Saturday, November 20, 2010

[Resources] Knight's Tour

The Knight's Tour is as old as chess itself. It's a math problem: can the Knight traverse the board only touching each square once? With 64 squares, the possibilities are immense (over 26 trillion closed tours).

What does this have to do with gaming, you might ask? Well, very famous people, from Benjamin Franklin to Leonhard Euler, fiddled with the Knight's Tour. It could be part of a modern spy game, or a Revolutionary War Masonic mystery, the key to solving a Nazi threat during WWII, a pulp-era world trotting expedition to find the true world-destroying copy of the Sanskrit poem Kavyalankara or even incorporated into a magical Mathemancy game.

2 comments:

  1. IIRC, the Knight's Tour was also integral to Katherine Neville's The Eight. I suggest reading it for anyone interested in starting a globe-trotting, chess-playing, treasure-seeking, historical-fiction, adventure campaign.

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