Talk:Racetrack (game)

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What is the best way to cross-link the articles called Racetrack and Race track? Should the articles be moved to Race track (facility) and Race track (paper and pencil game), with a disambiguation page and some redirects?--Niels Ø 09:48, Mar 15, 2005 (UTC)

I think that Racetrack should redirect to Race track, and the game should be Racetrack (game). If you look at the "What links here" page for this page, you can see that almost all refer to the racing facility, not the graph game. If no one objects I'll take care of these moves in the next day or so. --Fastfission 18:41, 15 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Martin Gardner?

From [1]:

The game was apparently first presented by Martin Gardner in his "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American.

If anyone can confirm this, it should go in the article.--Niels Ø 22:19, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Nice find, but confirming this will be difficult, since the Scientific American archives in the web are only available from year 1993 onwards and your source says it was read from a book published in 1983. I just read the A quarter-century of recreational mathematics article but in vain. --ZeroOne (talk | @) 01:51, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

There is no doubt that Martin Gardner wrote an article about the game - but I certainly played it in the 1970's - so he was reporting something that was widely played throughout Europe at least. I'm the author of [2]. My efforts to track the game to it's ultimate inventor failed - but for absolute certainty, Gardner didn't invent it.

Around the time I was playing the game there was also a published space game based on a hexagonal grid that had planets with gravity. The movement rules were the same as the car racing game - except you can accellerate in 6 directions instead of 4 or 8. You had limited amounts of fuel and used one unit of fuel each time you accellerated. Gravity was done by red arrows printed onto the board. If your move starts on one of those arrows, you have to add it's direction to your previous vector. All six spaces around a planet had arrows pointing inwards to the planet - which permitted you to orbit stably without using fuel - or to use planets to 'slingshot' you around. You could refuel at any planet by making one complete stable orbit. The board was laminated and you drew on it with a grease pencil. As I recall, the objective was to orbit each one of the planets in the solar system at least once and return to Earth. That was also around in the mid 1970's.

Sadly, I don't recall the name of that game. SteveBaker 04:44, 13 December 2006 (UTC)