The board game is Glagolitic Abbey. The players choose an avatar: the Assassin, the Inquisitor, the Spy or the Scholar. Their task is to solve the murder of the abbot and then to find the "legendary treasure reportedly hidden by King Boris I of Bulgaria" in the abbey and escape with it. Oh, and to do all that, players must decipher clues in Glagolitic. That's a script that flourished in a number of Eastern European countries from roughly 800 to 1400, explains Tim Brookes, inventor of Glagolitic Abbey. He describes the game as a hybrid of historical murder-mystery novel (and film) The Name of the Rose with Clue and other games. Glagolitic is one of hundreds of alphabets that have nearly perished from the face of the earth. With the help of this board game — and people to play it — Brookes hopes to reverse that trend. He invites word and game lovers to join him on Wednesday, December 13, at Burlington's Fletcher Free Library, to test and improve on Glagolitic Abbey — in prototype form — and other games. Participants can even try their hands at inventing their own card games. [event-1] The aim is to translate such games into at-risk languages and provide them to children around the world. "If you want to revive a language, you have to start with kids, and if you want to engage kids, you need games," Brookes wrote in an announcement for the event. Brookes is the founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project, which he admits began as something of a whim. Six years ago, finding himself with insufficient funds to buy Christmas presents for friends and family, he decided "to carve everyone signs to hang outside the front door, in the office, even outside my teenage daughter's bedroom door," he explains on his website. He was equally surprised to find that he enjoyed doing it and that his recipients liked the unusual gifts. Those first woodcarvings were name signs in English; next, Brookes moved on to Chinese characters. Realizing that scripts look like art to those who can't read them, he searched for other character-based languages to serve as inspiration. When he encountered the website omniglot.com —"the online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages"— Brookes was stunned to find a huge number of tongues he'd never heard of. That's to say nothing of the exotic alphabets.…
The board game is Glagolitic Abbey. The players choose an avatar: the Assassin, the Inquisitor, the Spy or the Scholar. Their task is to solve the murder of the abbot and then to find the "legendary treasure reportedly hidden by King Boris I of Bulgaria" in the abbey and escape with it. Oh, and to do all that, players must decipher clues in Glagolitic. That's a script that flourished in a number of Eastern European countries from roughly 800 to 1400, explains Tim Brookes, inventor of Glagolitic Abbey. He describes the game as a hybrid of historical murder-mystery novel (and film) The Name of the Rose with Clue and other games. Glagolitic is one of hundreds of alphabets that have nearly perished from the face of the earth. With the help of this board game — and people to play it — Brookes hopes to reverse that trend. He invites word and game lovers to join him on Wednesday, December 13, at Burlington's Fletcher Free Library, to test and improve on Glagolitic Abbey — in prototype form — and other games. Participants can even try their hands at inventing their own card games. [event-1] The aim is to translate such games into at-risk languages and provide them to children around the world. "If you want to revive a language, you have to start with kids, and if you want to engage kids, you need games," Brookes wrote in an announcement for the event. Brookes is the founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project, which he admits began as something of a whim. Six years ago, finding himself with insufficient funds to buy Christmas presents for friends and family, he decided "to carve everyone signs to hang outside the front door, in the office, even outside my teenage daughter's bedroom door," he explains on his website. He was equally surprised to find that he enjoyed doing it and that his recipients liked the unusual gifts. Those first woodcarvings were name signs in English; next, Brookes moved on to Chinese characters. Realizing that scripts look like art to those who can't read them, he searched for other character-based languages to serve as inspiration. When he encountered the website omniglot.com —"the online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages"— Brookes was stunned to find a huge number of tongues he'd never heard of. That's to say nothing of the exotic alphabets.…