With a couple of friends, I write scripts and send them to people in the hopes that they will pay me money to continue to do so. While discussing what to do next, the idea cropped up of a nomic panel show.

The more I think about the idea, the more it appeals, in some fascinating but ultimately self-destructive way. Two immediate problems present themselves - firstly, how do we compress a nomic worth the name into a standard twenty-five minute slot? Second, how do we make it entertaining for an audience? I’d love to come up with some method of making this work - maybe an initial ruleset, a la BlogNomic’s infinitely self-sustaining system (but what manner of thing would be necessary? Any ideas for inital rules?), or cross-episode continuity, or something else entirely…

So. I want to create a nomic panel game. Please, either help me achieve this or help me get better.

I think we should establish a policy for draft submission: I’ll approve pretty much anything you guys submit, but I do have to manually approve it, and I can’t do that if I don’t know about it. If you submit a draft, email me or post a quick comment on the last extant entry to let me know. I only found out about Kevan’s and Ben’s posts today through Holly’s demands to see them!

I think it’s neat that some people on the Forge came up with a game that tries to solve the same problem as Diesperado, only they call it (apparently) Rervoir Dogs. They use cards instead of dice and assign roles (Rat, Friend, Loot, etc) to players at the start of the game.

In a fictional-dictionary game a few years ago, I was given the word “sko” and came up with “Ancient Japanese board game where the object is to make the other player unsure of whose turn it is.” - is there any mileage in this? What elements would a game need for players to be able to prove conclusively who had taken the most recent turn, yet not be able to work this out from the visible gamestate? (Or would you not even need that? Most normal games seem fairly recoverable from a mutual “well, I did this, and you did that” discussion of recent turns, after all.)

So I have a game mechanic which needs both a goal, and probably some playtesting as well.

Play proceeds on a go board, with each player having their own color of stone. On your turn, you can either place a stone of your color, or move one of your stones already on the board to any adjacent square (including diagonals).

However, if, at the start of your turn, at least one of your stones is in the same row or column as an opponent’s stone, you must move that stone, and furthermore, the space you move it to can’t be in the same row or column as any stones it started off in line with. (So you can’t ‘threaten’ (move into line with) the stone that just threatened you, although moving it to threaten another stone is perfectly legal)

If you’ve got multiple stones threatened, you can pick which one to move.

As far as goals go, having more stones is good, so forcing your opponent to move stones instead of being able to place them is good as well (except, repeated forced moves usually allow your opponent to return the favor and force you into moves. Does it ever run into an infinite loop? Playtesting should resolve questions like that) Maybe if they are forced to move a stone, but can’t move it due to all available places being blocked by stones, they lose? Or just reaching a certain number of stones on the board?

Holly posted a cool set of Flickr photos called found board games, of which I think #3a is the most promising. Kevan suggested in the comments on that picture that it’s a bridge-building game, provide your own planks. Neat! But what’s the goal of a bridge-building game?

• Maybe it’s a race–try to get from the far yellow corner to the near blue corner first, but you can never have more than two planks on any given post, so your opponent can block or redirect your path. This seems like a recipe for mutual frustration, though.

• Maybe it’s a game of closing off loops to capture them for your own. You can try snag large cycles for big points, but your opponent might be quicker and cut your cycle in half before you’re done. You can play it safe with little squares, but your opponent might be roping in a lot of board while you do that. This seems awfully deterministic without some element of randomization to it.

The obvious answer is that this is just a grid, and there are a jillion games about edges on grids and I don’t think many of them are interesting. What interests me here is the color-coding and the specific way some of those blocks are shaped. It looks like it’s harder to reach the red blocks from the yellow ones; do those connections require special planks that could otherwise be used to make a diagonal connection?