Piece of History: Klaus Munro

Hello all,

the game now mostly known under the name of TWIXT,

was invented (at least) two times independently of each

other, under different names.

One was Twixt, by Alex Randolph.

The other one was "imuri", by Klaus Munro from Hamburg.

Now I found that Klaus Munro was not only a game inventor,

but also a famous songwriter. He wrote the text of

"Apres toi", the winning song of the European Song

Contest in 1972 (singer Vicky Leandros).

Here is a photo of himm together with singer

Vicky Leandros.

And here is a youtube video, where you see Klaus Munro

entering the stage at

second 19.

Have fun, Ingo.

It's nice to know that Imuri was not a deliberate ripoff. Sets are sometimes available with photos on eBay. The Imuri board is 30x30 minus the corner locations. The board has no holes. There are circles to indicate where the "towers" go, and lines to indicate where the "walls" go. They even put lines between holes in different border rows, such as A2 to C1 for example. I suppose this is due to lax production standards. All those lines on the board might make visualization more difficult.

I am curious if the exact same rules are in the box, including the swap rule and link removal.

> I am curious if the exact same rules are in the box, including

> the swap rule and link removal.

I can not tell for sure on the rules questions, because I gave

my copy of imuri away a long time ago.

But years ago I did some detective work to find out

about the origins of TWIXT/imuri. The best answers I got

from Johannes Ruettinger. He was working in the company

which published imuri. Later he opened his own company

(3 Magier Spiele) where Alex Randolph published some of

his games. According to Ruettinger the game was played

(in Bavaria) already around 1953 by schoolboys with paper

and pencil. Then, Randolph and Munro must have invented

"material versions" of it independently of each other:

Randolph in Vienna (in 1958), Munro in a beach holiday in

Yugoslavia (in 1959).

I also had a long phone call with Munro. One day, around

1967, he came in a shop (in Hamburg?!) and found TWIXT (3m

edition). He became very annoyed, because he thought that

it was some clone of imuri. On the other hand he was very

impressed because he saw that the realization (with the

board, and the towers to be pinned in the holes) was much

better than in imuri.

Munro made a lot of money with his song texts (for Vicky

Leandros, Roger Whittaker, many others). So, for him the

game playing scene (and the question who had how much

percents in the invention of the game) lost all importance.

For Randolph it must have been important to document his

beginnings with TWIXT. "Kosmos Verlag", which published

a TWIXT vesion only a few years ago, also printed a little

booklet where the very first games of TWIXT - between

A. Randolph and Herbert Feuerstein in 1958 - are documented.

Ingo.