The Apple-1 Software Library ^Beta

Also referred to as Hammurabi. Sold by Apple Computer on cassette tape for $5, order code A1T005X.

History

The game was ported to BASIC by David H. Ahl around 1971 and published in 101 BASIC Computer Games around 1973. It was developed at DEC originally, in the FOCAL programming language on a PDP-8 minicomputer, back in 1968.

This article on Wikipedia gets into more detail:

In 1968, however, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Doug Dyment gave a talk about computers in education at the University of Alberta, and after the talk a woman who had once seen The Sumerian Game described it to him. Dyment decided to recreate the game as an early program for the FOCAL programming language, recently developed at DEC, and programmed it for a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer. He named the result King of Sumeria. Needing the game to run in the smallest memory configuration available for the computer, he included only the first segment of the game. He also chose to rename the ruler to the more famous Babylonian king Hammurabi, misspelled as "Hamurabi". Dyment's game, sometimes retitled The Sumer Game, proved popular in the programming community: Jerry Pournelle recalled in 1989 that "half the people I know wrote a Hammurabi program back in the 1970s; for many, it was the first program they'd ever written in their lives".

Around 1971, DEC employee David H. Ahl wrote a version of The Sumer Game in the BASIC programming language. Unlike FOCAL, BASIC was run not just on mainframe computers and minicomputers, but also on personal computers, then termed microcomputers, making it a much more popular language. In 1973, Ahl published BASIC Computer Games, a best-selling book of games written in BASIC, which included his version of The Sumer Game. The expanded version was renamed Hamurabi and added an end-of-game performance appraisal.

Instructions

Several resources have to be managed in this game: people, acres of land and bushels of grain. The computer asks questions and the player has to answer them with a number. In the book 101 BASIC Computer Games Hamurabi is introduced as:

In this game you direct the administrator of Sumeria, Hamurabi, how to manage the city. The city initially has 1000 acres, 100 people and 3000 bushels of grain in storage.

You may buy and sell land with your neighboring city-states for bushels of grain, the price will vary between 17 and 26 bushels per acre. You also must use grain to feed your people and as seed to plant the next year's crop.

You will quickly find that a certain number of people can only tend a certain amount of land and that people starve if they are-not fed enough. You also have the unexpected to contend with such as a plague, rats destroying stored grain, and variable harvests.

You will also find that managing just the few resources in this game is not a trivial job over a period of say ten years. The crisis of population density rears its head very rapidly.

Winning Strategy

Spoiler alert! Efforts of Jeff Quast found a winning strategy for this game:

The winning strategy is to systematically starve 3% of the population each turn, to wish for plagues, and to leave as little food as possible available to be eaten by rats by buying land with any excess grain (and selling land to make up for any deficiencies).

With this strategy you can win 99% of games, 94% of them with the highest score.

References

• 101 BASIC Computer Games (p. 128) lists Hamurabi.
• Hamurabi and The Sumerian Game on Wikipedia.
• Winning game strategy on Jeff Quast's website and Applefritter about this.