Ludic Languages of Asia: Elisabeth Kaske on Shengguantu

[Jacob Schmidt-Madsen]

Dear friends and colleagues,

I am excited to announce that the Ludic Languages of Asia lecture series has now become a permanent fixture of the ASTRA research group at the Max Planck in Berlin. It will continue indefinitely with a more or less fixed schedule from semester to semester.

The next talk will be held online on Wed 24 Sep, 10:00-11:00 CET. Prof. Elizabeth Kaske from the University of Leipzig will present her work on using computational techniques to analyze a 19th-century Chinese board game (Shengguan tu 升官圖) modeling promotion in the bureaucracy of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911).

You can read the full abstract here: https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/event/digital-approaches-qing-chinese-boardgame

Registration for the event is NOT required. You can join freely via Zoom: https://eu02web.zoom-x.de/j/68564259061

Please share this announcement with anyone in your network who might be interested in participating.

I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible!

Best regards,
Jacob

[Stela Maris Ferrarese Capettini]

Tank you

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[Ian Rapley]

Dear Jacob, 

That's excellent news, congratulations. 

For want of something more substantial to say, here's a photo of a historic Japanese game I encountered on a trip this summer to Nara, which I've not seen covered widely in English: 

It's called Juroku Musashi. Where I've seen it mentioned, I think it's translated as 16 Soldiers; Juroku is 16, but Musashi is more obscure. It's different to the Sri Lankan game known by that name. According to the small museum I found it in, it was popular in the late Edo period (19th century).

It's an asymmetric game on a variant alquerque board: one player plays a single large piece and seeks to capture 10 of the other player's pieces. The second player wins by preventing the first player's sole piece from moving. Capturing is done in a way that was new to me: if the large piece moves between two smaller pieces, they can be removed. This does not apply diagonally, however (the second diagram in the photo above shows this, the red pair can be removed, but not the yellow).

I took the small pieces, and was losing comprehensively until my friend fell into a bit of a trap, and I managed to sneak a win. 

Anyway, congratulations again, and I very much hope I'll be able to make the talk next week. 

Ian. 

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[Jacob Schmidt-Madsen]

Thanks for sharing the photo, Ian. I am happy to see that Sixteen Soldiers is still being played in Japan!

The game is mentioned in a few articles in English (Culin, Murray) and German (Himly, Schröder), but lacks a proper treatment just like the related hunt and alquerque-style games in general. If you are aware of any research on the game in Japanese, I would love to hear about it.

I hope to see you at the Sengguantu lecture next Wednesday!

Best,

Jacob

[Stela Maris Ferrarese Capettini]

Good morning:
I am attaching an article of mine published by the journal Territorial of the University of Goiás, Brazil (approved with evaluation). It is the summary of a larger, unpublished research project on these games. In this article, I address the study of a game similar to the one you mention, practiced among the indigenous peoples of some South American countries and discovered by travelers and priests who arrived with the European conquistadors.
Please do not confuse some writings that claim this game was brought by Europeans, as they are false. Those who wrote these articles have not reviewed all the existing literature, written by Italian and Spanish priests and travelers, that those of us who live in this part of the American continent possess.
I am currently working on the Poma drawing that appears there to demonstrate that they are different games.
Please excuse me if my English is poor and there are any misinterpretations.

Dnda Stela Maris Ferrarese

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