As spring makes its way to Rochester, days are longer, new birdcalls fill the air, and I’m newly aware of—rabbits. Yes, there’s the Easter Bunny each springtime, but my rabbit radar ranges much more broadly. Since I’m a gardener, rabbits aren’t always my friends. Cute as they may be, rabbits seem somewhat less charming as they mow down seedlings or nip off the fresh and delicious growth on perennials in my flowerbeds. On the other hand, as a curator, the […]
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Teaching Dungeons & Dragons: Continuing the Years of Storytelling
It is always an exciting thing to have your personal hobbies suddenly become relevant to your work. But imagine my shock when I got asked by multiple teams here at The Strong Museum to run Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) games so that my colleagues could get familiar with the game in preparation for working on our Dungeons & Dragons: 50 Years of Storytelling exhibit!
While I have run multiple tabletop role-play games (TTRPG) for friends, I had only recently started dipping […]
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Role-Playing with Sound: A Sonic History of Tabletop Role-Playing Games
A crack of thunder. The rattling of chains. Roars of monsters in the depths. A song to guide your way. These words stoke our imaginations and illustrate how stories are told via the evocation of sound. When people imagine playing a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) such as Dungeons & Dragons, they envision people in costume rolling dice, moving small, hand-painted figurines, and navigating sprawling maps of the dungeons that are being delved.
In addition to these material components, however, at the […]
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A Sight to Behold: Dungeons & Dragons’ Beholder Monster
In light of 2024 being the 50th anniversary of the famous tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, it felt right to investigate more iconic monsters from the game. A few months ago, I wrote about Tiamat, the dragon that stands over The Strong Museum’s Hasbro Game Park, so now it’s time to investigate another monster that has been around since the beginning of Dungeons & Dragons. Thankfully, I did not need to look far because right on the cover of […]
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Scrabble: A Television Hit?
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
Board games and television don’t seem like they would go together. It would be hard to imagine millions of viewers tuning in regularly to watch people play a game of Risk or Settlers of Cattan. But 40 years ago this month, viewers across the country had a six-year-long daily habit of watching people play Scrabble every day on NBC.
The Scrabble game show originated with Exposure Unlimited, a prize […]
S-T-R-O-N-G: Investigating the History of the Ouija Board at The Strong Museum
The Ouija board as we know it today was patented in Baltimore in the year 1890. Its development and success were closely tied to the rise of the American Spiritualist movement following the Civil War, but the men who patented and popularized the divination tool as a board game were not Spiritualists, but capitalists. At a time when the desire to contact the dead had coalesced into a religious movement, a group of entrepreneurs including Charles Kennard and Elijah Bond […]
Stimulus Correspondences and Game Design: The Complex Case of Simple Simon
On the exhibit floor of The Strong National Museum of Play, somewhere between the Pinball Playfield and Sesame Street exhibits, there is a quote by Diane Ackerman: “Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning.” This quote resonates deeply with me as a Cognitive Neuroscientist interested in the relationships between brain and behaviour, as well as the numerous ways in which games and science interact. For one very special week in October 2023, I was fortunate to visit The Strong […]
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The Solo Games Barbarian Prince, Barbarian Vince, and Barbarian Mints
Game designer Arnold Hendrick designed the solitaire fantasy board game Barbarian Prince in 1981. It was called quirky and poorly balanced, and the website BoardGameGeek famously named it the most difficult solo game ever. But many players admit to loving the game, and it won the Charles S. Roberts award for Best Fantasy Boardgame that year. Without reading the rules, a player can win Barbarian Prince on their first turn, but they can also play it through 50 times and […]
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Play is the Best Medicine
A proverb in the Bible states, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”
There’s sound wisdom in this, as anyone knows who has felt better after laughing uproariously at a silly pet video. Play is not necessarily a panacea, but it is good medicine, a way of introducing fun into life and making it a little more bearable along the way. Because of these beneficial qualities of play, it is not surprising that over […]