Mandelbrot’s Game of Life

The Tokyo Game Market has long been a hotbed of innovation, especially where trick-takers are concerned. Sometimes the games don’t work entirely as intended, but, hey, that’s what it takes to transform the world one small iteration at a time. The bricks of the forum weren’t laid in a day. Case in point: Fractal Tricks, the hybrid trick-taker by Jason Lee, doesn’t always function to specifications. Oh, sometimes it does, and in those moments it’s one of the tightest two-player trickers I’ve seen. But even at its worst, when one participant is rumbling the other — or more often, when both players are still fumbling through the implications of their moves — it’s still an engrossing look at how much remains to be discovered in this eldest of genres. From this simple set of rules, infinite complexity shall be born… It begins with some simple rules. There are only two suits. Black on white, white on black. Technically black on white on black and white on black on white, but let’s not get…