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?

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?