Comments on: Elephant #3a (pretty long)

By: Will

Will — Fri, 11 May 2007 16:14:07 +0000

Oh man, I would so buy that game.

Also, it occurs to me that we could use a wiki, or something. For easy access to the awesomeness!

By: Leonard

Leonard — Fri, 11 May 2007 16:14:36 +0000

That sounds like a lot of fun. If I weren’t busy I’d start writing a server so we could experiment with this. I’d still like some way of structuring the game not to require a bookkeeper, but this sounds like it would make a great specially-designed gadget. I envision submitting plastic punch cards to a black box that grinds away and spits out result cards. Very gnomish.

By: Brendan

Brendan — Fri, 11 May 2007 16:15:00 +0000

Man, a punch card machine would be awesome! Actually, now that you mention it, I had a punch-card-based game called Lie Detector when I was a kid–you put in an unlabelled “perp” card and then poked a rod through different slots to see if it made contact and triggered a “true” response. It worked okay until we broke it by punching through the covered spots.

I’d prefer a bookkeeperless structure too, but I’m not sure how to go about it while retaining the bluffing and diplomacy aspect. It seems to me that if everybody just played their own cards face-up, all your bargains would fall apart the first time anybody didn’t hold up an end, and then those players would never bargain again. If you shuffled cards without a bookkeeper, you’d keep anonymity but you wouldn’t know whether that Screw went to the Coolant or the Propellor, or where the Dynamite was supposed to go off. Vexing.

By: Kevan

Kevan — Fri, 11 May 2007 16:15:51 +0000

“You’d keep anonymity but you wouldn’t know whether that Screw went to the Coolant or the Propellor, or where the Dynamite was supposed to go off.” - you might be able to get around this by having a fixed rule for how ambiguous plays are resolved; perhaps numbering every card and saying that the highest valid target is selected, or automatically ignoring the cards inside the periphery, or something.

Something specific enough that it would only require very minor rearrangement to the machine to set things up to reach the component you wanted to affect. Opponents might be able to remember who had put the Steam Tank into a position for it to be Welded, in some cases, but wouldn’t know if a saboteur had done it deliberately, or had simply followed up on another player’s innocent tinkering.

By: Brendan

Brendan — Fri, 11 May 2007 16:16:38 +0000

Kevan, that’s a great idea. I’ve been trying to think what would be a good way to set priorities that wouldn’t always result in the same macrocomponent getting blown up, and here’s what I came up with:

For each macrocomponent, there’s a numbered chip (1…x). At the beginning of a round, these chips are dealt out in order to all players until they’re gone–they don’t have to be even. Dealer shifts to the right each round. That way, each turn, a new player gets to decide which macrocomponent gets first priority, and the player to his or her left gets to decide which one gets second, etc. Then–as Kevan suggested–the cards are played and shuffled, and go to the macrocomponents with highest possible priority. In other words, if the Gear Train is #1 this round but requires no Pistons, and the Clockwork Gun is #2 and does need Pistons but already has its Pistons filled in, and the Juicer is #3 and has an open Piston slot, the first Piston played out of the shuffle gets put on the Juicer.

This would change the “special ability” mechanic… maybe instead of having your ability determined by a cross-section of your goals, you get a special ability card at the beginning of the game, and can play that after the cards are shuffled (”Oh, somebody played a Cherry Bomb! I use my ability, so now it’s a Dynamite!”).

I need to wiki this! Or somebody does.