tabletop time machine
KENSINGTON
This abstract strategy game was invented and self-published by Bryan Taylor and Peter Forbes at the end of the British board game boom of the 1970s. Like so many of its kind, it was over-hyped as taking ‘minutes to learn, a lifetime to master’, and more complex than Chess. Which is like comparing apples with oranges, given that Kensington is more like an elaboration of Nine Men’s Morris (Merels), but perhaps a necessary claim as Chess at that time was the only abstract game most people had heard of. There are two different accounts of how it got its name. One records that it was inspired by a book of Islamic geometric patterns picked up in the Portobello street market of that borough, the other that it was based on a mosaic seen in Kensington Gardens.