Daniel Lepage on 30 Dec 2003 21:42:21 -0000


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[spoon-discuss] Re: [Spoon-business] Tafl anyone? 


On Tuesday, December 30, 2003, at 12:29 PM, Craig wrote:


I propose a rule, to be called "Political Tafl":

{{
[[This rule establishes a subgame which is a variant of Hnefatafl. The rule is, by and large, a clone of the Go rules, with the relevant parts changed. I hope to make this game multidimensional, but think we should get used to 
these rules in a two-dimensional form first.]]
Perhaps some generic "board subgame" rules are in order, to avoid writing out the changed parts more than once.
The game is played on a board 13 spaces on a side, which is initially empty. 

What about the other side? Is it assumed to be square?
At any given time, every position on the board is either empty, or occupied by a Tafl Piece, either a Pawn or a Hnefi, belonging to a certain player. The gameboard has two dimensions, so every position may be represented by an 
ordered pair of numbers.
[[This rule is deliberately written to make a multidimensional extension of 
Tafl possible; so far, however, the gameboard is two-dimensional.]]
Each player has a Tafl Score, which is a quantity of Tafl Points (possibly negative), which begins at 0. A player's Tafl Score may only be changed as defined in this rule. Tafl Score is a quantity independent from the "Score" 
and "Points" referred to elsewhere in the ruleset.
That's an interesting way of defining 'score' - you phrase it as a "quantity of Tafl Points", so that my 'score' object isn't a number, but more like a purse full of points. 

I don't know if that's good or bad.
Players may place and move Tafl Pieces on the board in accordance with the rules of this subgame. To "place" a Tafl Piece means to create a Tafl Piece in a certain position on the board. Tafl Pieces do not exist when they are 
not on the board.
Just out of curiosity, why forbid that? At the moment it's impossible to create Pieces off the board or to move them there regardless of whether you state it or not; but someday we may want Tafl Pieces to exist in some other content (say, if you have a bag of captured pieces, or something). 


B. Alliances
For the purposes of this rule, a Player is either a Player as defined in the 
rest of the Nomic, or the Admin.
For clarity's sake, it might be better to put this at the beginning of the rule. 


Every Player has a set of Allies, who are other Players.
Anyone who is not an Ally to a given player is considered an Opponent of 
that player.
It doesn't come up in this or in PGo, but under both, each player is technically an Opponent of emself - Allies are 'other players', and anyone who isn't an Ally is an Opponent.
This doesn't affect PGo since PGo never mentions Opponents except when it defines what they are; nonetheless, it bugs me.
Alliances are not necessarily transitive. Player A can be allied with player B, and player B with player C, while player A remains an opponent of player 
C.

C. Moving
A Move consists of doing one of the following:
1. Placing a Tafl Piece on the board. A player who does this has eir Tafl Score decreased by three. If the player has no Hnefi currently on the board, then eir piece is a Hnefi. Otherwise, it is a Pawn. Tafl Pieces may not be placed adjacent to other Tafl Pieces, nor may any of their coordinates be 1 
or 13.
2. Moving an existing Tafl Piece belonging to that player. Tafl Pieces move in a single dimension during each move, and are considered to pass through 
all of the spaces between their original space and their destination,
inclusive. There are two limits on the distance a Tafl Piece may move. It may not move off of the edge of the board, and it may not pass through a 
space containing another Tafl Piece.
Any piece can move like this? It seems that the rapid placement and rescue of Hnefis is then the best way to go...
To form an Alliance, both players must publically consent to do so. (The first player consenting does not count as a move; the second player consents by actually forming the Alliance, which counts as a move.) The two players 
then add each other to their list of Allies.


'add each other to their list of Allies'? You mean, they become allies.


Anyone in an Alliance with another player can break the Alliance at any
time. In that case, the two players remove each other from their list of 
Allies.

A player may move at most once per Checking Period, and may not place a
Stone if one of eir Allies has made the most recent move.
One could argue that this should refer to PGo Allies and Moves as well, so that an ally in PGo who was an enemy in PTafl could lock you down by moving in PGo a lot. 


D. Capturing
Two positions on the board are considered adjacent to each other if one, and only one, of their dimensions differ by one. In other words, "adjacent" is taken to mean "horizontally or vertically adjacent", and diagonal adjacence 
does not count.
When the following rules refer to Tafl Pieces being adjacent, it means the 
same thing as the positions of those stones being adjacent.
If a Tafl Piece has two Pawns which are adjacent to it and whose positions 
differ from it in the same dimension, it is captured.


Even if those Pawns are owned by the same player?
In the event of a Tafl Piece being Captured, the players having Pieces whose presence was part of the Piece's capture are considered the Capturers. The Capturers each receive one Tafl Point per Tafl Piece of theirs involved in the capture. Each player whose Tafl Pieces are being Captured loses two Tafl Points for each Piece that e loses. When a Tafl Piece is captured, it ceases 
to exist.

You may not play a Piece in a position where it would be immediately
Captured.
By 'play', do you mean 'place', or just 'put'? I.e., can I move an existing piece to where it would be immediately captured?
Multiple Tafl pieces may be Captured in one turn, and these Captures occur 
simultaneously.


So ABABABAB would simultaneously capture all but the outer two pieces?


E. Ko
Two states of the board are considered "equivalent" if the only difference between them is that, at any number of given positions, a Piece belonging to 
one player is replaced by a Piece belonging to another, and those two
players are allied in either state. Only the positions of pieces on the
board are considered when checking for equivalence; differences in the state 
of alliances or in who made the most recent move are not considered.
A player may not make a move if that move would change the board position so 
that it is equivalent to a previous board position.
[[Tafl does not traditionally have a Ko rule, but it is being incorporated into Political Tafl because the game does not automatically end when a Hnefi 
escapes.]]
Ko works in Go because the number of stones is in general rising. This is not true of Tafl, and I don't think anyone wants to be responsible for comparing each move to all previous board states. 


F. Escaping
If a player makes a move such that a Hnefi of eirs has as any of its
coordinates either 1 or 13, that Hnefi is considered to have Escaped.
When a Hnefi escapes, it ceases to exist and the player who controlled it 
gains ten Tafl Points.

[[The size of this bonus may need to be tinkered with a bit.]]

G. Ending the Game.
The game ends during a Checkpoint when the most recent move was to Pass, and 
nobody has made any other move for more than an nweek.
Uh... you might want to specify *the game of Political Tafl*; I'd rather not have B Nomic end when this game does. 


[[If this ever happens, it indicates that the current game has become
boring. If this occurs, one possibility is to add a dimension or simply
clear the board.]]
Political Go, IIRC, has a bit here about how people get points for having Go points... is it your intent to make Tafl completely independent from the main B Nomic Scores? In that case, you can do this as a society. 


H. Displaying the Game
When a player makes a Move, e does so by posting a message to a Public Forum describing the move and displaying the state of the game in an agreed-upon format. Such a message may look like the contents of the following comment.
Y'know, it's debatable what happens when you say that. Since Comment Text can have no influence on the implementation of the rule, the rule should behave in exactly the same way if you remove all the comments... so one could interpret this to implicitly define the rest of the rule to be a comment. 


[[
I move my pawn from (5,13) to (10,13)

    1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 11 12 13
  .---------------------------------------.
13| .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  t  .  .  . |13
12| .  .  .  .  T  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . |12
11| .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . |11
10| .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . |10
 9| .  .  .  .  .  .  .  s  .  .  .  .  . |9
 8| .  .  f  .  .  .  .  .  .  f  .  .  . |8
 7| .  .  .  .  .  t  .  .  .  .  .  .  . |7
 6| .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . |6
 5| .  .  .  .  .  .  s  f  .  .  .  .  . |5
 4| .  F  .  .  .  s  .  .  .  .  .  .  . |4
 3| .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  f  .  . |3
 2| .  .  .  .  S  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . |2
 1| .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . |1
  '---------------------------------------'
    1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 11 12 13

[T] Teucer               0 points   Allies: Someone Else
[F] Rob the Voting Fish  0 points   Allies: none
[S] Someone Else         0 points   Allies: Teucer
]]
A visual representation of the board is strictly optional; the following 
comment is a perfectly valid expression of the same move as above.

[[
I move my pawn from (5,13) to (10,13).

Teucer               0 points   Allies: Someone Else
Hnefi: (5,12) Pawns: (10,13) (6,7)

Rob the Voting Fish  0 points   Allies: none
Hnefi: (2,4) Pawns: (3,8) (10,8) (8,5) (11,3)

Someone Else         0 points   Allies: Teucer
Hnefi: (5,2) Pawns: (8,9) (7,5) (6,4)
]]
If a Move as posted is illegal, then it is not considered to occur. If the state of the game displayed in the message does not accurately reflect the result of making that Move - for example, because the board does not reflect 
another Move made just before that - then the described Move takes
precedence.
}}



--
Wonko
Award Wonko a Win.
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