Learning to play checkers with Saul

We were at the Ann Arbor District Library downtown today on our normal Sunday walk through town after visiting Cafe Ambrosia. After playing a shape-drawing game on the library computers, Saul sat down to "play checkers" with another kid a little bit older who was there in the kids room.

He has a few ideas of the world of all possible checkers-like games down pat, including the idea of jumping, taking pieces of the board, and (mostly) putting the checkers down on all the black squares. But there was a bit of confusion with card games of turn-taking putting down the checkers for their initial board placement (the two kids took turns populating the board with checkers).

It made me think about all the other games you could play on a checkerboard with checkers that would turn out to be OK games. When I was a kid I was an avid reader of Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American, man I wish I had a big website full of all of those years and years of columns to browse through. Off to update Wikipedia with more memories.