Daniel Lepage on 26 Jun 2003 06:02:01 -0000


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Re: [spoon-discuss] Subgame?



On Thursday, June 26, 2003, at 01:21  AM, SkArcher wrote:

26/06/2003 06:15:41, Daniel Lepage <dplepage@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


On Thursday, June 26, 2003, at 12:10  AM, Rob Speer wrote:

On Wed, Jun 25, 2003 at 11:54:26PM -0400, Daniel Lepage wrote:
How does this look for a start?

Sounds too complex for the state of the game right now.

Most of the complexity is simply a roundabout way of saying, "Let's
pretend we're taking turns and have cards!"

The game I'm trying to create is Dvorak, which can be described in 99
words:

Shuffle the cards into a draw pile.
 Draw five cards each. Choose who takes the first turn.
 Each turn, draw a card from the top of the draw pile, then play a
Thing and/or an Action. (Things go onto the table in front of the
person who played them, Actions go face-up onto the discard pile.)
  If you've got more than five cards in your hand at the end of your
turn, discard down to five. Then it's the next Player's turn.
  When the draw pile's empty, shuffle the discard pile to make a new
one.
  And that's it.


Well yes, but that is exactly the problem, isn't it. As with Nomic, where
the short version is


Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it
differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is
proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed. --Peter
Suber



Its not what you are saying that is the issue, but what you aren't

Anyone reading the above comment has absolutely no idea that the result
could be B Nomic, but B Nomic is only one of the possibilities - your card game says very little, and (especially in combination with Nomic itself)
this could result in one hell of a lot of complexity to track.

Except there's not really anything that the 99-word Dvorak leaves out, except the text of the cards themselves. Which is whatever we want it to be, so it couldn't be put in anyway. And I suppose it doesn't specifically say that you do what the cards say.

In Dvorak games in general, there's not much to track. You need to know whose turn it is; you need to know where the cards are; you need somebody to implement the effects of the cards, which are usually fairly basic ("destroy target Thing." or "Action: Draw two cards, then discard one.").

We could play 'open-hand', as it were; then all we'd need is a little automailer, so that someone could email it a message, "Wonko draws a card" or "Glotmorf discards at random" and it would email to s-b, "Wonko draws 'The End of the World'." or "Glotmorf discards 'Mantisman'."

There actually is a MUSH engine already written for doing exactly that. See http://www.dvorakgame.co.uk/engine.html for more details.

--
Wonko

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