I was asked to shed some light on the development process of Siberian Dice. Surprisingly, there are interesting aspects to speak about.

First of all, it was not meant to be a mobile application. It was all started as a purely mathematical endeavour. Initially, we wanted to investigate some properties of the game, once it appeared so elegant and sophisticated to us. At a certain point we decided to develop an AI, in order to produce some «real» games for further investigation, where by «some» I mean an amount orders of magnitude greater than a human can produce simply by playing the game full-time for several years.
So we did.
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Lame Heron has released a wonderful board game — embarrassingly simple albeit tremendously rich in strategies. This is an ancient game played by some indigenous tribes of Siberia isolated from the rest of the world for millennia. This marvelous game remained undiscovered until recently. Being invented and developed in nearly complete cultural isolation this game employs mechanisms very alien to a player of «western» origin. Although the mathematical and physical substance of the game is not from the parallel universe — it is still cubical dice and a hexagonal board well known to everybody — the dice are used in a very unorthodox manner, they are randomizers and the moving pieces at the same time. The goal of the game is also surprising, it does not fall in any usual category, it is not a «capture» goal, nor a «advance to» goal, neither is it a «connect» goal, not even a «dominate», yet it is a very simple condition clearly followed from the rules and easily readable on the board.
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