French touch

On three French web sites I discovered three different designs for pasang board.

2 Tours de Jeu, a site documenting rules for strategy games, exhibits a simple makeshift pasang board. The pieces are placed inside squares (just like checkers and chess), a departure from the conventional placement on grid intersections. This is not really unusual; an early non-libre version of Pasang Emas included a theme which departed similarly from the convention. What is really unusual is the set of rules for the game. It is totally different from what Pasang Emas implements. This unusual version of pasang is described by R C Bell in his book "Discovering Old Board Games".

Some people dispute the accuracy of Bell's account. But I do not currently wish to go into that debate. I wouldn't be surprised either way.

Association pour Vivre l'AutoGestion, a social club for family entertainment, has this catalogue of rental games. Page 25 of this catalogue shows an ornamented pasang board. You have got to see it to believe it. The French are adding a dash of their own art to the Brunei game. That's truly multi-cultural.

Geoludie has an online catalogue of world games for sale. It includes what appears to be a modern looking pasang board with small plastic marbles as pieces (unless my discernment has failed me and those are actually computer generated). Geoludie's pasang has 2 sets of rules: the one described by Bell and the one implemented by Pasang Emas. (Geoludie actually contacted me in 2006 regarding the irreconcilable differences between the two versions. So, they are in business of selling pasang for a long time already). The unusual use of marbles (placed presumably inside shallow cups on the board) is based on Bell's description of the game. Having played Chinese checkers using marbles on a holey board, I can attest the practicality of that design.

17 March 2018: Edited to replace broken links with Wayback Machine