Buried in the sands of time....

Will we still be playing board games in a few millenia?  Check out this article about game designer Jason Rohrer, who won a design contest after burying his board game in the Nevada desert. Seriously.

Rattling off a list of board game materials that would be unlikely to last the intended passage of time (wood, cardboard, aluminum, glass), Rohrer ultimately decided to make the game from a resilient metal. He machined the 18-inch by 18-inch game board and the pieces future players will use out of 30 pounds of titanium.

Rohrer laid out the game's rules diagrammatically on three pages of archival, acid-free paper, hermetically sealed them inside a Pyrex glass tube — which were then housed inside a titanium baton — and set about burying them in the earth.

Although some 900 clues were handed out at the conference, Rohrer suggests it could take 2700 years to finally unearth the game.  (I imagine the desert will have expanded greatly by then.)

Sadly, no one but a computer has actually played the game or seen in it in its entirety which seems like a waste.  It definitely makes it impossible to predict whether it'll be a candidate for the 2736th annual Spiel des Jahres award or even whether the Kickstarter campaign will get funded.  Sigh.

(Thanks for the tip, Sibs...)