This is a sad story . . . Confusion was my final game, and I think it was my best (with the possible exception of Eleusis). It has a unique feature: at the start of each game, you don’t know how your pieces move. There are deductive elements to the game, but basically it involves putting together an attack when you have only partial information.In the early 1980s I spent about two years trying to find a publisher for Confusion. I had no luck. Franjos, a small company in Germany, did come out with a German version, but it was poorly made and the game was pretty much unplayable. (Franjos had also done Sabotage, an equipment version of my card game Leopard, and they did a good job with that game.) I’ve always had trouble getting my games published, but this experience with Confusion left me so depressed that I gave up on games in general. It was around that time that I began to get interested in “mazes-with-rules,” or what I now call “logic mazes.” Lately I’ve been getting e-mail from people who knew the German edition of the game. They have been encouraging me to try again to get an English version of the game published. Kerry Handscomb, the editor of Abstract Games, is among those who knew the German edition, and he has written me about how highly he regards the game. Well, okay, they’ve convinced me. I’ll try again to get it published. I may have a better chance today, because there are now a lot of companies publishing some very intelligent games. Back in the 1980s there was only Milton Bradley and companies like that. Just to prove that actually doing something about this, I added a picture on this page. It shows me working on a revision of the equipment. It’s been taking longer than I thought it would, but I should soon be able to start showing the game to some publishers. Here’s another view of the new equipment. The player here is Oriol Comas i Coma.
|