I've long been a fan of board games. They're a great way to stay entertained and develop mental skills while socializing with friends. The name "mental sports" is kind of a tacky name, but it's kind of a good one, too. Lately, I have been revisiting a classic, Mahjong, and exploring a new-to-me game series, the Gipf project. The purchase of a special games table has been tremendous in reviving my social board game interest. When not in use, it conveniently lives under my couch, but is easily transported.

Dimensions: 86cm x 86cm, 72cm tall - 34" x 34" -- perfect for Mahjong and card games, but also quite suitable for tournament size chess boards (51cm/20"), luxury Backgammon sets (53cm/21"), or "universal" GIPF boards (46cm/18").

Mahjong

My favorite kind of Mahjong is Zung Jung. I have played several variants. The big benefits of ZJ is that it's easy to teach, easy to score, and easy to understand how to build hands. I also consider it to be more flexible than the other major variants without leaving a poverty of choice.

My wife and I have hosted a few mahjong nights now. We play music and enjoy homemade drinks and snacks at the table -- you can see some fruit leather and beef jerky I dried out there. Most nights finish with me having a strong score over 100 and the others deep in the negatives. But they are improving. I dream of the day they can show me defeat.

Shoutout to u/cult_mecca on Reddit for preparing these Mahjong Cheatsheets : I was able to print out 4 sheets of the Zung Jung rules and get them laminated. A huge helper at the table!

Project Gipf

Now for the second half of the blog post. I was scrolling around looking for new 2 player board games to try out with friends. First I browsed through the MENSA Select games, then I checked out the abstract strategy list on BoardGameGeek. Some strangely titled games grabbed my eye -- GIPF, TZAAR, ZERTZ, DVONN, YINSH... I googled away, saw universal acclaim for the series, and jumped into the delightfully '90s Project Gipf website for more details.

After playing a few games with the wife and giko friends on BoardSpace.net I set to work on seeing as to how I could play these games physically.

Purchasing them used or new is out of the question -- I would have to spend over $400 for very simple games. And maybe wait months. Next I looked at my options for DIYing. Right away the Ultimate Gipf Board jumped out at me -- but no way, factoring in shipping and taxes, am I paying at least $50 for a board game's board without pieces! So what I did was I grabbed an image of the ultimate Gipf board, scaled it up to their suggested 18x18" size, printed it out across six A4 sheets, laminated them, and taped them together.

I've figured out how to DIY gipf pieces for now. Soft drink bottle caps are the perfect size and price. I'm using black for black and colors for white. My friends are picking up Gipf pretty fast and they're enjoying it as much as I am. The other games may take a bit more work to figure out... I can't help but feel Kris Burm would be happy hear that people are improvising boards and pieces for his games, even if not to the point of poetry as he did for checkers in the Phillippines.