In an attempt to conceptualize his studies on distilling game rules and using computers to synthesize them, Cameron Browne designed a fully-defined game system that is compact enough for computers to handle spatially but with enough complexity to be interesting. These efforts gave birth to a 4x4 board with stackable balls: Shibumi.
As a physical set, one only needs a board consisting of sixteen cavities in an evenly-spaced 4x4 arrangement and balls of the same size in three different colors: black, white and red. A possible fourth color, yellow, has been floated as a possible addition. Visually, the set is peak minimalism, even if you play with various balls and boards it still stands on its own, the spheres commanding its aesthetic. Its main feature though is its inherent depth: All of its 30 points are not fully available at once, these points are only available under conditions inherent to the physical set.
Add a precise glossary of terms and a the Shibumi system is ready for play. Keeping things simple, these features are inherent in the physical nature of the set and come intuitively in play. True to its abstract nature, nothing is left to chance and only moves with one certain outcome are legal, though games with randomness have utilized other factors instead.
To give the new system more bang for its buck, a contest was held to collect an initial set of rules made by humans, not only to seed the algorithms but to give the fledgling set a bunch of games for people to play with on the get-go. While Shibumi may be simple enough for someone to rediscover its concepts by scratch, a starting corpus of games is a necessity the same way you need to know at least one card game to get any use from a deck of cards.
The contest was a success, the resulting creations both stretched the capabilities of the system but also the imaginations of designers, who have to deal with reductions in size and abstraction. That various genres and goals can come out of a small playing area and color set is a conceptual marvel not only of the set but of abstracts in general. To compare, stone-placement games based on the Go set are either connection games or area games.
Sadly, after this competition, only a handful of new games popped up on BGG, and the synthesized games are yet to appear; the project itself put on hold. Fortunately, with the launch of Browne's project Ludii, new games may be on its way, and maybe, just maybe, we will see what machine-generated innovations will appear.
In 2020, Emil Danielsen presented nine new games of his own making for the set, after a lull of four years. Not restricting himself merely to abstract fare, Danielsen also approaches the set as a physical object and adds a dexterity game and a game that doesn't even require the board. It might annoy some that such games be included (although one Challenge entry is also a dexterity game, that one focused on ball-rolling and needed a slope), but thinking beyond the system's limits is something humans have excelled in doing; computers can only work within the rules they are given.
Clever yet underlooked, the Shibumi set was made to challenge computers, but it's yet to complete its first task of challenging us.
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