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

[Daniel Lepage <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Dec 31, 2003, at 11:35 AM, Craig wrote:
> > IIRC, the Chess repeated position rule only applies to a few preceding
> > turns. Also, in chess, the number of pieces tends to go down as the
> > game progresses, with no way of regaining old pieces, so at the very
> > most you need to consider every state the board's been in since the
> > most recent capture. Then also there's the fact that pawns can only
> > move foward, so all board states after a pawn move or after a capture
> > are guaranteed to be different from all states before then.
> >
> > In Tafl, as it is described here, it is perfectly conceivable that 
> > once
> > a player's pieces have been largely captured, e can repurchase eir
> > entire army back. Thus, after any given move, every previous state of
> > the board must be considered, since from every state it is possible to
> > progress to every other state.
>
> That is in fact quite different from genuine historical rules; my 
> intent was
> to make it possible for new players to join the game rather than 
> forcing
> everyone to decide at the beginning of the game whether they would 
> play or
> not. There is a thorough discussion of historical Tafl rules at
> http://user.tninet.se/%7Ejgd996c/hnefatafl/hnefatafl.html; there is
> absolutely no reason to believe that the game traditionally provided a 
> means
> of recovering pieces. Another reason why the rules are so different is 
> that
> all players are given an equal footing, whereas the original rulesets 
> had
> two players in rather different situations with different goals.

I know that traditional Tafl doesn't add new pieces; I'm talking about 
your PTafl rules, wherein the state of the board may very well become 
equal to a previous state. I would say, just let it - the odds that 
*every* player will participate in a back-forth stream indefinitely are 
incredibly small. There may even be players, who would place stones and 
get in the way for the sole purpose of breaking the monotony, players 
who are, dare I say it... whimsical.

> I'm leaning toward the suggestion above of only giving each player one
> Hnefi, and removing em from the game once it escapes.

The problem there is that it will be, in many cases, to everyone's 
benefit for another player to be removed from the game. So why would we 
try to stop an escaping player? And if there's no incentive to stop an 
escaping player, what differentiates this from a bunch of people 
sitting around gaining Tafl points for no reason?

--
Wonko
Award Wonko a Win.
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