Interviews by an Optimist # 98 - Harry Obst
Harry says this about himself…
"I was born in Koenigsberg, the capital of East Prussia, in 1932. It was a vibrant, culturally active city of about 400,000, the home of the famous philosopher Immanuel Kant and the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, the subject of the opera “The Tales of Hoffmann” by the French composer Jacques Offenbach. But it was totally destroyed towards the end of World War II, given to the Soviets at Yalta, and is now called Kaliningrad.
When Hitler started World War II, I was seven years old. My father was drafted and sent to fight in Russia where he was killed. Between the ages of seven and ten, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather at his apartment in Koenigsberg. He was an outgoing and very creative person who loved to play games. Not only did he introduce me to games, he taught me the tactics and basic strategies of how to play them well. He enjoyed nothing better than getting beaten by me. This would make him laugh uproariously. He would slap my back and compliment me on my good play. That is how I fell in love with games.
Losing our home in Koenigsberg and my grandfather, who starved to death under the ruthless Soviet occupation, my life journey took me farther and farther west until I wound up in the United States in 1957, and in the Washington, D.C. area in 1958. At that time, the Washington Senators were playing major league baseball at Griffith Stadium.
A friend took me there to watch a game against the Boston Red Sox. A former soccer player myself, I immediately grasped the intellectual superiority of baseball over soccer. The tactics of the game are dictated by the limited options available to the pitcher and the batter, and equally to the fielders, runners, and the manager. The pitcher may possess a good fastball, sinker, and curveball – and the batter knows that. Both need to do battle over those three options, depending on the number of outs, base runners, and the score while at bat. Yet no two games are ever alike. Later the idea came to me that this could be replicated in a card game. Harry’s Grand Slam Baseball Game is the only game design I ever completed and put on the market.
Now that I am retired, after working for seven American presidents as interpreter and later running an interpreting school for a few years, I might possibly get back to designing a game or two after completing the book on interpreting that I am currently writing."
Tom: What games did you play as a child?
Harry: The first game I was introduced to was the board game known in the U.S. as "Sorry!", in German called, "Don't get angry!". It taught me that even when you are far ahead of the opponent, your last piece on the board can get wiped out and sent back to "Start" two or three times over, and you can still lose. Don't assume that you have the game won when you are way in the lead. Of course, this game is just a game of chance, depending on the roll of the dice.
We played Chinese Checkers and simple card games like Rummy until I was ready to be introduced to the sophisticated tactics needed to play the most popular of all German card games: "Skat". There are Skat clubs all over Germany. Groups of three or four meet on weekends in all German neighborhoods for this game for three players (the fourth will sit out one hand then rejoin the rotation). Points are tallied on paper for each player for each individual hand won or lost.
Skat uses 32 cards, from the seven up to the ace. Its unique feature is that one player must defeat the combination of the other two, ten cards against twenty. A progressive bidding system determines who has the strongest hand. Two of the 32 cards are discarded face down. The winning bid may or may not pick up the two cards and exchange them, discarding two weak cards. If he does not pick up the discard but leaves it untouched, extra points are earned.
Skat is as sophisticated as Poker, maybe even more so. It taught me smart game strategy. Today, I am an avid poker player and member of a club that meets once a month. No wild cards, all excellent players.
Tom: Under the many trials you faced as a child, did gaming help? Was there much time for it?
Harry: By the time I was 12, in 1944, all of our property, including all games, had been lost in bombing raids and as fleeing refugees who had to leave most property behind. Mere survival, like finding food, took up all of our time. For 18 months, as refugees in Saxony, we lived on only potatoes and whatever greens we could find outside, like dandelions. Occasionally, we would play a game similar to Minesweeper, for which only pencil and paper were needed. But that was also a war game in which we tried to sink each others ships, so it did not take our minds off the war and, later, off the highly suppressive Soviet occupation of Saxony.
At about age sixteen, when I spent a few days in a hospital, the guy in the bed across from me was a Persian who had a chess set with him. He needed somebody to play with, so he taught me chess, which he said was a Persian game originally. The German name for chess is "Schach". He explained that that was derived from shah, the ruler of Persia. Originally, the queen was a vezier (treasurer of the shah), and the bishops were messengers in Persian. This brought me back to gaming, and I became a reasonably good
chess player.
Tom: What brought you to America?
Harry: After finishing my studies at Mainz University, I moved to Munich in 1956 to look for a job as a translator for books or documents written in English or French. Many book publishers were located in Munich that year. But good and experienced translators were a dime a dozen, and I was a rookie, just out of college. I was forced to take a job selling office machines. One day, I was eating lunch in a restaurant when three Americans came in and took the table next to mine. The menu was handwritten in local Bavarian lingo. They could not make heads or tails of it. I went over to their table and offered to read it to them in English. They invited me to join them at their table.
It turned out they were three newly arrived employees of the American consulate general. When they asked me where I was from and I answered Koenigsberg in East Prussia, they perked up. "We are looking for refugees like you". "Why?" I asked incredulously. "On December 31 of this year, a law called "Refugee Relief Act" is expiring. It was designed to bring refugees to the United States whose homes were lost due to actions taken by our country. We gave Koenigsberg to the Soviet Union in Yalta. Thus you are eligible, if you apply by December."
At the end of January 1957, I was flying to the United States as a legal immigrant in a decrepit propeller plane that crashed a month later at La Guardia with many fatalities. On the flight in hailstorms and blizzards, with emergency stops in Iceland and Gander, Newfoundland, I remembered a prediction made by a gypsy woman, reading my hand when I was 12. "You will go to the United States of America and become rich." "Rich? Will I become a millionaire?" "You will have more than that." She was right with the first part of her prediction. Now I am playing the lottery each week, waiting for the second part.
Tom: Can you explain the design process of your baseball game? What took you from watching the sport to producing such a game?
Harry: What fascinated me about baseball was its intellectual content that guides the application of the physical skills. The pitcher who can outthink the batter will usually prevail. The hitter who can outguess the pitcher and correctly anticipates what he will throw next, is more likely to get the crucial hit. But the available options for both are limited. The pitcher may only have three types of pitches he commands to choose from. The batter can take a pitch, swing, anticipating a fastball, or slow his swing, anticipating a slow-speed pitch. His options are limited, too. The same goes for the manager. Even when the leadoff hitter gets on base, his options are limited. He can try to bunt him to second or let the hitter swing away. He can order a risky hit-and-run. He can gamble after two balls and signal the hitter not to swing, hoping to advance the runner on a walk. He can attempt a steal of second. But there are virtually no other options. Similarly, the fielders have only two or three options to work with. By contrast, a quarterback in football has a huge arsenal of options for each individual play.
My first design problem was how to simulate this. I finally decided that I could do this through limiting the player's options by having him hold only three cards at a time. This feature, more than any other, is what makes Harry's Grand Slam Baseball Game unique. Next, I wanted to replicate as many game situations as possible: double plays, stolen bases, sacrifice bunts, pitcher balks, etc., without impeding the smooth flow of the card game. To move things along and make scoring easier, I had to eliminate certain situations like triple plays and scoring from second on a single. Once I had this worked out and my experiments had shown that this was a good basic approach, what remained to be done were additional refinements to make the game more fun to play, and to create a chance for a comeback for the player who is dealt bad cards initially.
Tom: For all your talk of strategy, there is a lot of luck in your baseball game. What would be your response to those who called it too light and luck-filled?
Harry: First of all, there is a lot of luck in baseball when played on the field. You hit a ball down the line, just within the reach of the third baseman, and he turns it into an inning-ending double play. You hit it three inches farther to the left, and it results in a double bringing in two runs. Those three inches are a matter of luck, not a matter of the batter's skill. The card game is not designed to be a deep-thinking game like chess; it is designed to replicate the many surprises that happen in baseball games all the time.
It is designed to move along and be completed in twenty to thirty minutes. But just about anything that frequently happens in baseball on the field, can happen in my game. You may not score a single run in the first six innings, but you may score seven runs in the ninth inning. The game can end four to three or fourteen to thirteen. You never know.
To take some of the luck out of it, the cards are reshuffled every three innings. It is unlikely that you will get bad cards three times in-a-row. It is smart strategy to consider this in your play. When you are hitting in the top of the first, save your only hit card for the second or third inning, because there are plenty of outs in the deck for your fielding in the bottom of the inning. But never save anything in the third or sixth inning. If you are fielding and are holding three hit cards or wild cards (advancing only the base runners), you have the option of calling in a relief pitcher. But you should not do that if you are only one run down, because the relief pitcher/pinch hitter card is not reshuffled and should be saved for later innings where it may save the game for you. You need to remember whether the home run or double play cards have been played or not. All of that is strategy, though not sophisticated strategy.
Finally, for those who like bigger challenges, the game is designed to resemble a pitching duel that will be decided by only one or two runs by removing a number of the hit and wild cards, as indicated in the instructions. If you prefer a slugfest, having had a couple of beers, you can remove some of the out cards and the double plays. Yes, the game has a strong element of luck in it and is a little light on strategy, but it is not light on fun and on resembling real baseball.
Tom: Are there other baseball board games that you enjoy?
Harry: Frankly, I have never looked for one, seen one or played one. Harry's Grand Slam Baseball Game is more of a card game than a board game. It can also be played without the board, keeping score with pencil and paper. This is what kids often do when they are stuck in the backseat of a car or in a van where there is no space for the outfield scoreboard.
Tom: Harry, thanks for taking the time to answer these questions! Before we go, is there anything you would like to say to our readers?
Harry: Well, first, before a word to the readers, I would like to thank you for including me in your interview series.
To the great game and board game fans among the readers, I would like to say Harry's Grand Slam Baseball Game will not get you from the journeyman level to the master level in game strategy. But, in between your deep-thinking game efforts, you may find this a fun game to relax with, especially if you like baseball. And, finally, this game makes a great gift for kids who play baseball or enjoy watching it. It gets them off the video screen for an hour or two, makes them interact with another kid instead of a computer, and it gives them the feel of managing a team.
I also would like to thank Out of the Box publishers for giving this old game new life.
Edited by Tom and Laura Vasel
April 8, 2006
"Real men play board games"
Harry says this about himself…
"I was born in Koenigsberg, the capital of East Prussia, in 1932. It was a vibrant, culturally active city of about 400,000, the home of the famous philosopher Immanuel Kant and the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, the subject of the opera “The Tales of Hoffmann” by the French composer Jacques Offenbach. But it was totally destroyed towards the end of World War II, given to the Soviets at Yalta, and is now called Kaliningrad.
When Hitler started World War II, I was seven years old. My father was drafted and sent to fight in Russia where he was killed. Between the ages of seven and ten, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather at his apartment in Koenigsberg. He was an outgoing and very creative person who loved to play games. Not only did he introduce me to games, he taught me the tactics and basic strategies of how to play them well. He enjoyed nothing better than getting beaten by me. This would make him laugh uproariously. He would slap my back and compliment me on my good play. That is how I fell in love with games.
Losing our home in Koenigsberg and my grandfather, who starved to death under the ruthless Soviet occupation, my life journey took me farther and farther west until I wound up in the United States in 1957, and in the Washington, D.C. area in 1958. At that time, the Washington Senators were playing major league baseball at Griffith Stadium.
A friend took me there to watch a game against the Boston Red Sox. A former soccer player myself, I immediately grasped the intellectual superiority of baseball over soccer. The tactics of the game are dictated by the limited options available to the pitcher and the batter, and equally to the fielders, runners, and the manager. The pitcher may possess a good fastball, sinker, and curveball – and the batter knows that. Both need to do battle over those three options, depending on the number of outs, base runners, and the score while at bat. Yet no two games are ever alike. Later the idea came to me that this could be replicated in a card game. Harry’s Grand Slam Baseball Game is the only game design I ever completed and put on the market.
Now that I am retired, after working for seven American presidents as interpreter and later running an interpreting school for a few years, I might possibly get back to designing a game or two after completing the book on interpreting that I am currently writing."
Tom: What games did you play as a child?
Harry: The first game I was introduced to was the board game known in the U.S. as "Sorry!", in German called, "Don't get angry!". It taught me that even when you are far ahead of the opponent, your last piece on the board can get wiped out and sent back to "Start" two or three times over, and you can still lose. Don't assume that you have the game won when you are way in the lead. Of course, this game is just a game of chance, depending on the roll of the dice.
We played Chinese Checkers and simple card games like Rummy until I was ready to be introduced to the sophisticated tactics needed to play the most popular of all German card games: "Skat". There are Skat clubs all over Germany. Groups of three or four meet on weekends in all German neighborhoods for this game for three players (the fourth will sit out one hand then rejoin the rotation). Points are tallied on paper for each player for each individual hand won or lost.
Skat uses 32 cards, from the seven up to the ace. Its unique feature is that one player must defeat the combination of the other two, ten cards against twenty. A progressive bidding system determines who has the strongest hand. Two of the 32 cards are discarded face down. The winning bid may or may not pick up the two cards and exchange them, discarding two weak cards. If he does not pick up the discard but leaves it untouched, extra points are earned.
Skat is as sophisticated as Poker, maybe even more so. It taught me smart game strategy. Today, I am an avid poker player and member of a club that meets once a month. No wild cards, all excellent players.
Tom: Under the many trials you faced as a child, did gaming help? Was there much time for it?
Harry: By the time I was 12, in 1944, all of our property, including all games, had been lost in bombing raids and as fleeing refugees who had to leave most property behind. Mere survival, like finding food, took up all of our time. For 18 months, as refugees in Saxony, we lived on only potatoes and whatever greens we could find outside, like dandelions. Occasionally, we would play a game similar to Minesweeper, for which only pencil and paper were needed. But that was also a war game in which we tried to sink each others ships, so it did not take our minds off the war and, later, off the highly suppressive Soviet occupation of Saxony.
At about age sixteen, when I spent a few days in a hospital, the guy in the bed across from me was a Persian who had a chess set with him. He needed somebody to play with, so he taught me chess, which he said was a Persian game originally. The German name for chess is "Schach". He explained that that was derived from shah, the ruler of Persia. Originally, the queen was a vezier (treasurer of the shah), and the bishops were messengers in Persian. This brought me back to gaming, and I became a reasonably good
chess player.
Tom: What brought you to America?
Harry: After finishing my studies at Mainz University, I moved to Munich in 1956 to look for a job as a translator for books or documents written in English or French. Many book publishers were located in Munich that year. But good and experienced translators were a dime a dozen, and I was a rookie, just out of college. I was forced to take a job selling office machines. One day, I was eating lunch in a restaurant when three Americans came in and took the table next to mine. The menu was handwritten in local Bavarian lingo. They could not make heads or tails of it. I went over to their table and offered to read it to them in English. They invited me to join them at their table.
It turned out they were three newly arrived employees of the American consulate general. When they asked me where I was from and I answered Koenigsberg in East Prussia, they perked up. "We are looking for refugees like you". "Why?" I asked incredulously. "On December 31 of this year, a law called "Refugee Relief Act" is expiring. It was designed to bring refugees to the United States whose homes were lost due to actions taken by our country. We gave Koenigsberg to the Soviet Union in Yalta. Thus you are eligible, if you apply by December."
At the end of January 1957, I was flying to the United States as a legal immigrant in a decrepit propeller plane that crashed a month later at La Guardia with many fatalities. On the flight in hailstorms and blizzards, with emergency stops in Iceland and Gander, Newfoundland, I remembered a prediction made by a gypsy woman, reading my hand when I was 12. "You will go to the United States of America and become rich." "Rich? Will I become a millionaire?" "You will have more than that." She was right with the first part of her prediction. Now I am playing the lottery each week, waiting for the second part.
Tom: Can you explain the design process of your baseball game? What took you from watching the sport to producing such a game?
Harry: What fascinated me about baseball was its intellectual content that guides the application of the physical skills. The pitcher who can outthink the batter will usually prevail. The hitter who can outguess the pitcher and correctly anticipates what he will throw next, is more likely to get the crucial hit. But the available options for both are limited. The pitcher may only have three types of pitches he commands to choose from. The batter can take a pitch, swing, anticipating a fastball, or slow his swing, anticipating a slow-speed pitch. His options are limited, too. The same goes for the manager. Even when the leadoff hitter gets on base, his options are limited. He can try to bunt him to second or let the hitter swing away. He can order a risky hit-and-run. He can gamble after two balls and signal the hitter not to swing, hoping to advance the runner on a walk. He can attempt a steal of second. But there are virtually no other options. Similarly, the fielders have only two or three options to work with. By contrast, a quarterback in football has a huge arsenal of options for each individual play.
My first design problem was how to simulate this. I finally decided that I could do this through limiting the player's options by having him hold only three cards at a time. This feature, more than any other, is what makes Harry's Grand Slam Baseball Game unique. Next, I wanted to replicate as many game situations as possible: double plays, stolen bases, sacrifice bunts, pitcher balks, etc., without impeding the smooth flow of the card game. To move things along and make scoring easier, I had to eliminate certain situations like triple plays and scoring from second on a single. Once I had this worked out and my experiments had shown that this was a good basic approach, what remained to be done were additional refinements to make the game more fun to play, and to create a chance for a comeback for the player who is dealt bad cards initially.
Tom: For all your talk of strategy, there is a lot of luck in your baseball game. What would be your response to those who called it too light and luck-filled?
Harry: First of all, there is a lot of luck in baseball when played on the field. You hit a ball down the line, just within the reach of the third baseman, and he turns it into an inning-ending double play. You hit it three inches farther to the left, and it results in a double bringing in two runs. Those three inches are a matter of luck, not a matter of the batter's skill. The card game is not designed to be a deep-thinking game like chess; it is designed to replicate the many surprises that happen in baseball games all the time.
It is designed to move along and be completed in twenty to thirty minutes. But just about anything that frequently happens in baseball on the field, can happen in my game. You may not score a single run in the first six innings, but you may score seven runs in the ninth inning. The game can end four to three or fourteen to thirteen. You never know.
To take some of the luck out of it, the cards are reshuffled every three innings. It is unlikely that you will get bad cards three times in-a-row. It is smart strategy to consider this in your play. When you are hitting in the top of the first, save your only hit card for the second or third inning, because there are plenty of outs in the deck for your fielding in the bottom of the inning. But never save anything in the third or sixth inning. If you are fielding and are holding three hit cards or wild cards (advancing only the base runners), you have the option of calling in a relief pitcher. But you should not do that if you are only one run down, because the relief pitcher/pinch hitter card is not reshuffled and should be saved for later innings where it may save the game for you. You need to remember whether the home run or double play cards have been played or not. All of that is strategy, though not sophisticated strategy.
Finally, for those who like bigger challenges, the game is designed to resemble a pitching duel that will be decided by only one or two runs by removing a number of the hit and wild cards, as indicated in the instructions. If you prefer a slugfest, having had a couple of beers, you can remove some of the out cards and the double plays. Yes, the game has a strong element of luck in it and is a little light on strategy, but it is not light on fun and on resembling real baseball.
Tom: Are there other baseball board games that you enjoy?
Harry: Frankly, I have never looked for one, seen one or played one. Harry's Grand Slam Baseball Game is more of a card game than a board game. It can also be played without the board, keeping score with pencil and paper. This is what kids often do when they are stuck in the backseat of a car or in a van where there is no space for the outfield scoreboard.
Tom: Harry, thanks for taking the time to answer these questions! Before we go, is there anything you would like to say to our readers?
Harry: Well, first, before a word to the readers, I would like to thank you for including me in your interview series.
To the great game and board game fans among the readers, I would like to say Harry's Grand Slam Baseball Game will not get you from the journeyman level to the master level in game strategy. But, in between your deep-thinking game efforts, you may find this a fun game to relax with, especially if you like baseball. And, finally, this game makes a great gift for kids who play baseball or enjoy watching it. It gets them off the video screen for an hour or two, makes them interact with another kid instead of a computer, and it gives them the feel of managing a team.
I also would like to thank Out of the Box publishers for giving this old game new life.
Edited by Tom and Laura Vasel
April 8, 2006
"Real men play board games"
