Robert Abbott (game Designer) - Biography

Biography

Abbott was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and attended St. Louis Country Day School. Abbott went to Yale for two years, then attended the University of Colorado for another two, but never graduated. Soon after, Abbott moved to New York, where he and his games were discovered by Martin Gardner. In 1963, after Abbott's book, Abbott's New Card Games, received only moderate success, he "got tired of being poor" and moved back to St. Louis. There, he became a computer programmer at the Washington University Computer Research Laboratory. In 1965, he moved back to New York, where he continued to work as a computer programmer, mostly with the IBM 360 assembly language.

Abbott created all of his card games during the 1950s, starting with Babel in 1951, and ending with Auction in 1956. Soon after, he moved to New York City, where the rules for his game Eleusis were first published by Martin Gardner in his Mathematical Games column. Motivated by the article, Abbott self-published the rules for four of his card games in the book Four New Card Games in 1962, which Abbott sold by mail. In 1963, the book Abbott's New Card Games was published by Sol Stein of Stein and Day, containing the rules for all eight of his card games and the rules for his chess variant, Baroque chess. In 1968, the publisher Funk & Wagnalls published a paperback edition of Abbott's New Card Games, in which Abbott slightly modified the rules of Baroque chess, but these changes never became popular. Around the same time that Abbott's New Card Games was published, Abbott sent his maze, Traffic Maze in Floyd's Knob, to Martin Gardner. This was the first logic maze to be published, appearing in Gardner's Mathematical Games column.

Since then, Abbott has created various mazes, most of which appeared in the books SuperMazes and Mad Mazes. In 2008, RBA Libros published a Spanish version of his book Abbott's New Card Games, under the title Diez juegos que no se parecen a nada, which translates to Ten games that do not resemble anything. This version was not just a Spanish translation of the original, however; the most up-to-date rules for the various games were used; in addition, the rules for Eleusis Express and Confusion were included. In 2010, his Where are the Cows? maze was published by the Oxford University Press in the book Cows in the Maze. In 2011, his game Confusion was published by Stronghold Games. The game was named "Best New Abstract Strategy Game" for 2012 by GAMES Magazine.