I don’t know if these were ever popular outside of the UK, but Top Trumps are a commercial variant of War, where you can buy decks of Sports Cars, or Military Aircraft, or Dinosaurs, or whatever else. Each card is printed with a photo and various numerical statistics about its subject, and the game is played in exactly the same way as War, except that the winner of each round chooses which stat to compare for the next one.

(So it still has as little strategy as War, the only real difference being that you aren’t necessarily sure how strong a given stat is, until you’ve played the deck through once. Although even then, it still needs some memory - that 200mph might be a good “Top Speed”, but, unless you know for sure that it’s the fastest card in the deck, you won’t know the exact odds of your opponent’s card being better or worse than it.)

Top Trumps were popular in school playgrounds of the 1980s, and have been experiencing a nostalgic resurgence over the past few years, with various decks being brought out based around modern films and television series; Lord of the Rings, Buffy, The Simpsons, and things. But they all have the same boring old rules. No extra, advanced set for players who aren’t six years old. I imagined there’d be some alternate rules online somewhere, but all the fan sites I’ve found seem more enthused by the idea of TV-themed decks existing, than being playable.

What games could you play with a set of pre-printed cards that each had a list of numerical stats? (Perhaps assuming that powerful cards are balanced in an interesting way, which is often the case; that a card with unbeatable Intelligence might have a low Strength, and vice versa.)

Leonard said:-

A sensible version of Clue would be more like the movie. One player would be the killer, whose goal would be to obscure the truth and eliminate the other players from the game, either by causing them to make false accusations, or by killing them as well. […] Players would have reason to form alliances and stick together, and the board would have a real purpose. Still have to do something about the arbitrary accusation rules, though.

Kevan said:-

Ben and I were talking about this a few weeks ago, for reasons I forget, and I don’t think we came up with any solid solution to the “secret murder” problem - it’d be great to have a game where NPCs (or even PCs) could be bumped off in secret, if they ended up alone with the murderer-player, and nobody but the murderer would be aware of it until the body was discovered. […] I think you’d have to include a GM player who’d watch over the game, know who the murderer was, assume that they’d kill at every opportunity, and announce that players are retroactively dead when someone found their body, or (a bit weirdly) when they walked back into an occupied room.

Leonard:-

Now that you’ve brought up the undead, though, here’s a solution to the secret murder problem: anyone murdered becomes a zombie. As long as you can secretly communicate to a player that they’ve been killed, they can keep rolling the dice and staggering aimlessly around until someone else notices that they’re a zombie.

Kevan:-

Aha, solving the wandering-corpse problem with zombies is absolutely perfect. The secret communication could perhaps be a weapon-card thing - give each player a weapon to begin with, and have the rules insist that players secretly flash their weapon cards to anyone they pass in an otherwise empty room. If someone flashes the poison card at you, then you have been zombified by the evil Dr Body.

The zombies either have to attack the detectives (but hold back long enough for them to forget where the zombie came from), or just avoid them for as long as possible; if the detectives are all eliminated before they can unmask Doctor Body, then the zombie team wins. Perhaps with some sort of recognition for the zombie who put the most work in.

Will added:-

OR, decree that only two people may be present in a room at one time. It would work with the whole suggestion aspect of the game. Actually, that works quite well. Then, the killer can’t attack you unless you suggest/suspect him, which gives decent enough motive.

The original Cluedo rules are available online for reference, but I think we’ve thrown most of it out, beyond the board - the whole “Miss Scarlett, in the ballroom, with the lead piping” element is lost, if the weapon is always the same, the location is meaningless and the identity of the murderer is already being tracked by the weapon cards.

(I suppose this means we could use the location and character cards for other purposes. Possibly use the character cards for a facetious combat system; if you’re being attacked by an opponent, or a group of them, draw a card at random from the six, and that’s who gets the punch in. And we could allow the weapon cards to be used as a ‘reroll’, but if your second draw is your opponent, they beat you and get to keep your weapon.)

We haven’t really said how the accusation system would work - given that it’s reduced to just accusing a character, without weapon or location, then maybe it needs a penalty for an incorrect accusation. Perhaps accusations could just be made as straightforward attacks (loser being forced to reveal their weapon card, their identity); if you attack and overcome an innocent, then you’ll be forgiven for being regarded with suspicion.

(Although any mechanic that uncovers a player’s innocence is potentially dangerous, and this goes for the weapon-card rerolls - you could ban players from waving their cards around at whim, but as soon as there’s a mechanic that allows cards to be revealed, it becomes easy enough for the detectives to prove their innocence and isolate the murderer.)

I get a tidy email notification every time somebody posts a comment here, which is nice because I get reminded about cool discussions after they clear my RSS reader. But, assuming there’s someone else who would find this service convenient, it’s not fair that I’m the only one who gets it!

I’ve changed the administrative address for this notebook to dispatch@xorph.com, which currently just bounces everything to me. If you’d like to get comment notifications, post your email address (formatted however you like) in the comments on this post. I’ll add you to the bounce list in a couple of days (so you don’t all get spammed with each other’s requests to join).

From a discussion on focus over at Vincent Baker’s Ongoing Roleplaying Theory Open House comes this image from an old Dragon Magazine, very kindly dug up and provided by Jeff Rients. It’s a flowchart of how a typical second-edition Top Secret spy adventure was designed to run, and it might be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

The chart itself is copyright Merle Rasmussen, of course, but I think the structure and format are excellent fodder. How can we play with this? What other kinds of genre games would make good flowcharts, and what would they look like?

Some games I used to play have a visceral appeal that still grabs me despite the game’s design flaws or general unsuitability now that I know about real, properly designed games. In this series I will dredge up the mass-produced games of my youth and try to figure out ways of changing them to make them better.

In comments to a previous entry I mentioned doing this for The Game Of Life, but I think this one is more bizarre so I’m starting with it. Our first case is the murder mystery game Clue (aka Cluedo outside of North America). This game is odd because all of the interesting pieces are more or less superfluous to the game.

Clue is at heart a card game. One card is removed from each of the the three decks and hidden. The three decks are merged, shuffled, and distributed between the players. The players then take turns making guesses as to which cards are hidden. By process of elimination, eventually one of them guesses right and wins. There are little psychological games you can play with your guesses to try and mislead people.

But as packaged, Clue is a board game. When you think of Clue, you think of all the other pieces besides the cards: the miniature weapons, the sprawling grid board representing the mansion, the secret passages, the cool little colored pawns. None of these pieces have anything to do with the game.

First problem: with the board in place, you’re required to take on the persona of one of the suspects to move around the house. You can win a game of Clue by deducing that you yourself are the culprit. This makes no sense; it indicates that you are not actually the person whose pawn is moving around the house, but rather a detective escorting them around the house. There’s no way in the game mechanics for the person who plays the murderer to know that they’re the murderer, and that they should work toward a different goal.

Second problem: the miniature weapons are totally superfluous. The only thing you do with them is teleport them into the room with you when you make a suggestion. What’s the point? The point is that they look cool.

Third problem: the rules tell you to set up all six tokens even if you have fewer than six players. This too is totally superfluous. The only thing you do with the unused tokens is teleport them into the room with you when you make a suggestion. Then they just hang out in that room until they’re teleported again.

Fourth problem: the board serves no purpose but to space out the players’ suggestions, since you can only make a suggestion for the room you’re in. This leads to the only honest-to-goodness strategy for Clue I’ve ever come up with, which is to issue a bogus suggestion just to teleport another player across the board, so they won’t be able to do their own suggestion in the room they want. I never would have thought of this when I played Clue as a kid, and as a strategy it borders on harassment. It’s not good enough to justify the inclusion of the board. The board is there because it looks cool, and because it adds an element of spatial planning to what would otherwise just be players taking turns making suggestions.

I get the feeling that development versions of Clue used the board and the weapon pieces more, but that it was too complicated or made the game drag on too long, so the teleporting rules were established.

In general, Clue has the feel of a stylish but poorly-designed boardgame version of the (much later) movie Clue, in which people did go around collecting evidence and did act like there was a murderer among them. Kill Doctor Lucky is not the greatest game in the world, but it’s much better than the game it spoofs because all its pieces and rules serve a real purpose.

A sensible version of Clue would be more like the movie. One player would be the killer, whose goal would be to obscure the truth and eliminate the other players from the game, either by causing them to make false accusations, or by killing them as well. (Or maybe the killer is one of the pawns that’s not playing this game, and all your paranoia is pointless.) Players would have reason to form alliances and stick together, and the board would have a real purpose. Still have to do something about the arbitrary accusation rules, though.

You could also ditch the rules of Clue and come up with new games to play with the pieces. Me, I’d like to see a tactical wargame fought in the Clue mansion, each player searching the rooms for weapons and duking it out in the hallways. Or a chase game, Tag or Hide-and-Seek or something. What would you like?

So I don’t know much about game theory, as a scientific or mathematical entity. That’s why I’m prepared for this entry to be shot full of holes by the people who read this and are much better at logic and math than me. Regardless:

When players come to a board or card game, they typically expect to compete against other players and, implicitly, the randomized elements of the rules. If the players are unable to effectively respond to those randomized elements, the game is perceived as an empty exercise by most people above the age of six. Candy Land and War are two good examples. Chance is king, unless you cheat.

I think it’s fascinating that people who would brush off Candy Land and War would still play slots, despite the fact that it’s exactly the same exercise, and the average reward for playing slots is negative. But that’s a different topic. Or is it?

Some board games, like chess, involve no elements of chance at all–they’re entirely driven by player choice. Chess is obviously a thrivingly popular game, so why introduce elements of chance to any board game?

I’m honestly curious about this. I’ve been trying to come up with good reasons, but they seem to fail under test. “It’s interesting to see something unexpected” fails, because you can certainly see unexpected things from the other player in a chess game. “I believe that the odds might favor me and help me win against a more experienced player” fails, because I’m smart enough to know that in the average case, they’re going to favor that other player just as much, and I’m going to lose just as often. But I like games that incorporate both skill and luck more than skill-based games.

Do you? Why?

Why hasn’t anybody done a hexagonal-tessellation version of Exquisite Corpse yet? Start with two completed tiles and spiral out, making it a rule that you’re not allowed to draw any blank tile bordered by fewer than two other completed tiles. (I get plenty of results by googling for “exquisite corpse” hexagonal, but none of them seem to be implemented.)

Derivative of Leonard’s first lonely mechanic. It’s trivial to generate a random book result, using a bag of letter tiles, a few d10s and the Library of Congress classification system (which most college libraries use). I’m not thinking here of any serious game, more like a meme-style thing you could do with your friends in a big library. What can you do with completely random, very specific book results? (Assuming you just take the closest neighbor to whatever number you rolled, not the exact number itself.)

I was going to post this straight to the wiki under the “Loose Mechanics” heading Leonard set up, but then I was like, no. Blog for throughput, wiki for retention. If it goes to the wiki, it’s because it got discussed here first.

So! Protodice.

Pipped dice are protodice; numbered dice are developed dice. At certain times, you may roll a pipped (six-sided) die and multiply the result by two. It’s then exchanged for a die with that number of sides (d2, d4, d6, d8, d10 or d12, where “d2″ just means “a coin”). At certain other times, you may exchange a developed die or dice showing a combined 8 or more for a new protodie.

I never thought when I wrote NewsBruiser’s story submission feature that I would one day use it myself…

For a long time I’ve wanted to make a game around the North American Industry Classification System. My attempts to date to create such a game have foundered. Here’s the best one I’ve come up with, which I call “Bidding War”.

Each player picks an industry from the NAICS, deliberately or at random. Enter the name of your industry into the search box at eBay (no quotes, be sure to check “search title and description”). You’re trying to get the top search result for the industry name to be something very expensive.

If there is a match, note the top bid (or starting bid, if there are no bids) for the first search result. The player whose bid is higher wins the round.

If there are no matches, remove one word from the right-hand side of the description and search again. In the unlikely event that none of the words match, choose a different industry and start over.

Sample game: I choose “Seamless rolled ring forgings, ferrous, made in steel mills”. You choose “Motor vehicle wheels, new”. Your search turns up a Toyota pickup with a top bid of $16,995.00. Not bad. But for some reason, “Seamless rolled ring” turns up a “SiteWatch Systems Wireless Network Video Solar Trailer” (”Long-Range Voice Data and Video Surveillance over Wi-Fi”) with an asking price of $23,750.00. I win.

You could also play only comparing the top bids of items that have bids, to eliminate way-overpriced junk from consideration. In that case you would have won that round, because the first item in my search results that has a bid is an RV (top bid: $13,999.00).

See, ’cause it’s like War, except with eBay… never mind.

Anyway, does anyone have ideas for games that use this dataset but are real games?