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| - 55Stones was invented in the Halloween night 2002 by Ralf Gering in Kusterdingen, Germany. The game was originally meant to be a candidate of the Simultaneous Game Design Competition sponsored by About Board Games and Abstract Games magazine in 2002/2003, but when the inventor became a member of the jury, he withheld the game. 55Stones (originally spelled 55 Stones) was first published in the Yahoo! forum mancala games on February 7, 2004. The game is also described in a Catalonian Wiki on mancala games and at BoardGameGeek. It was added to Super Duper Games, a Canadian hobby site for playing various freely available games over the web, on October 21, 2006. The implementation, however, is flawed (as of January 10, 2012) . Today, 55Stones is one of the best-known non-commercial modern manca
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| abstract
| - 55Stones was invented in the Halloween night 2002 by Ralf Gering in Kusterdingen, Germany. The game was originally meant to be a candidate of the Simultaneous Game Design Competition sponsored by About Board Games and Abstract Games magazine in 2002/2003, but when the inventor became a member of the jury, he withheld the game. 55Stones (originally spelled 55 Stones) was first published in the Yahoo! forum mancala games on February 7, 2004. The game is also described in a Catalonian Wiki on mancala games and at BoardGameGeek. It was added to Super Duper Games, a Canadian hobby site for playing various freely available games over the web, on October 21, 2006. The implementation, however, is flawed (as of January 10, 2012) . Today, 55Stones is one of the best-known non-commercial modern mancala games according to BoardGameGeek. The game was described in the German and the English Wikipedia, but on both websites the articles were deleted early in 2006 after Tobias Schmidbauer, a 19-year old college student, claimed that the game has no encyclopedic relevance. In the German discussion, however, he admitted that his request for deletion was an act of revenge because the author of the 55Stones article critisized him for some reverts. The vast majority in the German discussion wanted the article to be kept. Nevertheless, the administrator Uwe Gille, a veterinarian with no particular interest in games, eventually deleted it. Schmidbauer who wrote about himself, 'I am Donald Duck', was later banned from Wikipedia and from Wikibooks. In June 2007, an article on 55Stones was again added to the German Wikipedia because the game became much better known after its implementation on the web. The new article was deleted after just a few minutes by the admin GNU1742 without checking its notability or discussing the topic. Then the author was banned, before he could explain why he had written the article on the game. The next day, he gave a report on the discussion site of the general mancala article about what he perceived as power plays, but his statements were constantly reverted by two users. Eventually he was banned again, this time by the admin SINN. A number of German Wikipedians even started a smear campaign on Wikinfo and vandalized several of its pages. These events show the kind of manipulations, censorship, and abuse of administrative power typical for the German Wikipedia. 55Stones received five hate ratings on BoardGameGeek: the first one in 2008 by Chris Steere, after the game's author wrote a critical article about his father Mark who is well-known as a psychopath all over the internet. A second hate rating came from "abstractfan", a fan of the Spanish game designer Néstor Romeral Andrés, after several of his games (e.g. Coffee, Domina 4, Omega, Taiji) were identified by Ralf Gering as rip-offs that are based on earlier games. After a thread was opened on BoardGameGeek on March 8, 2012 to discuss this issue, three more hate ratings were given by Sam Houston (March 8, 2012), Sam Houston, Jr. (March 9, 2012) and Sam Houston, Sr. (March 9, 2012). These were all sockpuppets of Mark Steere, which was acknowledged by him in a public chat at igGameCenter (screenshots were taken as a proof). Their hate ratings affected all five games on BoardGameGeek, which were created by Ralf Gering. BoardGameGeek surpressed any discussion about these hate ratings, closing or removing threads and suspending the games' author for a day for starting a discussion in the complaints department of BoardGameGeek. Eventually all hate ratings were removed by BoardGameGeek except the first one. However, Mark Steere created another sockpuppet account on March 14 named "Christine Steelrush", giving two hate ratings and then gloating about that in an e-mail to the game's author. 55Stones has several unusual features:
* It is one of the few one-rank mancala games for two persons along with Atomic Wari and Sowing.
* All moves are played on the board simultaneously, which is otherwise only known from Agsinnoninka, a traditional Philippine game. However, unlike Agsinnoninka, all moves are performed at equal speed (starting and ending at exactly the same time) and all decisions are made in turns. Therefore, 55Stones is a game with complete information.
* The pie rule is used, which is mostly known from connection games to make the game fair. Unlike most modern mancala games, 55Stones is a multi-lap game and it has just a single type of pieces.
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