Consider a game with a number of possible player actions. Actions are limited to a fixed distribution (N of X, M of Y etc). Each action has a duration cost. The actions are represented as cards, one card per action in the distribution.

Arbitrarily order the players. In turn order each player draughts an action from the available set of actions and places it at the end of a growing sequence of action cards. Do this until all actions have been placed into that sequence. Put the player markers on the first, second, third etc cards in the sequence in accordance with their initial player ordering.

The player whose marker is earliest on the action card track has the current turn. On their turn a player does an action. They either do the action of the card their marker is on or pay a fee and to move their marker to and do an action further ahead in the line. The fee is proportional to how far ahead they go. Action cards which have player markers on them are not available. After doing their selected action the player moves their marker forward by a number of cards equal to the duration cost of the action they selected. The card for the executed action is discarded. Depending on the duration and placement of their action selections a player may have multiple turns in a row. Any cards which end up earlier than all player markers upon a different player taking a turn are put at the other end of the action card track in an order selected by the active player.

This process repeats until some round ending condition (eg all of two actions done or only N possible actions left in the track) . The next round starts with building a new action track using the discarded cards on the end of the current track.

Sometimes gaming bring unexpected rewards. Sometimes you really don’t want the rewards.

Wednesday of last week I went to play games up at Endgame in Oakland (map). While we were there there was [a riot a few blocks away around the Bart station). We were thankfully oblivious to this silliness as we played our games.

That video was shot all of about 3 blocks from the Endgame store.

Last Wednesday I went up to Endgame again and noticed that there was a lot of free parking. That was unusual as there’s a convention centre across the road from the store and the spill over parking swamps the street parking. Normally I have to hunt for a slot but this time where were rows of open slots on both roads by the store. Just as I drove by on 10th Street I saw a parking slot right in front of the door on the side street, Washington Street, but I had gone too far to turn back. There was also a slot open right beside the side door. For contrarian reasons I looped around the block and parked on the side street right beside the store door. It took a little longer but the ease of being right beside the store door appealed.

While we were playing (Confucius as happens) we heard yelling and loud booms from outside. A gang of yobos were running down 10th street smashing car windshields by jumping on them. Somewhere around twenty cars had their windshields smashed. The car in the slot right by the side door where I nearly parked lost its windshield. Four people that were playing games with us had their car windshields smashed. By simple foible of being on Washington Street rather than 10th Street my car was left untouched. I later saw the couple that owned the car that had parked where I’d nearly parked. They’d lost their windshield. They seemed bright, young, eager, potentially parents of small kids, and not at all keen on not having a windshield. I almost wanted to apologise for not taking the parking slot. It was so stupid.

One thing struck me as I walked back upstairs to our game: gamers wouldn’t have been so stupid. Not that gamers are so wonderful or smart or simply better, not at all, but gamers would have understood the incentive models that drive change and would thus have understood the rank stupidity of smashing windshields. That’s no way of effecting change, just of wasting your time and other’s, expensively.

I posted the following on BoardGameGeek and was a little surprised in retrospect at its truth:

I suspect that ultimately I will have designed one game, just one game, but it will be a game which has expressed itself in multiple published games, each one a different view onto that one core ur-game. That’s fine. My game design and development activities circle that ur-game, poking at it, extracting and applying ideas, working out various expressions of that ur-game in various splinter games. Some work out, some fail and whither, some meld back into the ur-game and disappear waiting for a more suitable splinter, and that’s all pretty much what I expect of the progression.

Motions are still (slowly) under way toward releasing/publishing my older Age of Steam maps. A skilled artist is working on rendering the maps in far slicker form than my Inkscape scribbles. We’ve also started toward determining the supply chain etc.

There are five maps in the pipeline, the first three of which are Wales, South-East Australia and Denmark. None of this so far should be huge news…except that I’m now also releasing the full text of the rules for each design.

Age of Steam: Wales

Age of Steam: Wales is geared for 3 or 4 players and introduces track gauges to Age of Steam. Players select either narrow or standard gauge track when building track and must also manage their Links between narrow and standard gauge for deliveries.

• Rules for Age of Steam: Wales

Age of Steam: South-East Australia

Age of Steam: South-East Australia was designed for 4 or 5 players and is the first map of a series which introduces a significantly new economic system to Age of Steam that makes for a simpler and yet deeper, nastier and more dramatic game pattern.

• Rules for Age of Steam: South-East Australia

Age of Steam: Denmark

Age of Steam: Denmark was targeted for 3 or 4 players and is the next step with that new economic system and adds the notion of limited train availability (borrowed from the 18xx). Age of Steam: Denmark may also be the first Age of Steam map which actively encourages highly dramatic hail mary victories. Leaping come-from-behind victories in Age of Steam: Denmark are quite possible if well planned.

• Rules for Age of Steam: Denmark

We’ve been playing 1889 lately (3 games in three days). It sparked the following game notion (and thus the creation of this category):

• Something akin to an 1830-esque 2D stock market
• A fairly large deck of cards, each card bearing the name of a company and an arrow (right, left, up, down)
  • Some cards may have double arrows
• The deck of cards is shuffled and some number are laid out in an ordered draught pool
  • The draught pool should be long, providing a long view into the future.
• One their turn a player may: 1. Buy one share
  • If all shares of a company are in player’s hands at the end of a round, the stock value moves up a row 1. Sell any number of shares
  • On share sales, stock value moves down one row per sold share 1830-style 1. Play one or two cards from their hand
  • Each played card affects the stock value of the names company by moving its stock value in the arrowed direction
  • Assume a smallish hand-size limit, perhaps 5 1. Draught any two cards from the pool
  • As soon as a card is draughted a new card is drawn and added to the new end of the draught pool
  • The oldest card is free
  • If one of the new cards is draughted the draughting player must place $N on each older card in the draught pool, sweetening those cards for later players
  • If a card bearing money is draughted the draughting player takes the money
• The Game is played until the card deck is exhausted
• The deck is then inverted (no shuffling) and the game continues through the ordered deck
• Once the draught deck is exhausted the game is over
  • Players cash in their shares
  • Player with the largest net worth wins

Possible extension:

• Instead of the cards bearing a company and an arrow, have two decks, one of companies and another of arrows and players must draught one card from each deck’s pool and play two cards (one of each) on their turn

Structures to toy with:

• Tichu-style, the hand starts with a round of passing:
• Two cards to each player
• Review the passed cards
• Two more cards to your partner
• It is possible that’s too much passing
• Played cards are arranged in a 2D grid. Each row and column of contiguous cards must either form a meld or a legal subset of a meld
• Cards may only be played in positions in which they extend (potential) melds both directions
• Cards may not be played in positions in which they conflict with potential melds in any direction
  • Are full houses legal melds?
  • Stairs?
• One their turn a player may play a single card or pass
• If they play a single card they may then do one of:
• Play a second card adjacent to the first (any direction)
• Play a PASS card
  • Each player has N PASS cards
  • PASS cards immediately pass control to the partner and are lost when played
• Place or recover their BLOCK
  • Each player has one BLOCK
  • BLOCKs mark positions that may not be played in
  • Should a trick end while blocks are still in play they are lost
• Pass
• Suits should probably wrap, 10-11-12-1-2 style

Divination of intent and thence coordination seems the core problem of a partnership game. More standard partnership card games communicate richly by what is/is_not played when and how that pattern relates to the goals of the partnership. Not One More also supports extensive signalling in the card grid, but it is both extraordinarily rich and extraordinarily diffuse, making divination and coordination hard. The primary idea of the above structures is to add more discrete signalling methods between partners.

Small clean-ups of the map and rules:

Nothing really big done: just edits for clarity, consistency, a bit of extra colour on the map, a few changed nouns, fixed capitalisations etc.

A chat with Ben Keightley on #bgdf_chat (I’m using the wonderful irssi instead of BitchX these days, so the formatting is a little different than previous log posts):

11:34 | clearclaw > You rarely play card games, right Ben?

11:35 | Coca_Lite > That’s right, I don’t play a lot of card games.

11:35 > clearclaw nods

11:35 | Coca_Lite > Not ‘traditional’ card games, anyway. I play a lot of Race for the Galaxy but I don’t think that’s what you mean.

11:35 > clearclaw nods. I’ve been noodling a sort of reverse climbing game

11:37 | clearclaw > The core element of the noodle is that played cards form melds against the other player’s played cards

11:37 | clearclaw > And the player of the last card that is part of the highest value meld is the current trick-winner

11:37 | clearclaw > The idea is to extend hand-management out of just to player’s hand to extend across all the hands of all the players.

11:37 | Coca_Lite > Love it.

11:39 | clearclaw > Thus one player leads an ace, another follows with a second ace and is therefore winning with a pair of aces, a third plays a 2, someone plays a pair of twos and is winning with trip 2s, then someone plays 3/4/5 to win with the A/2/3/4/5 etc.

11:40 | Coca_Lite > Yes, I love it. Lately you can take any game and add ‘…without the auction!’ to it, and I’m sold. Your game sounds like Modern Art…without the auction.

11:41 > clearclaw grins. I kinda like it too. Had the idea and posted it last night.

12:28 | clearclaw > Naming the inverse climbing game NotOneMore for the nonce, Tichu-style stairs are simply too hard to calculate comparative probabilities on.

12:29 | clearclaw > That leaves either the standard meld types of pairs, trips, 4-of-a-kind and rummy-esque runs, or going for the Poker set.

12:29 | clearclaw > Current thoughts are:

12:30 | clearclaw > Must either follow suit lead or must extend what has already been played toward a potentially winning meld or must fold.

12:30 | clearclaw > If fold can’t play in that trick any more

12:32 | clearclaw > Once all players pass trick is resolved

12:32 | clearclaw > Possible: If all players pass except the last player to play a card, they may NOT play again.

12:33 | clearclaw > Player may play one or two cards on their turn.

12:34 | clearclaw > Thinking of making melds have the value of the lowest card in them. That would weaken the already enormously powerful straights.

12:35 | clearclaw > Physicality would be all players toss cards into the central pot. As each player takes the lead they take the cards they want from the pot and build their winning meld before them.

12:35 | clearclaw > As they are superceded they toss that back in and another player builds the new winning meld.

12:37 | Coca_Lite > Once a card is ‘committed’ to a meld, it should stay there. No rearranging melds willy-nilly.

12:37 | clearclaw > Why?

12:38 | clearclaw > (asides from the explosive complexity)

12:38 | Coca_Lite > Explosive complexity, and to force early commitments by players.

12:38 | clearclaw > Fair point

12:39 | clearclaw > I’ve been more worried by having the game consist of only one trick as all players play all their cards in the first trick

12:40 | clearclaw > I had been thinking of various 2D arrangements of cards which expressed multi-member participations.

12:40 | clearclaw > And each player has a marker. If the marker is on the graph they are winning. As they are superceded another player becomes King of the Hill.

12:41 | clearclaw > Having committed cards would reduce the single-trick problem greatly.

12:41 | clearclaw > And would put in some interesting hand-management aspects.

12:42 | Coca_Lite > OK, or something like: each player has his own deck of cards with a colored back. Cards contributed to melds score for owners.

12:50 | clearclaw > How about each player plays 1 or 2 cards. The first card must be placed adjacent to a previously played card and the next card (if played) adjacent to that. If the player’s played card(s) form a winning meld they put their marker on one. Any previous player’s marker is removed from the board.

12:51 | clearclaw > Rows and columns of cards must either form legal melds or fractions there-of

12:51 | clearclaw > The value of a meld is the lowest value card in the meld

12:52 | Coca_Lite > Yeesh, it’s starting to sound like deconstructed Uno

12:52 | clearclaw > Scrabble-icious.

12:52 | clearclaw > I thought Uno was only a matching game?

12:52 > clearclaw has never played Uno

12:53 | doho123 > Uno is crazy eights

12:53 | doho123 > Match either the rank or suit of the previously played card

12:53 | clearclaw > I’ve not played that either. Just read the ‘geek page.

12:54 | clearclaw > Discard matching.

12:54 | doho123 > Right

12:54 | clearclaw > The “array” is sort of an agglomerative discard pile I guess.

12:55 | clearclaw > Yes, deconstructed Uno. Ha!

An odd idea, not yet fully enfranchised into a game. Consider a (relatively standard) climbing game, perhaps along the lines of Mu, however rather than players playing cards in sets they would iteratively play them one at a time until everyone passes¹. The key element would be that rather than a player’s played cards forming the sets within themselves, they would instead form sets within the space of all cards played for that “trick”. For instance:

1. PlayerA: Leads an Ace.
2. PlayerB: Follows with another Ace and is therefore winning with two Aces.
3. PlayerC: Follows with an 8.
4. PlayerD: Follows with a pair of 8s and is therefore winning with three 8s. …etc.

Problem:

• Determining who is winning the current “trick”.
• Requirements for following.
• How points are assigned
• Method required to denote who is currently winning the trick

Initial thoughts:

• 5 suits (perhaps a Sticheln deck)
• Do not need to follow suit
• May play any number of cards so long as the total number of cards played by that player in the trick is no more than one larger than the total number of cards played by the previously card-count leader[^2].
• Suits are circularly ordered with the lead suit high and the others following in a constant rotational order
• Standard meld definitions including Tichu’s stairs.
• Each meld in the taken trick scores the value of the highest card in the meld, with arrangement of melds organised so as to minimise left over cards
• Left over cards and singletons don’t score

Friend: Which is more important: that a game be interesting or fun?

Me, in instant response: Interesting of course!

Friend: Well there’s the problem.

Me: Oh.