring which had seven pips. Well the result looked quite amazing. It looked like a star map! So then I had to change the design to suit the new look of the board. Something that would look space-like. So I began using wooden balls of varying sizes so that the game began to look like a solar system. But then I thought that I should reduce the design of the board to its most simplest. Now the pips were necessary to keep track of rings since there were so many; I decided to reduce the number of the rings so that the pips would not be necessary. The result was three concentric rings with eight radii with game pieces that looked like moons of varying sizes.”
Davies said he had a goal he was trying to achieve too.
“It was 1998 when news of Garry Kasparov's defeat by IBM's Deep Blue had reached my ears,” he said. “I decided that I would build a code of play for the concentric-ring layout I had discovered that would be AI-proof--a game where the intuitive mind of man would suffer no defeat even at the hands of a computer.
“I saw that the coming AI revolution would be a serious threat and that I should work on overthrowing the false notion of the superiority of AI. After all, God's creation of man is greater than man's construction of AI. Even when God creates something weak, that weak creation is greater than the strongest thing man can construct.
“Was I able to achieve what I had set out to do: create this code? No. Not at all. I had failed. I found I couldn't do it, so I asked God for the wisdom to do it and then that's when everything came together.
“So in 2022 after I was finally satisfied that I had discovered the best code of play possible, I realized that I had never listened to anything Garry Kasparov had said or read anything he had written regarding his thoughts about AI and why he was defeated. I began to listen to interviews of him talking about AI. He summarized that the reason why AI is dominant at chess is that AI always dominates within closed systems. This seemed to make sense. But I still felt that Mur was AI proof. Then it clicked: if you consider the way thermodynamics works, Mur is actually an open-system game! The stones entering and re-entering is like matter and the competing cognition of the players is like the entering and exiting of heat.”
But, what can players expect here in terms of gameplay?
“Players can expect to play the most tactically rich game they will ever play,” boasted Davies. “It has taken over two decades to find the perfect code of play that stimulates the mind exceptionally well. Players who delight in discovery attacks in chess will be thrilled to discover that Mur dynamically expands on discovery so that it becomes three dimensional rather than just linear.
“Really talented players will discover positional play and how sacrificing a trap point for a positional advantage results in amazing consequences where multiple routes result in the marching of stones into multiple traps. Players will also delight in the creativity of each game: the final game position, except for the reset of the mur stone to the center of the board, provides the beginning set up for the next game in the set. This results in a game tree which is trillions and trillions of times greater than any other abstract strategy game. The asymmetrical setups feel natural given the constellation-like aesthetics of the game.”
I will interject that while I appreciate the enthusiasm of Mur’s designer I can’t say the game grabbed me so completely, although if it hits the table often enough it might. Of course with so many games out there the need for immediate ‘Wow! Factor’ is critical in ensuring replays.
Check it out in more detail at murfederation.com
