My friend Eric Solomon, who has died aged 85, was a renowned inventor of board games and puzzles, a keen sportsman and an operational researcher.
I first met him on the testing panel of Games & Puzzles magazine in 1972. Eric provided the first in a series of “Readers’ Games” by describing his own (unpublished) game Fighting Sail. His subsequently published games were not numerous but were of sufficient originality to have withstood the test of time, being constantly republished over the years under various titles in the UK, Germany and the US.
His first, The Sigma File (1973), reappeared most recently (2019) as Conspiracy in the US (with the publishers’ delightful introduction of a variant rule called The Solomon Gambit). His pattern-making and -breaking game Entropy (1979) has remained a staple tournament event at the annual London-based Mind Sports Olympiad since it began in 1997. Others include Billabong, Thoughtwave, Black Box and Balloon Race.
Eric was born in Sutton Coldfield, in the West Midlands, and educated at Bishop Vesey’s grammar school there. His father, Joseph, was a printer and his mother, Sarah (nee Johnson), a shorthand typist. At 17 he left school for a job at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment Harwell in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire). After home-studying for A levels he gained a BSc in physics at Reading University and a PhD in mathematics from the University of Southampton soon after.
He moved to London to a post in Ferranti’s computer department in Newman Street, where he was responsible for the Atlas programming system, and later set up his own company called Engineering Computations. He developed the Breeze system in the 1980s for the Building Research Establishment and for this was awarded the Napier medal by the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers in 1993.
Eric was an active sportsman. Fanatically keen on cricket as a youngster, he sustained serious damage to his front teeth from a cricket ball. Later, his attention turned to croquet and, with Alan Martin, whom he had met at the London Intervarsity club, he established a group that played regularly in Clissold Park, Stoke Newington. Becoming a strong player he won the Presidents Cup in 1979 and played regularly for England in the 1980s and in GB v USA in 1985.
“He was a particularly creative player,” writes his fellow player David Openshaw, “keen to experiment with new leaves such as hiding balls by hoops and the peg, well before this became the norm. He was also one of the first to experiment with reshaping the mallet shaft to fit the hands better.”
By 2010 Eric had started to lose his sense of balance and was diagnosed with a form of muscle weakness that also affected his speech. By 2015 he needed a walking frame and in 2017 moved to a rest home.
He is survived by his brother, Rob.
