In every village in every corner of Zeboya, from the mountains in the east to the semi-desert in the north to the fertile savannah in the south, there can be found a game called Moloza. Everywhere it looks slightly different, but it always has a board, etched into the ground, composed of circles connected by lines and stones, of two different colors for the two players, that move from circle to circle along the lines. It is a game of pure strategy: the only forces that determine the outcome are the players’ minds, and a sufficiently apt player could learn how to always win—though the children and farmers who take leisure in this game would never think to devote enough time to it to reach that level.
I was introduced to Moloza not as a recreational activity, as it is for most of our population, but as an object of study. When I was at the university, I studied the theory of individuals and societies, what the more travelled scholars call “anthropology.” But at the same time, some mathematicians made a ground-breaking discovery that would soon be known throughout the city and spark the study of games as an academic field.
What these researchers had found was a method for analyzing games of strategy such as the many variants of Moloza that, given enough time, could work out the optimal strategy so as to never lose (assuming such a strategy exists). Its resemblance to the work of the Anzala is telling of the nature of this discovery. They assembled an array of jars, each one corresponding to a possible position of the game, and in each jar put several beads of various colors, each one corresponding to a possible move that could be made from that position. The researchers then used this as a machine that could play against a Polytopian player: from a given position it encountered, it would make a random move, and whether it won or lost the game would determine whether it was trained to make that move again in the future or to avoid it. After many rounds of this, the beads corresponding to losing moves had been eliminated, and the machine was consistently able to beat even the best among the researchers—they had found the perfect strategy.
The announcement of this concept set off an academic explosion in the city. From the one version of Moloza that they had initially worked on, these mathematicians and their colleagues soon constructed machines to beat many different variants of the game, and scholars throughout the university studied these and other games with this new tool for “solving” them both simply to show that it could be done and to look for extensions in other disciplines. Over time, one problem came to loom over the new field of game theory: could a game be constructed that, despite conforming to the same basic structure as Moloza, could not be beaten with the jar-and-bead method? Some believed that it was impossible, and set about trying to prove it. The majority, though, thought it was possible, and everyone from mathematicians to sculptors to businessmen quickly found themselves in a meta-game of simbaza and geroffy: as they worked to design increasingly complex games of strategy, the university researchers kept outdoing them with increasingly complex sets of jars and beads; no end was in sight.
This is where I entered the fray. I did not study with the scholars most devoted to games at the university, but even with some separation I could not avoid the developments occurring at a break-neck speed all around me. Instead, I looked for connections to my own work. As I studied the politics of tribes and their relationships with each other, I saw the first hint of a solution to the problem. All the Square, with its thousands of tiles, its hundreds of cities and villages with hundreds of thousands of Polytopians, was the board of an immense strategy game on which twelve players (twelve who were playing by the rules, anyhow) were each looking for the fastest route to victory. If even a fraction of this complexity could be harnessed in a game in the style of Moloza, it would surely overpower the jars and beads that had been able to handle everything thrown at them so far.
And so I worked. Once I got out of university, of course, I had “real” work, the kind that put food on the table—mostly advising the city’s leaders on how to plan for the future against a shifting external background, ideally without starting any riots in the streets. But when I had time apart from that, I designed, iterated, built and destroyed, wrote and drew and sculpted, all in the hopes of finding a game that could capture the complexity of the entire Square in a space no bigger than the table I was standing at. I found that the best balance of strategy and intricacy was found in the wars between tribes. Just two tribes with relatively small but diverse armies have a staggering number of arrangements when given sufficient space to move and maneuver, seeking to capture the enemy’s capital.
But I knew that the jar-and-bead method could defeat this: it was obvious that the best strategy was simply to move towards the opposing capital, so it would not take long for the machine to plot this general course and then refine the individual movements. I had to keep hunting, keep developing, because even as I felt like I was going nowhere I somehow knew that I was only a small leap of insight away from the game that could beat the machine.
That epiphany came when my work in politics led me back to my university studies. I had taken a particular interest in the society of the Yădakk. Not only were they primarily nomadic traders—I did not need university to teach me that—but the wealthy among them would often carry supplies with them to set up what amounted to small villages everywhere they went, which could be used as spontaneous trade centers or, in the case of the political leaders, makeshift courts in the plains between cities. With my game always in the back of my mind, I realized: what if the two armies were more like the Yădakk, with the political center—what I had been thinking of as the capital, a static city—constantly in motion and even acting as a part of the army in its own right?
This, it turned out, completely remade the game. Now the game could not progress with such an obvious direction, and more defensive strategies opened up to make use of the new mechanic. The test games I played against my colleagues felt less like variations on a stale theme and more like unique journeys to novel destinations. I was ready to announce my contender for the game that could not be solved with jars and beads.
Despite my excitement, my idea was largely ignored. So many games had, in the turns since the first jar-and-bead experiment, been proposed, tested, and defeated that no one expected anything new. But all it took was a couple scholars who were now well versed in game theory recognizing that my game had a newfound potential, and they set about constructing the array of jars they would need. Before I even got the chance to play one game against the machine, other scholars noticed the project and started questioning whether they had accounted for all the possible positions, and the debate over this game reached such heights that the university had no choice but to shut it down. The scholars accepted that I had finally found the game that outdid the machine.
This announcement garnered more attention, and word spread quickly that the biggest open problem at the university was now solved. Enthusiasts of Cazimbo throughout the city wanted to get their hands on my game, seeking to establish dominance without any challenger of clay and glass, and for a brief period I was more interesting to the city’s leaders than even the top experts on farming or trade. All were intrigued that someone like me, with whom many of them had worked at one time or another, had managed to steal the spotlight of the entire university with something as simple as a game; they wanted to learn its secrets straight from the source, though I knew none of them could ever be much good at it. None, that is, except the ambassador from Luxidoor…
I found myself in a small yet ornate building near the center of the city, in a room with just one table. Opposite the entrance was the ambassador with their posse of advisors and guards, all curious as to what had sparked such a rustle among the local leaders. I marked out the board on the table, laid out the pieces my friend had sculpted for me, and started explaining the rules. The ambassador’s face went from impassive to surprised, but when I finished explaining I looked up to see them disappointed, at a loss for words. They managed to stammer out just one sentence in response:
“You didn’t know about chess?”