> Board game rules fall under patents
Please supply evidence. All links in your comment relate to a patent to an invention where lasers are an essential part of the claims. I'm not convinced that rules alone would be patentable subject matter.
Please supply evidence. All links in your comment relate to a patent to an invention where lasers are an essential part of the claims. I'm not convinced that rules alone would be patentable subject matter.
https://patentpc.com/blog/example-of-how-a-board-game-is-pat...
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/493249/mythbusting-game-des...
https://www.theiplawblog.com/2019/04/articles/intellectual-p...
http://www.gamecabinet.com/info/PatentSearch.html
https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/93654/blue-and-gray-paten... (Blue and Gray) - this particular one is well known because Sid Sackson went trawling through patents and found it and wrote about it. From https://archive.org/details/gamutofgames0000sack/page/9/mode...
> THE FILES OF PATENTS that have been granted are a fruitful hunting ground for forgotten games, although going through these files, as anyone who has ever been involved in a patent search well knows, is a time consuming job. Often the patented games are downright silly, such as a set of dominos made of rubber so that they can double as ink erasers (No. 729,489) or a sliding block puzzle with edible pieces so that a player who despairs of a solution can find consolation in gratifying his stomach (No. 1,274,294). Often the patents are repetitious: There are over a hundred variations of the well-known checkerboard and over a thousand different baseball games.
> But often the patented games are a fascinating reflection of their time: races to the North Pole, war games to capture the Kaiser, automobile games, in the infancy of the automobile, and radio games for the crystal-set fanatic.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2026082A/en (Monopoly)
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5662332A/en (Magic The Gathering)
Thank you. I concede, this one is proof that an application that's essentially board game rules can be accepted. Whether rules not tied to a particular machine should be accepted is debatable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-or-transformation_test...?