Strasbourg
Designer: Stefan Feld
Publisher: Pegasus Spiele
Players: 3-5
Ages: 12+
Time: 60 minutes
Times Played: 9 times with purchased copies
In college, I had a math professor who liked to visit the college’s rare book room once a semester to pull out some significant texts, and the occasional novelty. One of the folios was a table of prime numbers from the late 1700s. More specifically, volume 2. As the story goes, volume 1 was such a best seller, they put together a sequel, and after it went to print, many errors were discovered in the original, so the second run was sold to the Turkish army for cannon target practice. This was the second volume.
Or at least that’s how I’ve been telling the story for years. I reached out to Prof. Reznick in an act of self-ombudsmanship for this review and he corrected my memory on some of that under a warranty his class came with 16 years ago. (Get you a professor that gives out class warranties; you never know when it’ll come in handy.). The story came from p. 349 of a 1919 book on the history of number theory. As it turned out, there was no second edition (and likely never a “bestselling” table of prime numbers anywhere ever), there were in fact “no purchasers of the part printed”, and all but a “few copies” were “used for cartridges in the Turkish war.”
Anyway, the point (and now the meta-point) is, getting the facts straight is important.
This wasn’t how I intended to start this review, but I’m going to save that anecdote for another occasion. We got here because I was trying to read up on the history of journalism corrections. I didn’t find much until I switched to reading about the history of typos, and things became much more interesting -including a conference you can attend to listen to scholarly lectures on such topics, but then I smelled a Turkish madeleine and here we are.
Anyway, the point is I just noticed that years ago in a ranking of Feld games, we listed Strasbourg below It Happens! and I wanted to issue a personal correction.
Continue reading →
