TEDxZurich-Gian Klainguti-Shows you how to play Birom
okay good afternoon ladies and gentlemen my name is John kangi and I'm here to present bom it's a game that my uncle invented sitting over there uh a long time ago and I think I'm I'm I'm really in love with this game it's really is a passion and why is one of the reasons is it combines the best aspects from chess Beamon and go these would be for chest it's a logical game you can think a couple of steps in advance from be gamon it stays really exciting till the last stone is played and from go the neutral territories or I call the common ground but now let's go back and look a bit of the history uh this is my uncle jery he's an inventor um a painter a writer and uh artist and he thinks a lot and in the 80s he was totally into games and and puzzles and games and he was thinking about this one thing but he couldn't bring it out and then one night he was lying in bed full of sweat and he had the vision bam he had it right in front of him he woke up these are these patterns he woke up cut it out and there you have that's bom that's how bom happened he had this vision and everything came together he thought about it a couple of years and now everything came together and was actually playable um he put the game together played it with a couple of people my cousins and so on and um I would like to give you now like a short overview of the rules um everything's formed around this red Central stone called beom uh and it's neutral now and it's always the center of everything so in a way it reminds me of Switzerland because it's also some are neutral there's red and now standing on here on a red stage something El with Ted I don't know maybe you had that envisioned as well I don't know but in any case back to the rules you have um two opponent a two player game one's yellow the other one is blue and they're both trying to surround the red stone now that gets really difficult if two people are trying to surround the same Stone and that's why you have points points in the matter that nobody is able to surround the red Center Stone the points come in handy and one counts at the end of the game who has more points point now there's one other little trick is surrounding your opponent uh if you surround your opponent you can take it out use his stone at the end and you have a stone more so that's a big Advantage actually that's a really big advantage and making points are also really big advantag now so since those are really big Advantage there's something in this game that's called a common ground or neutral territories now I really really love this idea of common ground because what it what does that mean it means if for instance here if for instance someone's able to surround the opponent he gets the stone he can take it out now that's a huge advantage and uh the space that is left over the empty space is caling ground it still connects blue now for instance making points if you make a point if you take a stone and put it and create an empty space you can fill that space with with your points now those points although they are yours your opponent can use them to connect his colors and sometimes at the end of the game he only won because the points you actually made now I love that idea um and I think that's also for our uh for our Century it's and everybody's been talking about this also here at Ted I think this is just a amazing idea if you are able to create a real Advantage for yourself you should make sure that everyone around you also get an advantage and I think uh if everybody would do that and we would really implement it in this Century uh then we would have you know a much more sustainable place to live on now uh going further these simple simple rules here in this game uh create really really crazy patterns um complex patterns and it's really funny because every time I play this game with someone else like if I play it with a banker it's going to be a very organized pattern now then I play with my uncle he's an artist and the patterns get very crazy and it's every with everyone one plays it's really it's it shows it it really shows something about the people you played with and every pattern is different now here we played a be with lots of stones and since every pattern is different I I started thinking okay every time I play this game I'd love to take a picture of the pattern and upload it and I hope that maybe afterwards when we go uh we'll be we'll be playing beom at the end of the show uh anyone who's interested in the game can sit to sit with us and play around and everybody who beats us will get a real copy of this game a limited thing and uh I think this game is really if everybody it's going to be available soon I don't know yet when uh if everybody would just take a picture of the pattern they create they can upload it they can name that pattern after themselves and I hope that at the end after I don't know after 50 years maybe we'll have the decoded all possible formations of the patterns uh physically that's a really nice thought so uh last but not least I would like to say thank you to everyone uh thank you for letting me present this game that's been he created in the in the 80s and it's been locked up in an archive over 20 years and now today it's been presented at Ted thank you very [Applause] much