Author |
Topic: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games (Read 522015 times) |
|
christianF
Forum Moderator
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #4019
Gender: 
Posts: 804
|
 |
Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #915 on: Apr 1st, 2012, 8:52am » |
|
on Apr 1st, 2012, 8:25am, clyring wrote:Thanks. I understand your not wanting to do analysis, but if it were 'just' analysis, I would do it myself and tell you instead of asking that you do it yourself. My goal for the endgame has largely been to find the general by looking at the specific. In this case, it illustrates an endgame concept that I don't think you understand yet- one that allows you to make a 4-point mistake even so late in the game that your intuition would tell you that you have no need to think. Nothing is ever that symple... 
Fortunately, in this position you only have two distinct options- placing in my territory and growing in your own territory. I've told you that growing is not correct- I think it's best if you find out why placing in my territory for the next 14 moves should be better on your own. You just might learn something. |
|
Given my playing abilities I can't afford to ignore any advise and your generalization is just what I need as a kind of rule of thumb. I had considered the differences but they failed to sufficiently come into focus. Now I'll consider them more in deep in my next games. If you care to play another I would be honored  .
|
|
 IP Logged |
|
|
|
christianF
Forum Moderator
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #4019
Gender:
Posts: 804
|
|
Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #917 on: Apr 3rd, 2012, 9:43am » |
|
My all but inseparable companion for eleven years has died today.
Troy 1999-2012
This photo has been taken a week ago. He was thirteen and had a tumor the size of a grapefruit, which caused him no pain and didn't interfere with eating and subsequent functions yet. But it started to interfere with the functioning of his hind legs. He had to walk slowly and slept some twenty hours a day in the last weeks. His last week was full of the smell of spring and extra snacks and attention. I miss him dearly.
|
|
IP Logged |
|
|
|
Dolus
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #6845
Gender:
Posts: 86
|
|
Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #918 on: Apr 3rd, 2012, 11:09am » |
|
I am sorry to hear that, but glad to hear that his last week was a good one.
|
|
IP Logged |
|
|
|
omar
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #2
Gender:
Posts: 1003
|
|
Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #919 on: Apr 3rd, 2012, 11:21am » |
|
Sorry to hear about that.
|
|
IP Logged |
|
|
|
christianF
Forum Moderator
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #4019
Gender:
Posts: 804
|
|
Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #920 on: May 24th, 2012, 10:18am » |
|
This thread miraculously keeps attracting viewers. I almost feel obliged to bring some news. For the Havannah Challenge we hope to set a date next week, and the CodeCup Challenge will present Symple as its 2013 game shortly - the organizer is currently caught up in school exams I presume.
The one new development is that Ed has started on the Mu applet. Mu is a simple, complex, versatile and flexible organism. It was basically conceived during one of those nightly bikerides home, after a night at the games club Fanaat, where you suddenly find yourself in the street where you live, without any recollection of the ride itself.
No checkers involved, just let the thing explain itself.
Mu is a territory game, a connection game, a elimination game, a race and block game, in fact thematically it harbors about everything except Chess and it can be played with any number of players (though a two player version is a likely stepping stone).
It has been played once, some 30 years ago. Barring the change from a compact lay-out to a non-compact lay-out, it hasn't changed, not even after all physical signs of its existence were wiped out in the SE Fireworks disaster in Enschede, the Netherlands, in 2000. You can't lose a self explanatory organism.
So calling this my magnum opus and predicting one of the most unusual abstract games ever is somewhat awkward.
Consider it my farewell gift to the abstract game community. It would not be possible without an applet so I hope Ed's efforts to make one that is fit to handle the game's complex behaviour are successful as well as appreciated. They certainly are by me .
I've updated the rules (examples of chain reactions, minor changes where wording was less than clear, a bug in an example).
|
| « Last Edit: May 24th, 2012, 10:41am by christianF » |
IP Logged |
|
|
|
christianF
Forum Moderator
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #4019
Gender:
Posts: 804
|
|
Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #921 on: May 27th, 2012, 5:20am » |
|
I noticed that at BGG the year of invention of Martin Medema's game Atlantis is said to be 1980. That cannot not be right.
Atlantis: note the compact lay-out of the board segments.
Martin's memory may or may not be better than mine, but since Mu's conception was directly based on it, and immediately following it, both games have the same date. In my case all material evidence of Mu disappeared in 2000. This afternoon I'll take a bikeride to Fanaat, first time in two decades or so, to see if Martin is even still alive. At my age, if you don't see an old acquaintance for a couple of years, there's a fifty fifty chance they're dead.
P.S.
Nowadays it's only a three mile ride to the university. Beautiful weather and a lively campus full of students enjoying the descent of the holy spirit. I received my fair share: the transmission of my bike got stuck in low gear.
Fanaat is housed in this building called the Bastille.
To prevent the holy spirit from entering, it was closed over pentecost. Hallelujah. So Martin's state of being, or lack thereof, remains as yet inconclusive. He may be alive, he may be dead, like Schrödinger's cat.
P.P.S
Fanaat itself dates Atlantis 1986 - they may have some record. And indeed, come to think of it I left Fanaat in 1986 (in the flesh that is, I'm an honorary member) because of the fairies and trolls flooding the place, and that was indeed not long after Atlantis' arrival.
And who cares anyway  .
|
| « Last Edit: May 27th, 2012, 9:04am by christianF » |
IP Logged |
|
|
|
christianF
Forum Moderator
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #4019
Gender:
Posts: 804
|
|
Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #922 on: May 30th, 2012, 3:20am » |
|
I had a reality check at Fanaat yesterday. Its homebase, the 'Belletrie Library', is now situated in a larger section of the Bastille called the 'Dragon's Cellar'. The all male occupancy was clearly focused on in social interaction around thematic games in which one could be captain of industry, or move merchandise around the world, or create civilizations. Two of those present had ever heard of Havannah and none had ever heard of the Monte Carlo programming method - mind, this is a university of technology. I felt I was wasting my time there.
Martin Medema, by the way, is still among the living. "Part of the inventory" as it was put.
|
| « Last Edit: May 30th, 2012, 3:26pm by christianF » |
IP Logged |
|
|
|
christianF
Forum Moderator
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #4019
Gender:
Posts: 804
|
|
Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #923 on: May 30th, 2012, 3:51pm » |
|
It looks like the Havannah Human versus Bot Challenge will take place in the period end of August, beginning of September, live at iGGC, courtesy of Arty Sandler. I count Castro (Timo Ewalds), Wanderer (Richard Lorentz) and Lajkonik (Marcin Ciura) in. I'm in the dark about a possible German entry, but I'm playing against a new opponent at LG (kenzopower, no info) who plays like a bot. And not too bad either, for a bot.
'Kenzo' is a dice game. 'Kenzopower' is 'Monte-Carlopower'. It plays only Havannah. It's a failed Turing test
P.S. Not that 'failed' after all, or at least not in that sense: turns out Kenzopower is a player called Max with a bot-like preference for tactics .
|
| « Last Edit: May 31st, 2012, 10:10am by christianF » |
IP Logged |
|
|
|
christianF
Forum Moderator
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #4019
Gender:
Posts: 804
|
|
Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #924 on: Jun 7th, 2012, 9:16am » |
|
So Luis asked me at iGGC how I would describe Mu in one sentence. I immediately replied "A simple organism operating on a complex terrain". Because that's what it is.
The organism emerged in a number of steps in which I was hardly involved, though I sparked the process at the game club Fanaat at the University of Twente, by drawing attention to a game called "Explosion" featured in issue 55 of Games & Puzzles Magazine.
Martin Medema was the one to combine this mechanism with the move protocol of Sid Sackson's Focus, to a simple hybrid with an extremely capricious behaviour, called Explocus. Then, a couple of months later as far as I remember, he came with the monumental game Atlantis. It featured the organism that now operates uncurtailed in Mu.
Atlantis is a crooked game. I realized that on the way back, an eight-mile nightly ride of which I had no recollection at all, afterwards. The question that triggered the concept of Mu was this: "What do you use explosions for, to build something or to clear something?" and the answer was clear. Martin had released a spectacular new organism on the wrong kind of terrain, one that wasn't fitting its will and intent adequately.
Now for all the right or wrong reasons, Mu has remained dormant for more than a quarter of a century. That's about to change. The bottleneck was the mindsports applet. Mindsports uses one generic applet for all games, like a car using the same engine and chassis for different bodies. Sometimes that's tricky, like the 'layered' boards of Caissa and Shakti. The trick was to consider the tiles on these boards as 'pieces' and keep up an elaborate administration. The new applet has the 'layered board' as a build-in feature. It will now be used for all games, even if they don't use it. I can say it works fine for Caissa and Shakti. Mu is more than a layered board, but now that this particular hurdle has been taken, a two-player applet should follow soon.
Mu is a tribute to freedom, human playfulness and organic design - even the board is 'organic'. It's the very anti-thesis of the elaborate restrictions and forced decisiveness sought after by the Church of Cyclophobia and Hard Finitude. It appears 'complicated' to a disorganized mind, but simple and complex to an organized one. It fits Prince's qualification "make the rules and break them all 'cause you're the best".
It was conceived, standing on Martin's shoulders, without the use of a single checker, precisely because it is an organism, rather than a mechanism with different parts (however cleverly assembled). It lived through its 'annihilation' in the SE Fireworks disaster, re-emerging in my mind as if nothing had happened. It was tested only once, more than a quarter of a century ago, but never in the current 'organic lay-out' and the implied opening protocol. It allows you to get from say here:
to say here:
after seven rounds.
It's worth keeping an eye on .
|
| « Last Edit: Jun 10th, 2012, 2:05pm by christianF » |
IP Logged |
|
|
|
christianF
Forum Moderator
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #4019
Gender:
Posts: 804
|
|
Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #925 on: Jun 16th, 2012, 8:22am » |
|
If abstract games matter at all ...
Of the fortynine games at mindsports that I invented or co-invented, twelve made the ArenA and eight of these, I feel, "matter, if abstract games matter at all".
Of these, seven are 'organic', but what precisely does that mean? Did you have trouble identifying the one that is not? If not, then there's an 'intuitive notion' involved.
All of them feature uniform pieces, and only two of them allow a second kind of piece by promotion. Two others are pure placement games, a type of game not usually associated with any 'organic' quality. That is, untill you see a game in a one minute timeframe. Go players know the strong sense of 'movement' a game can induce. A game obviously doesn't need to feature actual movement, to feel organic.
I don't use the word "as opposed to ...". My approach does not concern itself with finitude and drawlessness as a priori conditions, but Symple, Havannah and Sygo come close enough. On the other hand, games resulting from the 'finite and drawless' approach may be highly organic, like Mark Steere's Oust. So 'organic design' is not the only or even a 'superior' alley, but it's my favorite and it has some characteristics (a high success rate not among them) .
So what is 'organic design'?
Quote:"His naming the animals, what is it but the parable of the scientist in him? He knows the name of a thing at sight. Later he tries to find out what it is."
(John Erskine - Adam and Eve) |
|
It's later now, so let's try. Metaphorically speaking, I'd say that an organic game is an 'inspirited mechanism'. You start with pieces and a protocol regulating placement, movement and/or growth (if applicable) and interaction with its opposing equivalent. Once you've found one and absorbed it, try to figure out what it is and what it wants. Neither is trivial and both are to be subjected to the scrutiny of Occam's Razor at all times. The summit is a self-explanatory organism revealing itself in the simplest possible terms: a quintessential game effectively eliminates the inventor from the process of inventing.
An example
Here's what Ralf Gering wrote about Emergo:
Quote:"Emergo lacks the excitement of piece promotion, which is essential to draughts variants. To me Emergo is a "castrated" version of column checkers."
(bgg) |
|
Ralf studied Culture and Religion at Tübingen University and graduated in 1999 (Master of Arts). He is also a highly acclaimed authority on mancala games and draughts variants. He thinks column checkers is a draughts variant. He has a high regard for the majority opinion and sees games as subject to human arbitrariness, not as inspirited mechanisms with an intent of their own. Like this:
Quote:| "His caging the animals, what is it but the parable of the scientist in him? He will imprison a thing at sight. Later he tries to find out what it is." |
|
In this metaphor, column checkers is the animal, while checkers is the cage. Column checkers was born and bred in captivity, with Bashni, Lasca and Stapeldammen (literally 'column checkers') providing the cages. It was denied its own nature, its own identity, and forced to take on a false one.
Strangely enough, Lasca has Ralf's full mark of approval. The game may be extremely susceptible to opening analysis, tedious, crammed, self-hampering and, excuse me, outright boring, but it comes highly recommended by authority and majority. Jawohl.
Emergo is in fact 'All Kings Lasca', albeit with an interesting opening protocol instead of a crammed initial position. It is so much freer, there's so much more room to breathe, that it feels elated in comparison. But that, to Ralf Gering, is castrated. His approach breathes a deep-felt dislike of freedom.
This is what happened when I was introduced to Stapeldammen by Ed van Zon, because, as he put it, "some beautiful things are going on there". He showed me two aspects:- How columns would always start out at their strongest, and weaken in capturing sequences till they became a liability themselves.
- How the system was 'spiraling upwards' because the number of pieces could and would decrease, but never increase.
Stapeldammen has no promotion, so we were spared that distraction, but it even more emphazised the fact that the beauty was in the columns and their interaction, and not so much in the 'checkers' aspect. And the second point would guarantee termination at some point, so what the heck is checkers doing here anyway? That's Occam's Razor. We had the animal out of its cage, and let it determine its own housing, which implied an entering protocol that fits it like a glove.
So these are aspects of organic design: recognize a thing for what it is, and don't let the place where you found it, or the manner of its finding, fool you. Respect it as if it were alive and listen to it. Don't start with a cage and force the animal to fit.
2b continued, probably
|
| « Last Edit: Jun 23rd, 2012, 6:06am by christianF » |
IP Logged |
|
|
|
christianF
Forum Moderator
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #4019
Gender:
Posts: 804
|
|
Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #926 on: Jun 18th, 2012, 1:39pm » |
|
Immunized ...
The two player version of the Mu applet is under construction. Now that I've finally allowed the game to take over, it didn't hesitate. What a surprise. I'm getting impatient (not that it helps, Ed will work at his own chosen pace) and can only concentrate on things close to the subject. Organic design for instance, as a time killer  .
Conceiving Mu - a dialog on a bike
There are things about Mu that I sometimes have difficulty explaining:- It's a simple game in terms of structure.
- I conceived it within an hour and without touching so much as a checker.
- Its behaviour, in general terms, is fairly predictable.
I posted some thoughts about predictability of game behaviour before, and Mu fits the bill despite its complexity. We're about to reconstruct its immaculate conception during an eight mile nightly bike ride home, starting with an organism that was handed to me on a silver platter earlier that same evening by Martin Medema and his monumental game Atlantis.
The first pillar: the basic organism
The basic organism goes back to Sid Sackson's Focus and is based on a form of positive feedback: a column - a single included - moves as far as it is high. We're not concerned with bicolored columns, just with single-colored ones like these:
Here are some men arbitrarily divided over 6 columns. Consider it to be one organism. Like an ant colony it answers to a single mind: yours. It can split or merge, go this direction or that, crawl or jump, and it can display efficiency in that there's a minimum number of step in which it can do things like:- Spread out completely
- Raise one stack consisting of all men
- Get at least one man to A
- Get say 10 men to B
- Occupy the area around C completely
Or reach similar arbitrary objectives. It moves and morphs. For the moment it lacks growth ... but we'll get to that.
The second pillar: the basic terrain
The basic terrain goes back to an obscure seventies game in which a square would 'explode' if it would hold as many men as or more men than the number of its adjacent squares, ejecting one man to each of these, leaving the remainder behind, if any. It was called "Explosion" and was featured in issue 55 of Games & Puzzles Magazine. We had experimented with it before at Fanaat, including the hexversion, but on this particular night Martin arrived with a board made up of 7-cell segments, like this:
It allowed for boards of different sizes and shapes and a 'one move per segment' protocol, that would enable move combinations without having them get out of hand. Note that even this compact hexagonal lay-out has 18 'capacity-3' cells along its edge. These will already 'explode' if they get to hold a 3-men column.
Growth (will kill you)
Under the explosion protocol, the maximum height of a column would be 5 on a centercell, 4, 3 or 2 along the edge, limiting the columns' range accordingly. The game started with each player occupying one cornersegment filled with 7 men, one on each cell. It allowed each player to explode a first (capacity-3) cell on his second move.
In Atlantis, explosions provide the growing mechanism: If a cell explodes, it ejects one man to each of its neighbors (letting any remainder evaporate - that made me raise an eyebrow right away). Next the cell becomes a 'well', growing one man each turn untill it reaches capacity for a second time. Then it explodes again and turns into a 'crater' - a solid obstacle. That, as it turned out, is a critical growth rate.
The negative side of positive feedback
Here's the thing about positive feedback: you have to keep it controlled or it will spin out of hand. Wells and craters were no longer 'territory', that is: these cells did no longer count as neighbors. Now say you're a cell and your neighbor explodes: you get an extra man and at the same time lose a neighbor. Your capacity decreases while the load increases. That's "Chain Reaction" flashing in neon. Add that these chain reactions are most likely to creep inwards from the corners and edges, fueled by the wells, and the picture is clear: you're first and foremost trying to get away from your own wells, with whole sections along the edges eventually turning into craters and 'sinking into the sea' behind you ('cratered segments' were removed entirely). With any luck, you could secure some territory with targeted explosions, at a safe distance from each other, in the remains of what used to be a large board. I thought it was a rather pathetic object and a game that seemed designed with the sole purpose of hampering itself. Although I don't remember, capture must have been by replacement - the alternatives are 'absorption', which would send positive feedback completely through the roof, and 'one-for-one' removal, which would weaken both the attacker and the victim. Not good in a multi-player game. But the segments crumbling into the 'sea' still dominate the recollection of my first impression.
It was a strange night and I finally took my bike and went home in a state of confusion.
2b continued
|
| « Last Edit: Jun 19th, 2012, 12:33pm by christianF » |
IP Logged |
|
|
|
christianF
Forum Moderator
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #4019
Gender:
Posts: 804
|
|
Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #927 on: Jun 19th, 2012, 7:30am » |
|
Immunized ...
I must have sleepbiked on autopilot. I re-entered reality in the monochromatic orange light of an arterial road about half a mile from my home, about two o'clock in the morning. My legs were still peddling. Mu was born. I felt elated.
I had left Fanaat with conflicting impressions. On the one side there was this beautiful organism, versatile, fexible, efficient, volatile and capricious. What did it want? That was the key question. Certainly not the crippled fight to secure some space on a sinking island, fighting another sorry bunch of natives, driven onwards by explosions and crumbling edges of one's own making. Not only the manner of erecting walls seemed wrong, but the place where they first appeared: in the players' own back, at the edge of the board. One needed growth, and low capacity edge cells were the only place to get it, initially. It was like building a wall against a wall. Meanwhile jumping to the center with high stacks to erect walls there, required making high stacks in the first place, without having them explode away accidentally in a chain reaction. In the center you'd need a 6-column for the first explosion, and next you'd need 5-columns for adjacent ones. But the attempted 'wall' would more often than not become an omni-directional 'blob' due to a chain reaction. Some way to build a wall.
Then, somewhere along the way, it occured to me that explosions are used, usually, to clear an area, not to erect something. And then the vision came. Ask any inventor how a game came to be, and it will probably be a more or less rational and evolutionary story along a timeline. But you can't rationalize a vision, or at least not its appearance. So I'll rationalize in retrospect, but it all happened in a fraction of a second.
Vision rationalized
To clear an area there must be something to clear in the first place. So I imagined the above board filled with a top-layer of white draughtsmen, on which play began. Suddenly there were holes appearing by explosions. The holes grew bigger and bigger, like bacteria in a petri dish, and encountered one another and ... didn't merge. Instead black draughtsmen appeared to replace any white one the removal of which would cause a merger otherwise. An organically growing natural separation between different territories that would be occupied by the players' pieces.
I envisioned the board still in the above compact lay-out and I could see the top-layer exploding away leaving behind a wall as a connected network spanning the whole board, dividing it in different sections. It was all in one vision, one moment, and it included the growth of a new man on every cell that had its top-layer blown away. It provided fuel for the very same chain reactions, but with the reverse effect: they would actually clear one's territory instead of taking it away. A 'one-man-per-explosion' growth rate would be substantial, but not critical. This, I felt immediately, was what the organism was made for.
By the time I awoke, peddling, I had filled in most of the details: white draughtsmen would only have their own as neighbors, to determine capacity. The cells of territory they revealed when an explosion occured on them would have their own and those of the top-layer for neighbors. This would allow any overcapacity to remain 'in place' (much of the energy in Atlantis evaporated as 'overcapacity', that had bothered me immediately). Of course cells that became part of the wall could also have overcapacity. I realized there were men on the wall ... men that could travel the whole wall. Oh well, maybe not the whole wall, but they were there, and the question 'what would they want' had an obvious answer: remain involved. It was a detail that would solve itself, I felt. And it did, though it was not at all a 'detail', but rather the crucial key to invading territories! It goes to show once more that if the system is sound, the rule will be there.
The next week I played the game against Anneke Treep, with the rules as they are now, albeit still in a compact lay-out. It is, as far as I know, the only game ever played. I lost.
Epilogue
The current procedure for making a board, as part of the game, came later. It solves the '5-players problem' and makes the game faster (due to a lower average capacity), with more room for opportunism based on local peculiarities.
Now what ...  Mu on the brain and no applet yet ... come on Ed!
|
| « Last Edit: Jun 23rd, 2012, 6:10am by christianF » |
IP Logged |
|
|
|
christianF
Forum Moderator
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #4019
Gender:
Posts: 804
|
|
Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #928 on: Jun 21st, 2012, 1:22pm » |
|
Having a mind with a mind of its own can be annoying . Meanwhile the applet progresses steadily - all my trials lord, soon be over.
Here's a home industry superpaint example of an endgame position between two players. Both have ten men left, divided over several sections and the wall.
Preliminary observations
- G6 turned into a cell of the wall before F5 did.
- J6 and I5 are yellow territory as long as he is on the wall.
- The top left section is yellow territory. The only invasion point (I10) is guarded.
- The middle right section is yellow territory. The only invasion points (D6 and E8, if the red man on the wall is moved to F9) are guarded. If white invades off the wall, the supporting 2-columns are trapped. If he invades with a 2-column, it is captured by the yellow top man on E7, while the bottom man still guards against recapture off the wall. Only a simultaneous invasion of two -2-colums could be problematic for Yellow. Yet, as we'll see, that would eventually cost Red the large bottom right section.
- Red's bottom left section is safe. The only possible invaders are on the wall and both cells they can reach are guarded. Yellow cannot erect a 2-column on H5 (to guard an invading top single with the bottom one), because H5 is a capacity-1 cell. Simultaneous invasion (one move per segment) meets with F24, capturing one and, exploding, capturing the second one.
- Red's top section is also safe, and would remain 'red and safe' even if the 2-column were to jump over the wall, because its wall section cannot be reached by a yellow column elsewhere on the wall.
- Red's large bottom right section seems safe, but isn't.
That's not a preliminary observation, but the result of Yellow's plan.
Yellow has a route to the rightmost section of the wall: build a 2-column on I6, jump with it to G6, build a 3-column on F6 and jump to C6, capturing the yellow man (if still there) and occupying both wall cells (while losing one man to oscillation).
- Yellow: H5-I6; F56
- Red: H10-G9; DC3
- Yellow: IG6
- Red: GF9; CB3
- Yellow: GF6; EC7 expodes
- Red: C54
Red realizes that a double invasion will cost him the bottom right section and clears the wall.
- Yellow: GF6; D87
- Red: B42
- Yellow: H8-E5 explodes (chain reaction); FC6 explodes (-1 by oscillation)
- Red: C4-B3
- Yellow: D7-B5 explodes
- Red: B34x
- Yellow: D67; AB4x
- Red: B34x
- Yellow: D67; C5-B4x
- Red: BC2
Red could not recapture B24x because of ... D7-B5 (exploding and capturing at B4)
- Yellow: D7-B5 exploding
- Red: B2-C3
Red could invade here with G10-E8, having it captured and recapturing off the wall. The top section would become neutral and so would the section he just invaded: Yellow still can jump in with one man off the wall, because in the bottom right section he wins the three against two fight anyway, by exchange. So he doesn't need the extra man there. That's not worth it for Red.
- Yellow: AB4; C6-D7
- Red: C23
Yellow doesn't need the man on the wall anymore and moves it off the wal to D7. Now a red invasion is no longer possible. Yellow wins the three largest sections, Red two smaller ones, and the 2-cell section is neutral.
|
| « Last Edit: Jun 27th, 2012, 4:56am by christianF » |
IP Logged |
|
|
|
christianF
Forum Moderator
Forum Guru
Arimaa player #4019
Gender:
Posts: 804
|
|
Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #929 on: Jun 25th, 2012, 8:34am » |
|
Quote:"Again, I like completeness and a logical structure, not because they are prerequisites for a good game, but because I'm at a loss when confronted with zillions of arbitrary choices. Take Shogi. It's a great game, so great in fact that it doesn't have to bother about my opinion one way or the other. It has proven its merits over centuries and shows no signs of exhaustion whatsoever.
But Shogi doesn't have a 'complete' set of pieces. The set is obviously well balanced, but the choice of pieces is quite arbitrary, as countless Shogi variants show.
Though the pawn may be considered more logical than its western counterpart in that it captures the way it moves, there's no a priori logic in the game's stucture. So I decided to try my hand at a Shogi variant with a complete set of pieces and a logical structure - that would at least be a novelty - and with emphasis on Shogi's most prevalent characteristics: a strong forward orientation and ample opportunities for promotion. In Shogi that feature is not restricted to pawns.
So I took a Shogi general and Shogi pawns and went shopping for pieces."
How I invented pieces, and why not - Yari Shogi |
|
So this is anorganic design, mechanic design if you like. You're looking to combine a right set of pieces, among countless examples, with a right set of rules, using the 'generic' Shogi ruleset as a framework in this particular case. It's choose & assemble and it may profit from some experience, some intuition, and usually some trial and error. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it, be it that the bar for Chess variants, in terms of adding something to anything, is set very high by the sheer number of them. But it always works from the bottom up, usually towards some preconceived concept (some inventors 'forget' that part ). After you've assebled it, you can see if it meets the requirements of the envisioned concept - which is sometimes easier said than done.
For organic design one must be lucky or attentive enough to literally 'see' an organism as a whole, before the parts are charted, and next extract the rules from the top down. It's not choose & assemble, but look & disassemble. The fuzzy distinction between inventing a game and discovering a game runs along that line.
That's it in a nutshell. Now with any luck the 2-player version of the Mu applet will be operational this coming weekend .
|
| « Last Edit: Jun 27th, 2012, 9:44am by christianF » |
IP Logged |
|
|
|
|
Home
Help
Search
Members
Login
Register
Notify of replies
Send Topic
Print