The Gymbal



This device is one of a myriad of inventions by Isambard Kingdom Brunel
who, although his father was a Frenchman, was one of the most prolific
English contributors to what has generally been regarded as the inventiveness
and enterprise that secured enormous wealth for the national coffers, both public
and private, in developments of the concept of the industrial revelution.

The gymbal is a piece of engineering which allows instruments used at sea especially the
compass and the chronometer to permanently keep their horizontal position
thereby maintaining operational legibility, thanks to the means of suspension
that the gymbal comprises.

The following definition came from an inadequate source of reference, I will provide
a better one later, but it said that this means of suspension comprises a number of concentric
rings moving in relation to each other on pivots, in such a way as to allow two directions
to be at rightangles to eachother, to counterbalance the motion of the vessel.

From the standpoint of this web site, the contribution of the gymbal to the Wheel Life
project as a result of a friend of the author owning a device that replicates
the principles upon which the gymbal operates.

That was the version that that implanted in the mind of Meigle Cernunnos, seeds of the
idea that when countervailing forces come into operation against eachother withih a system
THEY CHANGE THE SYSTEM.

That being the case, knowing that he was at that time working on a story in which
exactly that, was required to happen, and a game of apparent chance would influence
the fortunes of the proponents in that story, Mr Cernunnos contemplated his lifelong
preoccupation with the fact that boardgames in general are played on a FIXED
arrangement of whatever the repeated motif happans to be, squares for example in chess
which allows no changes in the relationship between the squares, one with another
or each individual motif with the whole.

Listed in the Ginnis Book of Records as the worst player in the recorded history of
the game, Mr Cernunnos concluded that, that, the RIGIDITY of the FIELD of PLAY, on
the chessboard, was a limitation, and immediately setabout devising a way to rearrange
the component parts of the board as the game progressed.

At that time he was unable to conceive a means of rearranging the patterns on
a board comprising SQUARES, but has done so since, influence of the motion
in a continued circle in the gymbal uppermost in his mind, he decided to design
a game that operated on a circular board with moving parts, and so

at this revolutionary moment in world history



the uncontrollably interesting new game called



WHEEL LIFE
WAS BORN



Description of playing this game and its rules are provided in the GAME file below