Ron's Info-Closet Annex
The online extension of Ron's Info-Closet.
Book links are usually to my Powell's affiliate program; game links are usually to Funagain Games, and benefit the Games to the Rescue Project.
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Ron Hale-Evans
rwhe@ludism.org
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Lately I've gotten interested in something called Constructive Living (CL). Although CL is based mainly on two schools of Japanese psychotherapeutic practice, Morita and Naikan, Constructive Living is not psychotherapy; it's more of a philosophy of life with a therapeutic aspect, such as Stoicism.
I first came into contact with CL through the bestseller Book Lust by Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl, who reviewed two books by David K. Reynolds, the founder of Constructive Living: Even in Summer the Ice Doesn't Melt (1986) and Playing Ball on Running Water (1984). When I saw a copy of the latter in a used bookstore, I snatched it up, brought it home, and misplaced it immediately. Then, a few weeks ago, Amazon recommended Handbook for Constructive Living (2002) to me. I bought it, read it, and was glad it's the first book by Reynolds that I read, because it presents a much later, fuller, and better integrated version of his philosophy.
Nevertheless, I'm enjoying my refound copy of Playing Ball on Running Water, not least because, for me, the title combines a Ludist view of life as game (playing ball) with the familiar Heraclitean saying that you can't step into the same river twice. There is yet more ludic goodness in the chapter entitled "Exercises in Living--The Ball Game", particularly exercise 8, "Play a game". Reynolds really understands the Ludist idea of game as microcosm. He writes,
Any game that requires some attention and effort to play well will do. Avoid games of pure mindless chance. Appropriate table games include chess, checkers, Scrabble, bridge, and the like... As you would expect, the quality of your play is more important than the particular game you select...
Work hard at keeping your mind on the game. Play purposefully with an overall plan and specific tactics. Notice the sorts of things that distract you from attending to the game in each moment. Do you think too far ahead and miss the immediate opportunity? Do you get disgusted with yourself for missing the last play and so lose the next few plays? Do minor physical discomforts intrude on your attention? Do you get annoyed and distracted by your opponent's habits? Are you intimidated into self-consciousness and a self-defeating attitude by your opponent's style? Notice these mental slips, then bring your mind immediately back to the play at hand...
Attend to winning well or losing well with full attention. Continue playing ball even when the ball game is over. [pp.112-113]
Many of these faults are mine both in games and in life, and they're one reason I've never mastered any game, whether Chess, Go, or Focus. And to them I'll add one more, my most grievous fault: failure to see the whole board.
It's a good thing most of my gamer friends never read my blog; they already think I take gaming too seriously. The few who do read it probably agree with everything I've said here.
By the way, a while back I questioned why if there was a book called The Inner Game of Tennis, there wasn't an Inner Game of Hearts. It turns out there's an Inner Game of Chess, at least. It's not philosophical, though.
Entered 23:11 [/games/ludism] permalink
My friend Mark Schnitzius, who by the way is a contributor to Mind Performance Hacks, plays a game I will call The New Game. The first rule is:
Try something new every day.
He continues,
I've gradually evolved rules to the game, as to what counts and what doesn't, and since these rules are my own, they only really have to make sense to me. Seeing a new movie counts, but not a new TV show. Finishing a book I've never read counts, but not starting one, or finishing one I've already read. New restaurants always count, and even new dishes at familiar restaurants. What's best is things I've always been a little leery about trying (such as the Turkish delight I tried for the first time a few weeks back). Checking out new neighborhoods or new routes to get from point A to point B also count. Newness created is as good as newness discovered, so doing any sort of creative work counts.
The New Game is a good example of the Ludist idea of a positive life game. I'll be trying it myself starting today (Halloween/Samhain) and continuing through November. If I find it fun and useful, I'll keep playing.
Of course, I'll have my own rules about what counts as novelty, and I probably won't report every day on my blog the way Mark plans to, but you may hear from me once in a while.
Yours in neophilia,
Ron
Entered 10:18 [/games/ludism] permalink
Here is the First Law of Game Systems:
Given enough time, every set of objects becomes a game system.
Let's say you're someone living 10,000 years ago. You have a stick, some stones, and the dirt on the ground. They mean nothing to you. They're just a set of objects.
One day, you idly start using the stick to dig holes in the ground, you roll the rocks around with the stick, you drop them in the holes, and so on. You are playing with them. Your set of objects is now a toy, but there are no rules associated with it, so it's just a toy.
Someone else sees you playing with the sticks, stones, and holes in the dirt, and joins you in play. Over time, the two of you make certain rules about the way you play with your toy, and possibly over generations, Mancala evolves (or simpler games, such as Morris, or what have you). Now that your set of objects has one ruleset associated with it, it is not only a toy but also a game.
The game Mancala spreads, and people develop variants. Eventually, variants evolve that are different enough from Mancala to be called different games. Now that there is more than one ruleset, your set of objects (stick, rocks, and dirt) is not only a toy and a game, but also a game system.
Thus, a game system is always a game, a game is always a toy, and a toy is always a set of objects (possibly a set with only one member). Furthermore, each stage usually evolves from the one before it.
game system: 2+ rulesets
game: 1+ rulesets
toy: 0+ rulesets
It's basically a simple Venn diagram: four concentric circles, with (sets of) objects the outermost and game systems the innermost (see above).
I suppose negative numbers of rulesets could indicate further and further departure from use as a toy, so tools (such as rotary sanders) would have small negative numbers and weapons (such as neutron bombs) would have large ones. However, not every object is a tool, and not every tool is a weapon, which breaks the diagrammatic convention. Possibly usefulness and lethality need their own axes...
Entered 21:01 [/games/game_systems] permalink
I was recently asked by my friend Mark Haggerty to name my 10 favourite games for his game design research. It was tough!
I've added two more games to the blog version of my list. Here it is in alphabetical order. I'm not going to comment on them now; perhaps I will later. All links except Ultima's point to BoardGameGeek.
Entered 12:14 [/games] permalink
Coincidentally, I am no longer living a lie
So: in my bio at the front of Mind Performance Hacks, I wrote,
You can find [Ron's] multinefarious [sic] other projects at his home page (http://ron.ludism.org), including his award-winning board games, a list of his Short-Duration Personal Saviors, and his blog.
I confess that at the time I wrote this, I had only one award-winning board game, KidSprout Jumboree, co-authored with my wife, Marty.
I did have a game that took an honourable mention in another game design contest: Epic Funhouse, also co-authored with Marty and deemed "Cleverest overall concept" by the judge of the contest. So it was kind of an award. Technically. Miss Ingeniality, I guess.
But! In August 2006, I took first place in another game design contest with my solo project, Piecepack Letterbox, so now I can exhale and cease to fear being exposed as a dreadful fraud.
Except by myself.
Sorry.
Next up: I confess to hacking a gumball machine when I was 9.
Entered 02:14 [/games] permalink
As I mentioned, I enjoy a good 3D chess variant now and again. I recently commissioned a board for Dragonchess from an artist named Orion who has a specialty in 3D chess boards.
Orion has some photos of the board he made for me at his blog. Beautiful. You should see the confusing board I used to use.
If you are looking to buy a 3D chess board of some unusual size or shape, or even of usual ones (for example, 8x8x3), I cannot recommend Orion enough. He listened to my requirements, made some suggestions, emailed me some sketches (first flat ones, then a 3D mockup in Sketchup), and was generally completely accommodating throughout the entire process, while maintaining his own vision and sense of his tools and materials. He built the board well within the amount of time I would expect a project of this scope to take, and I'm not going to tell you how much he charged me for it because "surprisingly affordable" doesn't begin to cover it; "embarrassingly affordable" is more like it. I almost think he was just looking for an excuse to make something cool.
I played four games with the board on Saturday night. It's not only beautiful, but highly functional. My friends and I at Seattle Cosmic had very few problems with it. Marty's camera battery died, or I'd have some photos of the board with pieces on it (I used the Exchess pieces from my EconoSplurge set). Soon...
Oh, I haven't paid the last part of the price of the board yet: Orion requires that everyone he makes a board for play him at a game of that chess variant. Considering Orion is at the equivalent of expert level in several different 3D variants, this may prove to be the most costly part of the bargain.
Entered 00:38 [/games] permalink
I had this conversation with my friend John Braley back on the Fourth of July:
Me: Why are highly-themed games more popular than abstract games and game systems?
John: Why is Spider-Man more popular than Wittgenstein?
By the way, congratulations to my friend Kevan Davis for being the first to kick me when I immediately failed to fulfill my oath to blog daily.
Entered 21:10 [/games/game_systems] permalink
To make a long story short, having won the previous piecepack game design contest with my game Piecepack Letterbox, I was entitled to design and judge the next contest. The rules have been announced, and the contest is called Good Portsmanship.
The rules state,
In the spirit of free and open source software and culture, every entry must be a translation, or "port", of an existing game to the piecepack. While this may seem like a mechanical exercise at first glance. there is plenty of room for the game designer's talents.
You can enter games until 3 December 2006, and I hope you will, unless you're Charles Manson, which seems rather unlikely.
By the way, there was some debate on the piecepack mailing list about the rules of the contest, which some people thought were rather strict. There have been several easements, and the rules are now at version 2.
Entered 08:19 [/games/game_systems] permalink
While writing the latest article in my Game Systems series, I had occasion to research the origin of the phrase "shooting the moon" in the card game Hearts.
At the turn of the last century, "shooting the moon" was apparently used to mean something like "aiming high as a desperate gambit", and particularly to mean absconding in the middle of the night without paying the rent. Examples:
For a day and a half I had nothing to eat or smoke, and then, too hungry to put it off any longer, I packed my remaining clothes into my suitcase and took them to the pawnshop. This put an end to all pretence of being in funds, for I could not take my clothes out of the hotel without asking Madame F.'s leave. I remember, however, how surprised she was at my asking her instead of removing the clothes on the sly, shooting the moon being a common trick in our quarter.
--George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
What concentrated irony and imagination there is for instance, in the metaphor which describes a man doing a midnight flitting as "shooting the moon"? It expresses everything about the run away: his eccentric occupation, his improbable explanations, his furtive air as of a hunter, his constant glances at the blank clock in the sky.
--G.K. Chesterton, "The Red Town", Alarms and Discursions
How well the last passage describe the nervous attitude of someone trying to shoot the moon in Hearts.
In the Hearts variant I am designing, I considered replacing the phrase "shoot the moon" with "fly by night" as a contemporary phrase for a similar situation, but the old phrase stuck, so "shooting the moon" it remains.
Entered 12:07 [/games/game_systems] permalink
As announced at Dragonflight XXV, I am running a glass bead game design contest until 15 February 2005, with $100 of prizes from Powell's Books and Funagain Games. Full rules for the contest are on the Glass Bead Game Wiki.
This is a little different from a typical game design competition, so please email me at rwhe@ludism.org if you have any questions.
Entered 22:34 [/games/gbg] permalink
Letterboxing: my first hitchhiker and first first-find
Now sit right back and you'll hear a tale, the tale of my recent letterboxing activities.
On 23 September (a Thursday night), I found my second virtual letterbox, Chippy. It didn't have quite the same feel of an actual walk as the Emerald City virtual letterbox did, but I did learn a lot about wildlife. Recommended for a rainy afternoon.
I'm keeping the "stamps" from virtual letterboxes in the pocket of the Moleskine I'm using for my logbook.
On Sunday, 26 September, Marty and I and Kisa Griffin made a quick stop on the way to Tacoma for the Glenn Hanson Park [sic] letterbox in Kent, Washington, the town where Marty and I live. Kisa and I figured out the landmarks and found the box without too much trouble. The stamp was cute, but the logbook and most of the rest of the box were severely waterlogged. I did all my stamping stuff, dried the box out as best I could, and replaced it. Interestingly, the last group to visit the box didn't stamp the log, but signed themselves "The Dog Pound", with trail names such as Snoopy, Big Dog, and Hoochie Poochie. Another dog synchronicity -- or do letterboxers just tend to be dog people?
The round trip from the starting place to the box and back to the car only took about half an hour. I asked Marty cheerfully when we returned, "You don't mind that we picked up a hitchhiker, do you?" I had found my first hitchhiker letterbox (what they call a "parasite" in Dartmoor letterboxing). It was called the Mini Bob's Wife Hitchhiker, and had made its way up to Kent from Gresham, Oregon, about 170 miles south. I would have liked to hide it in the next letterbox I found, as is customary, but there was just room in the logbook for me to stamp and sign it. I'll be mailing it back to Twinkletoes in Gresham shortly.
Personal letterboxing peeve: Big families with little kids who letterbox together and then give each of the kiddies their own page in the logbook to stamp. With a nice fat logbook it probably doesn't matter, but with a tiny logbook in a hitchhiker, it wastes a lot of space. Mini Bob's Wife might have made it up to Canada or somewhere out east if so many of the pages hadn't been wasted with this kind of thoughtlessness. Plus, the kiddies' stamps are usually store-bought, so there's less room for original stamp art.
Yesterday, 3 October, Karl Erickson and I found the letterbox "Great Moments in History: June 8, 1959", placed by Green Tortuga on 16 September 2004 in Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park. The letterbox had been there about three weeks, but we were the first finders. Woot! Too bad there wasn't a first-finder certificate!
As you can see if you follow the link, this is a box with a puzzle clue. I didn't find the puzzle difficult, but I had the right tool for the job. (No, I shan't tell you what that tool was.) However, if Green Tortuga is who I think he is, his letterboxes are reputed to be fiendishly difficult, so I guess it's no surprise it took so long to be found.
Karl picked me up around 10, but we didn't get to the park until 12 pm. Truly, we had a harder time finding the trail itself than finding the box once we were on the trail. The hike was lovely. This small field of flowers at the starting point was lovely in the noon sun:
The starting point: nothing but flowers
Not too far up the trail, we came across this gnarled, mutant, hollow tree, surrounded by huge mushrooms, where I would have hidden a letterbox if I had one to hide. But it wasn't our destination.
Where the letterbox should have been hidden
Eventually, I located the landmark and Karl found the letterbox when we got there. (I was poking around with my walking stick, wary of snakes. I might have found it if I had rooted around with my hands, but Karl was braver.) Karl snapped this photo of me:
A great moment in history: Ron, flushed with triumph
The stamp was really nice! You might say it was a commemorative stamp. Thanks, Green Tortuga! It really would have benefited from my using multiple colours instead of my standard black. I may start carrying around markers now.
On the way back to the car, I discovered that I had lost my compass. Since my camera had dropped out of my pocket when I sat down to stamp the letterbox, I figured my compass might have too. Light-footed Karl offered to zip back to the landmark to see if he could find it. He couldn't. So much for "take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints".
Hi, I'm Karl, and I don't have your compass.
The whole hike took about an hour, and when we returned, Karl and I made a slight detour to a scenic vista. The day was foggy and everything looked soft and perfect.
After we got back to my house, Karl and I hung out with Marty for a while, looking over a new game system I am reviewing called Trillõn and its rulebook. Karl eventually went home, and Marty and I went out in search of Sid Sackson's posthumously-published game BuyWord. No luck with that, but I did pick up another compass like the one I lost. This time I bought a lanyard for it.
Entered 14:18 [/games/letterboxing] permalink
THE ETERNAL TWINS
Taking fun
as simply fun
and earnestness
in earnest
shows how thoroughly
thou none
of the two
discernest.
--Piet Hein
Entered 02:10 [/games/ludism] permalink
Just as Kendo can be a meditative discipline, so can, uh, Zendo. Or almost any game. We have the Inner Game of Tennis; why not the Inner Game of Hearts?
Of course, people have known this about Go for a long time. In principle, it applies to Chess as well, although in practice it seems to have the opposite effect.
Entered 12:22 [/games/ludism] permalink
Before I set out to find the REI Flagship letterbox (see below), I went in search of the Emerald City virtual letterbox by Mischief.
A virtual letterbox is one in which not only the clues but also the goal or treasure are all online. Emerald City has a nice treasure at the end of the trail, and the clue is clever and cute. An interesting experience -- you feel as though you are looking for a "real" letterbox. A quick, fun diversion. Recommended.
Entered 13:37 [/games/letterboxing] permalink
My first letterbox: REI Flagship
I've recently taken up a sport called letterboxing. It's a treasure hunt in which you decipher clues (in the U.S., usually from the Web), then hike to a hidden weatherproof box (the "letterbox") containing a unique, handmade rubber stamp. You stamp your logbook with the letterbox's stamp, and stamp the letterbox's logbook with your stamp.
For my personal stamp, I had wanted to do a graphic with a dog on it, because I love dogs and regard them as my totem animal. (Yes, I know that having a domesticated animal as a totem is... unorthodox. But you know, you don't pick your totem; it picks you.) My "letterboxing name" is related to dogs, and in fact, I am planning to take my dogs on letterbox hikes whenever it's permissible (many letterboxes are in city parks, where regulations about dogs vary).
Two nights ago, I spent a lot of time trying to draw a recognisable dog that somehow expressed my personality, but when I awoke yesterday morning, it had come to me that my stamp should show Anubis, so after buying the materials, last night I carved a rubber stamp bearing the image of Anubis (and my monogram -- see above).
Unfortunately, neither my skills nor my tools were up to the task of carving this computer graphic onto the stamp material. I'm told that the result is pretty good for a beginner, but eventually I decided to use a large version of my monogram (the sigil in the lower left of the stamp image). Too bad. I'll try my hand at another Anubis stamp (without my monogram) later.
Now, letterboxing is sort of like geocaching, but you don't need a GPS unit; the highest tech a letterboxer needs on the trail is a compass. But he does need a compass. Stewart Brand (who doesn't letterbox, as far as I know) recommends the Brunton Classic 9020G as a good, cheap, general-purpose model. It turned out that REI, an outdoor-goods co-op based in Seattle, carried this item, so I decided to go buy it and make my first letterbox the REI Flagship Letterbox. My friend Kisa and I went into the store, bought my compass and a few other things such as Nalgene bottle splash guards, gawked at the local sights (an indoor climbing pinnacle among them), and then followed the directions to the letterbox in the vicinity.
We got a little lost, because we didn't avail ourselves of the compass I had just bought, thinking we had spotted a short cut. We ended up poking around the whole area for the landmark where the letterbox was hidden. Kisa finally spotted the landmark, and I retrieved the letterbox and took it to his car, out of public view, where I did all the stamping and paging through the letterbox logbook. Then I hid the box again. Great fun, and I already have some ideas for my own letterboxes, which will be connected to my other gaming interests.
On the way home, I pulled out my logbook to admire the handsome new stamp, and Kisa said, "Look! A rainbow!" I glanced up and just then the CD player played a line from the Jethro Tull song, "Rover", from the album Heavy Horses: "The long road is a rainbow and the pot of gold lies there." Kisa shouted in surprise, and when I went home, I looked up the lyrics to "Rover". Here they are:
Rover
I chase your every footstep
and I follow every whim.
When you call the tune I'm ready
to strike up the battle hymn.
My lady of the meadows
My comber of the beach
You've thrown the stick for your dog's trick
but it's floating out of reach.
The long road is a rainbow and the pot of gold lies there.
So slip the chain and I'm off again
You'll find me everywhere. I'm a Rover.As the robin craves the summer
to hide his smock of red,
I need the pillow of your hair
in which to hide my head.
I'm simple in my sadness,
resourceful in remorse.
Then I'm down straining at the lead
holding on a windward course.Strip me from the bundle
of balloons at every fair:
colourful and carefree
Designed to make you stare.
But I'm lost and I'm losing
the thread that holds me down.
And I'm up hot and rising
in the lights of every town.
I find this a remarkably textured synchronicity: the dog connection, the treasure-hunting and wanderlust imagery, and of course the rainbow. An auspicious start?
Howdy, Anubis! See you on the trails.
Entered 00:09 [/games/letterboxing] permalink
As I mentioned, I was a guest of honor at the Dragonflight XXV gaming convention at Seattle University, from Friday, 13 August 2004 through Sunday, 15 August.
I made a lot of friends at Dragonflight. I haven't been to many gaming cons before, and so making so many new friends was a serendipitous benefit, probably the most important one I experienced.
Lots of people gave me business cards. I have business cards too, but I want my gamer friends to call me at home. What I need is a "pleasure card" of the sort Richard Stallman gives out, to hook people up with my various projects through the Center for Ludic Synergy and elsewhere.
Here are a couple of other items that may be interesting:
I've already described the events I would be hosting at the convention, as I envisioned them. How they actually came out is described below.
Marty and I wake up, exhausted from packing the night before, and run around on last-minute errands such as photocopying seminar materials and buying microcassettes and dry-erase markers. It's crazy. Our nerves are worn thin at the synapses, but we still manage to make it to Dragonflight an hour before I am supposed to give my first seminar.
There is only time to register partially (pick up my "special guest" badge and so on) before the Ludism seminar starts. Marty parks the car and I bring in the necessities for the seminar and the Cosmic Pig session, which starts soon after.
Marty and I sit and wait in the fifth-floor lounge where the Ludism seminar is supposed to be. No one shows. It turns out there's been a schedule screwup: the scheduling guy allegedly got into a fight with the other Dragonflight staff and quit the week before the convention. The new program has outdated information: the times and places for this seminar and my Game Systems 1 session on Sunday are reversed. According to the schedule, I am now supposed to be in the ballroom, giving Game Systems 1. Marty suggests I go down to the ballroom and place a notice at my table informing people of the "schedule change". I quickly do so.
More problems become apparent: all of my other seminars and game sessions also have old information in the program, including promotional copy garnered by the organisers from the Glass Bead Game wiki and elsewhere, even having embedded WikiNames in the text, WhichLookLikeNonsense if you're NotOnAWiki. Also also, my bio doesn't appear in the program itself, but on an errata sheet. Also also also, the whiteboard I need for my seminars has been lost....
Ah, well. I try to be Stoic. I had told myself I would count the seminar as a success even if no one showed up, because (among other reasons) I had to prepare an outline for it, which I can turn into an article. Meanwhile, I use the time available to prepare for my Cosmic Pig session, which starts at 7:00.
I return to the ballroom, and prepare for CP by cutting out and sleeving the spiffy Cosmic Pig Edicts that Marty drew up, and mixing them with the regular Cosmic Encounter cards. Marty amuses herself by watching a game of Princes of Florence, the convention staff play The Waltons board game (long story), and Thread Impressions make her hat (see below).
I have brought four Hasbro/Avalon Hill edition sets of Cosmic Encounter, and enough Cosmic Pig Edicts for all four copies, so I am prepared for up to 16 people to play Cosmic Pig. This is my Cosmic Encounter variant based in the game in the juvenile SF novel Interstellar Pig by William Sleator, which I (and a number of other people) strongly suspect is influenced by Cosmic Encounter. In all, we have 8 players, including myself -- enough for two full H/AH games.
The players of Cosmic Pig Game 1 are an interesting guy named Eugene, another person I'll refer to as Rude Boy, and two other people. They start off cool toward Cosmic Pig and grow more enthusiastic as they play. Eugene is an experienced CE player, and expresses skepticism that Cosmic Encounter is a strategic game. I protest, and it gets me thinking. (But more on this later.) Rude Boy is an older man with a boyish demeanor who can't restrain his indignance when I don't remember the finer points of the Hasbro/Avalon Hill edition of CE. For example, I can't remember whether you lose your alien power when you're down to two home bases or only one. (When Seattle Cosmic plays with our "monster" set, we usually use two powers each. When you're down to two bases, you lose one power of your choice; when you're down to one base, you lose both powers.) Looking back, Rude Boy was atypical of the gamers I met at Dragonflight, who were almost to a person polite, friendly, and community-minded. But R.B. eventually settles down, and the players in Game 1 have a good time, with lots of laughter.
Game 2 starts off enthusiastic about Cosmic Pig (and Interstellar Pig) and cools off. It consists of myself, Brett Lentz (a Seattle Cosmic irregular), his SO Sara, and her brother Izzy. Sara and Izzy have visited SC once or twice as well. Izzy is an experienced CE player and helps with rule clarifications, for which I am grateful.
Eugene wins Game 1 when a Piggy Challenge happens near the end of the game and he manages to hold onto it until the "timer" goes off. In Game 2, we don't have any Piggy Challenges, but we know where The Piggy is. I grab The Piggy from its envelope with Four-Dimensional Waldoes near the end, lose it in a challenge, and get it back as consolation by playing a Negotiate (Compromise) card. Izzy, however, manages to obtain the Piggy-Befriending Device in the same way. The Piggy-Befriending Device alters the win condition to maximum number of bases. Izzy has 10 bases (edging out Brett by one base, I believe), so he wins. (I have something like 3 bases, including home bases.)
Cosmic Pig is much better playtested, and the new rules draft should be available when you read this. (Dragonflight was the first playtest with the new Edicts and rules.)
I finish registering and haul the rest of my stuff in from the car to my dorm room. I go back to the ballroom and hang out with some other Seattle Cosmic members. I select the design and colors for an SC logo hat, which will be done by the next morning.
Afterwards, a vendor (Bill from Wizards Toy Chest [sic] in Portland), lends me his demo copy of Trillõn (pronounced "Trillion", I assume), a new game system by the company Gamepeace in Utah (I have already been expecting a review copy of Trillõn in the mail). It looks even more interesting than I had hoped, and I plan to describe it soon in one of my upcoming game systems articles. Bill promises he will demo a few Trillõn games at my Game Systems 1 session Sunday, and puts up one of my posters in his booth.
I've had a long day, or what seems like one. I kiss Marty goodnight (she is driving home every night to take care of our dogs) and return to my room. I take a cold shower (no air conditioning, so the dorms are hot in mid-August), and listen to BBC World News. I think about Eugene's claim that Cosmic Encounter is not a strategic game. I was the second-best CE player in Seattle Cosmic the last time we bothered to keep track, so I have some strong opinions that Cosmic can be a very strategic game. I decide I'll write an article about it, and start enumerating some CE strategies before I finally go to bed.
I wake up and immediately begin thinking about my Cosmic Encounter strategy article. I call my friend John Braley, the number one Cosmic player at Seattle Cosmic, and ask him to collaborate on the article. He agrees.
I go downstairs to the ballroom (really more like a cafeteria) for brunch. I pick up my new Seattle Cosmic hat from Thread Impressions. It looks beautiful. I don't normally wear baseball caps, but half the heads seem to be sporting one here, so none will care it's considered déclassé by the mundanes. My cap and I are inseparable for the rest of the weekend. Its design is similar to the logo below, except that the pawn is green and the orbital ring is a solid yellow, with the words set off to the right in green and yellow. Marty bought a similar cap, but in pink and silver.
I run across a new game called ChessHeads. It looks as though someone has tried to turn Knightmare Chess into a collectible card game. I shudder and set it down.
I also meet a fellow named Jeff Wilcox of Curious Games. He designed the game Phantasy Realm, which I have played once and won. I enjoyed it even though it is not really my style of game. Jeff also designed the satirical TRPG: The Role-Playing Game, which we give out as prizes at game night. A nice guy, Jeff. He wants to attend EGGS, our game design group, time permitting. (More info below.)
After meeting Jeff, I buy a pair of Average Dice from a vendor. An Average Die is a six-sided die bearing the following numbers: 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5 -- no 1 or 6. Apart from my hat, they are the only game-related items I buy all weekend. Sadly, the vendor doesn't have any Extreme Dice (1, 1, 2, 5, 6, 6).
After my stroll around the vendors area, I sit down to eat brunch and go through my notes for the Glass Bead Game talk. A fellow named Aaron Nabil-Eastlund spots me and chats with me about the upcoming Monster Cosmic game. Aaron is an experienced Cosmic player, and it's his contention that the manifold expansions we'll be using tonight were produced by Eon solely to make money, and actually detract from the purity of the game, making a kind of "strategic soup" (my words, not Aaron's), so he probably won't be playing. I invite Aaron to collaborate on the CE strategy article (because he does think that in a stripped-down game, there is plenty of strategy). Maybe!
Besides sharing a taste in gaming, Aaron and I have a mutual friend: Dave Howell (who co-designed the Seattle Cosmic logo). We also both have hyphenated surnames. Hyphenees against the world!
I'm realising as I Google for Aaron's home page that Aaron probably joined the seattle-cosmic mailing list at one point -- Aaron, or someone else equally interested in robotics. Come to a game night, Aaron!
Fortunately, the convention staff have finally managed to locate the whiteboard, so I give my Glass Bead Game seminar, using the whiteboard for a kind of "chalk talk". I work from loose 3x5" cards with graphic images of the things I want to talk about, as recommended by Mark Twain, since I figure the iconic quality of a chalk talk will add to the glass-bead-gaminess of my presentation (iconicity being one of the pillars of the Glass Bead Game. Naturally, I am not as accomplished an impromptu speaker as Mark Twain, so I make a hash of the talk (according to Marty, later). Nevertheless, I seem to get something across, because, of the five people attending (five times as many as I expected), only one leaves early, and the rest stay late to toss ideas around. Most of the attendees indicate they will enter the Kenning Haiku competition I announce. I now reckon about a half-dozen people are planning to enter this Glass Bead Game competition, which is as many as actually entered the first piecepack competition, so we're off to a good start.
Of the people who stick around, one is Marty, one is Aaron Nabil-Eastlund, and there are two new people, Patric Rogers and Mac McKinlay.
Aaron is politely interested in my Glass Bead Game playable variant Kennexions, but is fairly critical of one aspect of it. Later, I realise we were miscommunicating. Fortunately, I have the chance to explain this to him (see below).
Patric Rogers [sic] comes to the seminar a bit late but catches up fairly fast. He is an interesting guy: politically active and sporting several GEEK buttons (Gamers to Enthusiastically Elect Kerry). He is very interested in Kennexions.
Mac MacKinlay is also very interested. Helpfully, he seems to have a background in poetry and mythology. For example, he recognised that kenning analogies are a kind of proportion, and suggested some improvements to mine (for example, he thinks that "flower" in the Norse Language Game should really be "seed"). Sharp!
All three stay and talk. They seem likely to collaborate on Kennexions, and I feel I could be good friends with any of them regardless. I plan to stay in touch.
Mac follows me down to the Monster Cosmic Encounter game, which is billed as being able to hold 10 or more players. There are seven people ticketed, which is more than a CE game can usually hold, but two of them, a father and a pre-teen son, ditch because the son is a CE newbie. We end up with five players, because I sit out to referee and explain rules in a nonpartisan way. The father and son might as well have stayed, because one of the remaining players is a 10-year-old girl who has only played twice, and I end up setting up the game and explaining the rules for something like an hour and a half. We're using tons of expansions, both commercial and off the Internet: not only Lucre, Moons, double powers, and Reverse Hexes, but also War cards, Internet Edicts, and so on.
The overall visual effect on onlookers, of whom there are plenty, is much like the photo below, taken of a slightly younger version of the same set from a Seattle Cosmic newsletter of 12 August 2000.
Everyone seems to have fun. One of the better players, Edward, tells me afterwards, "I had a blast". That's great! The only serious contender, however, is Mac McKinlay, who focuses hard, plans, and spreads (as the alien Disease) from toehold to toehold in the girl's reverse hex, which is a ringed planet and offers plenty of spaces to expand in the rings. I call Mac "Mac the Knife" because he's such a shark. I'm guessing he hears that a lot, because he kicks Marty's ass the next day in a game of Age of Renaissance.
After the game, a gamer named Jeffrey Field and his friend stop by to chat about Cosmic. He says he enjoyed watching our game, and seems impressed by the PostScript graphics for the reverse hexes and so on. I explain they are available as PDF files from the CE download area here on Ludism.org. Jeffrey says he is an old-timey Cosmic Encounter player who used to write CE expansions for The Space Gamer back in the 1980s. (I should have asked which ones!) He is interested in finding out about the growth of Cosmic after Eon stopped publishing it, and asks about the Mayfair counterpart to Eon's newsletter, Encounter. I tell him that Mike Arms, with whom I corresponded briefly, is the man to talk to. Before he goes, Jeffrey mentions something about Cosmic Settlers, which is some weird hybrid of Cosmic Encounter and The Settlers of Catan. Have to track that one down...
After Jeffrey leaves, I catch up with Aaron Nabil-Eastlund, who made some odd remarks during the Glass Bead Game talk that I suddenly realise were a serious miscommunication. I had been talking about every game object in the Kennexions archive having a UUID (universally-unique identifier number). Aaron thought I just meant spelling out the names of game objects in hexadecimal ASCII, and thought this was a rather pointless "encoding" as opposed to a completely different "representation", which might be more interesting. I explain to Aaron when I run into him that the UUID is algorithmically generated. It's a kind of index into the database and isn't just a "spelling-out" of the object's name. The whole thing is a misunderstanding due to my rather clumsily describing a bracelet Marty made for my birthday that spells out "glasperlenspiel" ("glass bead game" in German) using glass beads in a binary ASCII pattern, which doesn't really have much to do with Kennexions, but is a clever and fun attempt to translate language into object.
Aaron says somewhat enthusiastically that he has been thinking on and off about ways to improve gismu glyphs. However, he objects to making Lojban strings the "canonical" form of Kennexions games. "What about Hawaiian?" he says. "I know some things you can say in Hawaiian that you can hardly say in other languages. Why make everything Lojban?" I tell him about Lojban's "metalinguistic quoting" features, which enable a speaker to incorporate an arbitrary amount of text or speech in any other language into a Lojban string. It's as if Lojban has built-in HTML tags, thus:
Atom
<hawaiian> ... </hawaiian>
Aaron finds this amusing, and we promise to keep in touch.
By the way, you don't need to know all this technical stuff to enter the Kenning Haiku Competition. It's meant to be simple and easy to get started with, and you can email me if you have any questions at all.
I find Nat Dupree and Marty playing light games with Victoria Osborne, the former top-ranked female Magic: the Gathering player.
I beat her at Bucket King, despite her drawing five cards toward the end of the game because she kept forgetting. (Illegal, but she pleaded newbiehood.) I feel pretty good about this, even though Bucket King's only marginally more strategic than Loopin' Louie (and involves more chickens)....
After Bucket King, we sit and talk with Victoria about her views on the differences between the tournament mentality and social play, and between male and female gamers. I'm not sure I agree with all of her conclusions (Marty doesn't either), but it is an enlightening viewpoint from Someone Who's Been There.
I kiss Marty goodnight, and retire to my room to write up my observations for the day and listen to BBC World Service again.
I get up and prepare for Game Systems 1 and 2. I lug down the Big Box O' Game Systems (I portaged a ludicrous number of them with me to the con). The crowd in the ballroom has shrunk by almost an order of magnitude. Most people came for Saturday and then left. The cafeteria staff are packing up, so I quickly buy half a dozen Balance bars for my daily bread.
Game Systems 1 is lightly attended, but I do get a few people. One gamer, Danny Goodisman, is attracted by the new Abacus edition of Das Spiel. Danny has the 1980s edition, which he picked up on a trip through Germany. Danny and I play a game of Rasanto with the new set, then realise that the new edition doesn't have enough dice in just two colours to fill the pyramid.
We fill the rest of the pyramid randomly with the third colour and are joined by a new player. Danny teaches us a quick game to take down the pyramid. He doesn't remember what it's called, but it involves rolling a die, then looking at the pyramid from one direction and taking only the free dice that have that number facing you. I quickly realise it's a game of pure chance, and Danny points out that elements of skill and dexterity could be added with a short timer. I still haven't found out what this game is called or even if it's in the Das Spiel rulebook, so I'm going to call it "One-Player Raffzahn".
After we destroy the pyramid, I teach my new buddies how to play Domino Rasanto. This is my favourite Das Spiel game. It's a kind of highly-strategic, three-dimensional dominoes -- a true bridge between dominoes and dice. The rules in the available English translation are unclear, so I wrote my own version of the rules, which I plan to post soon.
The third guy leaves, and Danny I hang out and talk. Danny has designed both abstract and Cheapass-style games. He is currently working on one of the latter. The theme is brilliant. It's historical and rife with dark comedy. I wish I could tell you more about it, but the theme has never been done before to my knowledge, and it's so perfect that I literally don't want to give the game away.
I invite Danny to join EGGS (Experimental Game Genesis of Seattle), and he says he wants to very much, especially after I explain that at EGGS we don't just give encouragement and back-patting, but gritty criticism and suggestions for improvement. I make a few suggestions about fine-tuning his new game's theme as an example of the kind of feedback we give in the group.
Danny is one of the people I connect with the most at the con, and I think we can be good friends.
Sadly, Bill from Wizards Toy Chest, who was going to demo Trillõn, never shows up to Game Systems 1. He goes out for lunch and gets lost. By the time he returns, people are packing up.
By this point, most people have left, and Danny is making arrangements for transportation, so the piecepack session never really happens. Knowing Danny's penchant for designing Cheapass-style games, I show him the rules to our game KidSprout Jumboree, which he enjoys.
Danny leaves. Marty is wrapping up her Age of Renaissance game, and I start getting ready to go myself. I pack up to go home much more systematically than I did to come to Dragonflight -- after all, I have a finite number of things to take home, but I had potentially the entire game-related contents of my house to bring.
I manage to get everything into four pieces of luggage. I also get to hear Ursula Le Guin talking about utopian fiction on Studio 360 while I am packing. What luck! The interviewer literally doesn't know a utopia from a dystopia, but Ursula sets him straight. You go, Ursula!
Marty is playing a pickup game of Lunch Money that she says will only take 10 or 15 minutes. I get the car ready and check out. It develops that Marty's Lunch Money game is being played with all kinds of expansions and takes more like 90 minutes. I have nothing else to do, so I hang out in the lobby and watch Big Trouble in Little China. Then I use the con's computers to check my wikis for activity. It turns out someone has been repetitively spamming them, but the wiki users have been mostly foiling the spam by reverting the changes minutes after the spammer makes them. I had planned to ask someone to be a wiki babysitter while I was away, but I didn't really need to. Ghod, I love the Internet. (Not the spammers, though.)
Home! Home! Home!
I drink deep of sleep.
I am surprised by how energising and positive an experience Dragonflight was for me, despite some initial problems, spotty attendance, and my usual dislike of crowds. I actually came home charged enough on Sunday that I felt I could go into work the next day, sleep deficit or no. I'll certainly be attending next year although the chances I'll be a guest of honor again are negligible, and I even surprised myself by contemplating going to GameStorm.
See you next year, or sooner!
Entered 22:24 [/games/events] permalink
This is the kind of thing you'll like...
if you like this kind of thing.
Entered 12:27 [/games/gbg] permalink
As I mentioned, I'll be a guest of honor at the Dragonflight XXV gaming convention from 13-15 August at Seattle University. Here's a list of events I'll be hosting. Consult the Dragonflight site for scheduling if you want to attend any of these.
Following the list of events is a short bio Marty wrote about me for the convention program.
Philosophy of Games - Not a seminar about game strategy, but about philosophy as it applies to games and gaming. Should we play games? If so, why? Why do people have an innate urge to play? What makes a game good? Can lessons learned in games be used in life, and vice versa? Is life in fact a game? Ron will describe a philosophy of gaming called Ludism, then open the floor to discussion. Remember: it's not the hand you're dealt, but how you play it.
The Glass Bead Game - Is it a game disguised as an artform, or an artform disguised as a game? Come learn about the many "playable variants" inspired by Hermann Hesse's Nobel-Prize-winning SF novel, The Glass Bead Game. Connecting everything to everything else, the GBG plays "with the total contents and values of our culture... as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette." Ron will give a talk with handouts, demonstrate his own gameform, and announce a contest.
Cosmic Pig - Ron will teach people how to play his Cosmic Encounter variant based on the cult SF novel Interstellar Pig by William Sleator. Multiple Cosmic Encounter sets will be available for play.
Monster Cosmic Encounter - One giant Cosmic Encounter game with 10 or more players and tons of non-standard expansions. (Ticketed.)
Game Systems - A game system is a set of components that function together in multiple games. The standard deck of playing cards is a well-known game system. Come play some of the oddball game systems mentioned in Ron's articles on this subject for The Games Journal, and some he hasn't written about yet.
Piecepack Games - The piecepack is a relatively new but increasingly popular game system. Come learn several piecepack games, including some of the award-winning games designed by Ron and his wife Marty.
Ron Hale-Evans has been an avid board gamer since 1978, when he received Cosmic Encounter as a Christmas present at the age of 13. Since then, his pursuit and development of a ludic philosophy has led him through many game-related adventures and areas of study.
In the late '80s, Ron and his college game group Y Nomic created a game of Nomic that lasted 2-1/2 years. Ron also encountered Hermann Hesse's book The Glass Bead Game in college, and began to study it seriously in 1995, leading to his work with the Bamboo Garden GBG workshop in Seattle and the development of his game form, Kennexions.
More recently, Ron has added his work with the piecepack game system; aside from writing about and promoting the piecepack, Ron has authored six games for it (most with his wife Marty) including the winner of the first piecepack game design competition. Ron also writes a respected ongoing series of articles on game systems for The Games Journal.
Ron and Marty started Seattle Cosmic Game Night in January 2000, which began as a way for Ron to play more Cosmic Encounter and has grown into a vigorous local gaming group that meets weekly to play and discuss a wide variety of new and old games.
For more information about Ron, see his webpage at http://ron.ludism.org and/or his blog at http://ron.ludism.org/annex.
Entered 21:48 [/games/events] permalink
Moratics is the study of generalised lines of strategy and tactics in games. For example, the concept of a tactical fork is common to Chess, Checkers, and many other games. I run a mailing list on the subject. My friend Chad Urso McDaniel attempted to revive discussion lately by writing,
Here's an assigment to help people get into the moratics mindset:
Choose any two distinctly different games you play over the next week and post to this list describing a gameplay strategy that you can employ in each. Try to find how this element can be used in each of the games.
My exercise involved two games from Seattle Cosmic last night, Starbase Jeff and Ad Acta.
In Starbase Jeff, "space station contractors" simultaneously play tiles in order to build a space station in the center of the table. Rules summary:
The contractor with the most money at the end wins.
The station starts as a few connected corridors. Some tiles simply extend a corridor, some make it branch, and "end caps" terminate corridors.
Tiles cost a certain base amount to build. This goes into a pot. You must also pay other players $1 for every tile they have between the tile you just played and another one of your tiles (you choose the route, and if you have no other tiles on the board, you pay only the base cost).
If you finish the station by capping the last corridor, you win the pot.
Every tile has a priority. End caps are in the range 0-2, while other tiles have priorities as high as 6 (the more branches, the more costly). The highest tile is Sabotage (7), which destroys one other tile.
Players take turns in descending priority. If two players play cards with the same priority, the cards "bounce" and are saved for the next round. If you have more than one card to play, you may play them in any order.
Dave Howell is a Starbase Jeff shark and won twice in a row against three of us newbies. At the end of the first game, he predicted correctly that I would play a 0 priority end cap and bounced with me, so we each had to save them for the next turn. On the next turn, he was the only player to play a 7 (Sabotage) card, so he went first. Since he could play his cards in any order, he played his end cap from the previous turn and won the pot.
The other game I played last night was Ad Acta. Rules summary:
Players score victory points by filing cards, or "files", in a series of filing cabinets. Every time a cabinet fills up, the cards in it are scored. The game ends either when someone has reached 36 victory points (in which case, she wins), or all cabinets are full, in which case the winner is the player with the most points.
Each filing cabinet has a number from I to VII. Each file has a letter from A to G and a colour that designates who it belongs to. There is also a series of icons along the top of each file that designates which player, or "office", must process the file next. When all of these icons are paperclipped, the file is "finished".
Some filing cabinets are better than others for certain files. For example, Cabinet II might score 7 points (the maximum) for a C file, while Cabinet III might score only 1 point for it (the minimum). Thus, timing is crucial. If you are "aiming" your C file for Cabinet II, you don't want to overshoot and end up placing the file in Cabinet III instead, scoring only 1 point instead of 7.
Each player has an in box and an out box. Tiles are processed from the top of your in box and placed in the top of your out box.
Each player has three action points that let him do things like process the top document in his in box or tell someone else to process the top document in her in box.
The first-player position rotates, and the first player in a round is called the Messenger. After everyone has had a turn, the Messenger places the contents of the out boxes into a delivery cart on the central board, preserving both the order of the files in the out boxes and the order of the out boxes starting with his own.
The Messenger then takes the top document in the cart (the last document processed by the last player). If it is complete (it has been processed by all necessary offices), he places it in the first available filing cabinet. If it is not complete, he sends it to the next office listed on the card, where it is placed on the top of the in box. He does this for each file until the cart is empty.
So, what strategic elements do these games have in common? Superficially, not much. One is about building a nonlinear map of a space station, the other about filing documents in a rigid linear order.
On closer examination, in both games it is important that you insert objects (tiles in Starbase Jeff, cards in Ad Acta) into the right positions in a "data structure" (a first-in first-out (FIFO) queue in Starbase Jeff, a last-in first-out (LIFO) stack in Ad Acta). Both games involve preemption tactics:
In Starbase Jeff, you can preempt another player's tile either by playing a higher tile, in which case you go before they do, or by playing the same value of tile, in which case their attempt to play a tile this turn is completely foiled (if someone else had played a 7 at the same time Dave did, he would not finished the space station and won that turn).
In Ad Acta, you can preempt someone's attempt to get a card into a given filing cabinet by making sure that there are enough completed files after his file in the turn order that they will end up higher in the delivery cart and will go into that cabinet first. For example, it is useful to preempt someone's file with your own if getting your file into that cabinet will score you lots of points, or if the cabinet in question would score your opponent lots of points.
A related concept is what I will call postemption. Sometimes you want other people to go ahead of you.
This might happen in a two-player game of Starbase Jeff when there are two branches left on the space station, and you are fairly sure your opponent will play an end cap. You could try to "sneak in" an end cap with lower priority so that your opponent caps a corridor first, leaving you to cap the remaining corridor and win the pot.
Postemption in Ad Acta might take the form of trying to get into a later file cabinet that is valuable to you by completing one of your files earlier in the turn order.
Or consider Hearts: in Hearts, the cards played in a trick have a notional order: the highest Heart card wins the trick, unless there are no Heart cards, in which case the highest card of the suit led wins. The player with the lead is the person who took the last trick. Sometimes you want to lead, because it gives you better control, so you might preempt the other cards with a higher one. However, if a trick has a lot of Hearts in it, winning it will cost you, so you should generally try to postempt it by "sneaking in" a low card.
Thus, preemption is a somewhat more general version of the concept of trumping, and postemption is its complement. I suggest the backformation of emption for the general concept of inserting a card, tile, or other game object into the right place in an ordered set, to your own advantage.
Note: You can follow this thread from its beginning in the moratics archives, which are open to the public.
Entered 19:52 [/games/moratics] permalink
I visited Piecepack.org yesterday and saw that at long last, James Kyle's seminal article on the piecepack from Grampa Barmo's Discount Games Magazine has been posted.
I also noticed that you can download beautiful, colourblind-friendly JCD printable piecepacks there now too.
Finally, the piecepack has just made an appearance on MonkeyFilter also.
Entered 14:05 [/games/game_systems] permalink
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Followup to the original piecepack playset story:
Delivery-date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 06:26:57 -0800
Subject: Sakura Piece-Pack Playset
From: Lion Kimbro <lion@speakeasy.org>
Ron: Good news and bad news.
Bad news first: My piecepack set is, well, rendered unplayable.
One tile is now very, very, silver colored.
Another one is makeup-red all over.
Others have various other uniquely identifying patterns of
God-knows-what feminine makeup-like substances on them.
The good news.
Sakura's FAVORITE TOY is now the Piecepack. She plays with
it all the time, and always wants it.
I keep coming to interesting game-like configurations on
the ground, different every time I get home.
Take care,
Lion {:)}=
--
http://speakeasy.org/~lion/ LionKimbro@jabber.org Seattle, WA
|
Entered 19:22 [/games/game_systems] permalink
New piecepack game: Piecepack Playset
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Rules
I visited my friend Lion Kimbro yesterday and gave him a new Mesomorph piecepack as a holiday present. His 2-3/4-year-old daughter Sakura was present, and since her mother was away, she stuck close to Lion. As soon as Lion opened the piecepack, she dug her hands into the components and strewed them about. She messed around with the components for a while, then built an 8x3 board of tiles. (Are there any piecepack games that use an 8x3 board?) On top of each tile, right in the middle, she placed either a coin or a pawn. (She may have used dice too.) I did not notice any ordering, except that she placed the pawns close together. The result was pretty. Later, she took a coin from each suit and placed it suit-side-up on the corresponding suit icon on top of the piecepack box. (The diagram on the box is roughly the same as the logo shown to the left.) Pretty sharp for someone who's only 2.75! After she took off the coins, I placed a pawn of the appropriate colour on top of one of the box icons. Sakura picked the remaining pawns up and distributed them to the other icons. She didn't match the colours and I couldn't discern any other pattern in the way she placed them, but for all I know, the kid is a piecepack Mozart and invented a new system of colour correspondences. Overall, it was a lot of fun watching Sakura play with the piecepack. She treated them as construction materials, like building blocks, rather than as a game or game system. Lion showed me some varnished wooden building blocks she likes to play with of approximately the same size and colour as the piecepack tiles. He also suggested that "unit blocks" (that is, various blocks made of unit cubes) would make in interesting game system. If you do let a little kid play with your piecepack, watch them to make sure they don't eat the smaller components. This episode of the Piecepack Ethologist has been brought to you by Ron Hale-Evans. |
Entered 23:01 [/games/game_systems] permalink
People are saying nice things about "Game Systems, Part 4" over on rec.games.board:
"The whole of [The Games Journal] is good, but this series of articles are the jewel in the crown for me. This article was thought provoking, well researched and well written. Over 7000 words of quality."
--Iain Cheyne"Yes, that certainly is a meaty article. The Games Journal is always really great, but this one is really REALLY great."
--Justin Green (shumyum@yahoo.com)
Thanks, guys! I wasn't even sure that people would like an article that focused on game systems made from everyday objects, so the response is especially gratifying. It seems the part that has gotten the most response is the game of Remainders, which was almost (not quite) an afterthought. Since it's not always easy to tell what people will respond to most in an article, my theory is that you should throw it all in. I believe Penn & Teller refer to this as "the scattershot technique" in one of their books. Note that "scattershot" is not always a word used in praise.
Entered 13:08 [/games/game_systems] permalink
"Game Systems, Part 4" now available
My article "Game Systems, Part 4: Low-Tech Game Systems" is now available online at The Games Journal, as the "cover story" for the November issue.
I love what editor Greg Aleknevicus did with the graphics for my article. The pictures for the games Rock Paper Scissors Spock Lizard and Change Change are great. Greg adapted my US-centric description of the latter and replaced my ASCII diagram of US coins with photos of Canadian coins, including a loonie (dollar coin) instead of a quarter.
This issue was atypically a little late (Greg says Halloween is a big holiday for him), but from my perspective, it was worth the wait. I'm sure the rest of the articles will be a lot of fun too, as usual.
Entered 00:13 [/games/game_systems] permalink
Gamers who run GNU/Linux systems should check out gtkboard, the free software world's answer to Zillions of Games. Conceived by a gifted programmer from India, Arvind Narayanan, gtkboard can currently play about 30 games. Thanks to its Logos (Lots Of Games, Open Source) library, however, gtkboard will soon be able to run the almost 1000 free games available for the Zillions platform. There are other good reasons to run it too.
The gtkboard project is understaffed at the moment, so if you're a developer and a gamer, gtkboard needs you!
Entered 12:29 [/games/game_systems] permalink
I created a page on the Piecepack Wiki today called Playing Chess with a Piecepack and 88 Cents or Less. You probably have the eight dimes and eight pennies, or something equivalent, but do you have the piecepack?
In the spirit of WikiWiki, "AlphaTim" Schutz added the game setup illustration you see above, and Mark Biggar added an explanation of how to play Chess with just a piecepack. Thanks, guys!
Entered 19:19 [/games/game_systems] permalink
Just about six months ago I was interviewed in email by W. Eric Martin of TwoWriters.net for an article in Games magazine about "rule-changing games", which I call "transfinite games".
The article was called "Meta-Gaming 101" and appeared in the September 2003 issue of Games. Although the interview seems to have informed the article significantly, not much of it was explicitly quoted. (And if you're looking for the "Center for Ludic Strategy", I assure you that you're really looking for the Center for Ludic Synergy.) Thus, I am reproducing the interview below, with Eric's permission. I have changed nothing except for abbreviating the header, deleting my .signature, and making the hyperlinks "live".
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2003 18:07:38 -0800 To: "W. Eric Martin" <eric@cluestick.org> Subject: Re: Questions about rule-changing games From: Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@ludism.org> On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 04:51:27PM -0500, W. Eric Martin wrote: > Thanks for responding so quickly! As suggested, I've included my > questions below. My deadline for the article is the end of March, > so if you can answer the questions by Friday, March 28, that should > give me enough time to incorporate your answers. > > Please don't feel obligated to answer everything, but the wealth of > knowledge you display on your Web sites and in your articles > inspired me to keep adding questions. Thank you very much. I've answered everything I could. If any of my answers do not seem cogent, please let me know. > 1. How would you like your attribute to read? Founder of Seattle Cosmic Game Night and the Center for Ludic Synergy, Gamemaster of the Kennexions Glass Bead Game, and card-carrying Pope. > 2. You list Nomic as an interest on your home page; what about the > game appeals to you? Why single out Nomic when all other games are > grouped as "board games, card games, and role-playing games"? That's just my crufty home page, which has evolved over more than 15 years. My online bookmarks have quite a different breakdown. However, I do have a sentimental attachment to Nomic because for two and a half years, I played a face-to-face game as an undergraduate at Yale. Further, Peter Suber's Nomic Initial Set is the best thought-out, most balanced ruleset of its sort I have seen. More to the point, Nomic can encompass all the other types of games mentioned; during our college game, we frequently subsumed games of Illuminati, Nuclear War, Black Spy (Alan Moon's Hearts variant), and even Cosmic Encounter. We called these little pockets of other games "barlafumbles" in Nomicspeak, the artificial language of my college game. > 2a. What common elements, if any, do you find in the Nomic games > you've played? I've run across many games online that introduce > colors, money, and locations, for example; are these quirks of > particular players, or is this to be expected from our collective > gaming experience? Every Nomic group varies, but there are often similarities because Nomic players like to introduce features of the real world that interest them. Since Nomic is a political game, these include awards, titles, offices, and political parties, as well as the items you mentioned. These are all _imaginary objects_ or properties, and I think this partly stems from the fact that many Nomic players are computer geeks, and a computer programming technique called "object-oriented programming" has been very popular. In fact, in Nomic's first online heyday (the mid to late 1990s), there were a couple of experimental intergame computer protocols that would let Nomic players carry objects from game to game. > 3. What doesn't work about Nomic, if anything? Or does the game > fail only if the players let it fail? The main problem is that Nomic games sometimes buckle under their own complexity. However, if there's anyone left in the game who's still interested, they can have "constitutional conventions" or "revolutions" and "purge" all the old rules that don't work at once. (Yes, I know this sounds unsavoury; Nomic players tend to be fond of power grabs, even if the power is imaginary.) It really is up to the players. Our group really had the will to keep playing, so we jokingly introduced a kind of Orwellian doublethink. When we encountered a "boogle", or snag in the rules, we plastered it over with a "whabawwea" by chanting in unison, "We Have Always Been At War With East Asia!" (or Eurasia, as the case might be) -- an allusion to a brainwashing technique used in Orwell's _Nineteen Eighty-Four_. In our club, even _winning_ the game didn't end it; when someone won a game we would "pop" up to a "metagame" and "push" down to a fresh game with the same rules, minus the rule or rules that had caused the person to win. > 4. In your introductory essay to the Kenning Game (I spent a lot of > time looking around your site), you relate Nomic to James Carse's > idea of infinite games; what's the appeal to you of playing a game > merely to keep playing? The last sentence of _Finite and Infinite Games_ reads "There is but one infinite game". I'm sure Carse means life, or the world. Nihilists, ascetics, and lunatics aside, this is a game most people want to keep playing. "Transfinite" games like Nomic are like the world on a smaller scale. Tolkien delighted in the Elves of Middle-earth he created, and his Elves delighted in the magical jewels _they_ created. In just the same way, Nomic players, like role-playing gamers, love to explore the worlds they create. Creating leads to exploring, and exploring leads to creating. Sometimes the most fun in Nomic happens when you discover unintended consequences from the way two or more rules interact. It's like one of those dreams in which you discover a new room in your house. The difference between Nomic and role-playing, however, is that in Nomic, there is no gamemaster -- the creators and explorers are the same. (In the game we played at Yale, a player was called a "govotnik", which expressed the idea that she was both government _and_ voter.) > 4a. Following that thought, Kate Jones told me that one of her goals > with Lemma was to create a game in which the purpose was to keep > playing -- yet I know from one of your newsletters (mentioned in > your game system article) that your gaming group did not have a > great experience with Lemma. Any thoughts on the difference between > Lemma and Nomic, or is the difference all in the players? Nomic was written by a professor of constitutional law, and its design reflects that. It is much more detailed, formal, and rigorous than Lemma, which in its turn is much more free-spirited. With all its loopholes, Lemma seems to be designed for an afternoon's play, while Nomic games can go on for years. However, after talking with Kate Jones myself, I've concluded that your experience with either game will largely depend on the group with whom you play. I've certainly heard of enough Nomic games that only lasted an afternoon. > 5. Being a math person myself, I like your description of these > games as transfinite; do you feel there's a continuum of > "rule-changingness" that games like Nomic, Lemma, Fluxx, Democrazy, > Cosmic Encounter, Proteus, and Bartog can be placed along? That is, > from most changeable to least? Or are the games too different to > compare in this way? Yes, I do think there is a continuum. At one end of the continuum are games like Checkers whose rules do not change. Then come games like Cosmic Encounter, in which the rules change mostly at the start of the game. Then Fluxx and Democrazy, in which the rules change every turn, but are limited to the rules on the deck of cards. Then Nomic, in which the rules change every turn and are limited only by your imagination. Finally there is life itself, in which the rules change from moment to moment, and we are never quite sure what they are. > Is rule-changing a strong enough quality (such as simultaneous play, > bidding, or hidden movement) that it can be considered on its own? Yes, and you can add rule-changing to any game as easily as saying, "On your turn, you make a new rule". As kids, long before they heard of Nomic, my wife and her sisters added rule changing to the game Sorry. They called their variant "Evil Sorry", and they still have the rules somewhere. > 6. Care to comment on the other games mentioned in question 5? > (Obviously CE is huge in your group, but the rule-changing aspect is > only a piece of the game, not the essence of it.) I haven't played Proteus (the game from Kadon), although I would love to. Bartog I understand to be similar to Mao, about which I am sworn to secrecy. > And you mentioned that your group has tired of Fluxx; care to > elaborate on why? Seattle Cosmic tended to find Fluxx games too similar to one another after a while. Also, we focus on strategy games, and there is very little strategy in Fluxx. Nevertheless, there are some people in the group who still like it. > 7. Are you familiar with "The Only Known Game," a creation by Mark > Bassett and Steve Knight that predates Nomic by two years and very > much resembles Lemma? Yes, I've seen it. It looks all right, but I prefer games with more initial structure. Changing the rules of a game as you go is not new. Peter Suber's real innovation was his detail and rigour. > 8. Are there other rule-changing games I haven't mentioned that you > feel should be covered in this article? Well, _Games_ did that great article on 1000 Blank White Cards last year. (I found that very similar to a nameless boardgame I played with some friends in New Haven one night.) Dvorak <http://www.dvorakgame.co.uk/> is a more structured version of the same idea. Bob Abbott's game Eleusis <http://www.logicmazes.com/> is a forerunner of these games, and Das Regeln Wir Schoen <http://www.boardgamegeek.com/viewitem.php3?gameid=1003> is really the German original for Democrazy. Mutant versions of Suber's Nomic Initial Set have proliferated; one that interests me is Solitaire Nomic <http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/acka/hist/solitaire.html>, which I carry around on my PDA. You should also look at Matrix Games <http://www.io.com/~hamster/> and Shared Universes <http://members.tripod.com/~lkraz/SharedU.html>. Mornington Crescent <http://parslow.com/mornington/> is very silly, and the Fantasy Rules Committee <http://www.win.tue.nl/~engels/frc/> have done some really amazing stuff. And then, of course, there is the Glass Bead Game. > I've enjoyed your sites greatly, and have found many new topics to > explore, especially the idea of being headless. I look forward ot > your responses! Thank you; I'm glad you've enjoyed my stuff. I've tried to answer your questions in a timely way, in case they raise any further ones. Best, Ron
Entered 05:14 [/games/transfinite] permalink
Check out this superb new book on game design, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (MIT Press, 2003).
I won't say much about it, because I'm a few chapters in, having only skimmed the rest, but so far it's obvious that there has never been anything like this before. It's more than 650 pages long, meant to be a textbook for an academic course in game design (any kind of game, on computer or off). It's even of interest to non-designers, because it contains original games by James Ernest and Richard Garfield, among others, and an essay by Reiner Knizia on his Lord of the Rings game.
And, oh yeah, my Game Systems series was cited, and served as source material for a chunk of the "Games as Open Culture" chapter.
If you buy it here, I'll even make, like, $3.75...
Entered 20:32 [/games/design] permalink
These two new Cosmic Encounter powers come from a post I made to the seattle-cosmic mailing list on 17 March 2003. Our group still hasn't playtested them, probably because we haven't been playing a lot of Cosmic this year.
These powers are based on the Mesmer and the Vulch, respectively. The Mesmer can turn any Edict into any other Edict, and the Vulch can collect discarded Edicts. Naturally, like the Mesmer and Vulch, the following two powers are not meant to be used together (except perhaps at Cheezy Cosmic Nights).
FLESMER (optional)
You may treat any Flare in your hand as though it is any other Flare in the game (whether in the Challenge Deck, the Flare Deck, the discard pile, or someone else's hand). As usual, you may only use the Super version of a Flare if you possess the corresponding power. Once you declare that a given Flare "is" another Flare, you may not change your mind.
You may look through the Challenge Deck, the Flare Deck, and the discard pile to see what Flares do, but each time you significantly slow down the game while doing so (by unanimous vote of the other players), you must lose a base of your choice. You must shuffle the Flare Deck and Challenge Deck after you have looked through them.
This power may not be combined with Flulch in a game with multiple powers.
Wild: All other players must show you their Flares. You may select one to take into your hand. Discard after use.
Super: You may use any Flares in your hand as either Wilds or Supers, except this one. A given Flare cannot be declared both Wild and Super in the same challenge.
FLULCH (optional)
When another player discards a Flare, you may take it into your hand.
This power may not be combined with Flesmer in a game with multiple powers.
Wild: You may retain the Flares in your hand, including this one, even when discarding the rest of your hand.
Super: Once per challenge, you may take a Flare from the discard pile into your hand, even if you yourself discarded it.
Comments? Seattle Cosmic has also collaboratively come up with at least two more that need to be formalised: the Deafener and the Crippler. See this March 2000 newsletter.
Entered 13:59 [/games/design] permalink