Pachinko / Set / Twister
What (if any) Skill should a game require? Tentative Tuesday Continues ...
When writing about Whiffle and early Pinball games, I realized that Pachinko machines were likely invented at the same time … and I was correct. The Japanese called them “Corinth games” and (like early Pinball games) they were more Bagatelle than what we think of as modern pinball. The amount of skill in a Pachinko machine is probably much less than a modern pinball machine; closer to a slot machine … that is to say, none at all1. But I would not be surprised if there were some that had a reasonable amount of skill … probably not in gambling halls, but still.
Marsha Falco’s SET is one of those games I suspect doesn’t make the cut, but worry that my biases are getting in the way2. Card are dealt out that show various shapes (ovals, squiggles, diamonds) with various shadings (empty, filled, lined) and colors (red, green, purple). Each card has 1, 2 or 3 (identical) shapes. And you make a set if you can find three cards where each “variety” is either all the same or all different. So in the picture below the bottom left set has “All three colors, all three shapes, all three numbers, but all are filled.”
My kids terrorized my wife at Set. They were ridiculously fast.
There are many games where players at different levels can make it unfun. But SET (like trivia games) suffers because the “skill level” has little to do with the game and is mostly outside a players control (short of studying up a bunch of trivia, or really stretching your pattern recognition ‘muscles.’3)
Chuck Foley, Reyn Guyer and Neil Rabens Twister certainly involves skill, but like poker probably the best skill to have is “who to play with/against.” The game became famous — perhaps infamous — after Johnny Carson played with Eva Gabor on the tonight show. Is Twister a game or merely a gateway drug to key parties?4
Twister was a fad, to be sure, but also an innocent kids game. And also sold several million copies. What more is there to say?
As always, you can vote on which games you think should be on the final list on Board Game Geek.5
Admin Note — The 20th Century Project is taking a break for the July 4th Holiday and will be back on the 17th.
As a child, a friend of my father’s had a pachinko machine and so we’d play it when at his house. As a kid I was convinced there was a lot of skill, and it certainly looked and sounded amazing.
Which makes it perfect for Tentative Tuesday!
I’m honestly not sure if people can improve their pattern recognition skills in general, or just in specific domains.
Although entries for games may take an hour or day to appear after the article is published.