Toki Pona Forums

Hi,
I wonder how to translate games names in toki pona.
Maybe the following works:

Board: supa musi = game surface

Checkers/go: musi pi tawa sike pi pimeja en walo = game with B&W round pawns
Chess: musi pi tawa ante pi pimeja en walo = game with B&W different pawns
Poker: musi lipu tawa = game with cards and chips
Rubik's Cube: musi pi wan tawa mute = game with a lot of moving parts
Sudoku: musi pi nanpa wan = game with unique numbers

All manner of fussbudgetry here.
‘ijo pi walo en pimeja’ sounds immediately like sriped or otherwise particolored objects. ‘ijo walo en ijo pimeja’ is safer -- except then the ‘en’ might be between 'musi pi ijo walo’ and ‘ijo pimeja’. But surely context will cover both of these problems.
I don’t understand ‘tawa sike’ (well really just ‘tawa’) for playing piece. ‘sike tawa’ “moving circles”? But go stones, for example, don’t move, except onto and off of the board. (I thin part of my problem is the translation “pawn” throughout, though it can probably be justified, certainly for checkers and or remotely for chess. It really falls apart with poker, where ‘tawa’ is used again but this time for chips, which play a very different role, indeed, no official one in the game at all.)
‘tawa’ works fine in Rubik’s cube, though.

I guess the overall problem is that these names don’t say much about the game. Chess, for example, should mention war, Rubik’s cubes are about getting uniform side colors, etc.

toki!

jan wiko wrote:But go stones, for example, don’t move

Oh right! musi pi tawa awen as game with fixed pawns is better.

jan wiko wrote:I guess the overall problem is that these names don’t say much about the game. Chess, for example, should mention war

Indeed it would be a good choice. musi supa utala as game of war played on a board sounds good to me.

Finally for Rubik's Cube maybe musi pi kule tawa is relevant as well as musi lipu mani for poker.

if only leko was still in use to describe a rubix cube

It is, but describing a Rubix cube even with it is not easy.