Games in progress
It's also been a good week for game development.
Advanced Civilization has already been developed by Avalon Hill, so I don't have to. However, as much as SWIL loves to play Civ, we don't play that often because we're widely distributed and don't always have big, solid blocks of free time available. Why don't we play by email? Answer: because the in-person interaction is why we love Civ in the first place, but, setting that aside, we'd need some way to share or exchange the game state online, starting with the board.
Yes, that is a giant HTML , decorated with some very elementary CSS. Yes, I typed most of it by hand (okay, I used copy/paste for the repeated elements). Yes, I am crazy. Who wants to play?
Age of Eats is my working title for a game in the same broad thematic universe as Civ, in that each player follows a civilization from the dawn of history through thousands of years of development. However, Age of Eats is primarily focused on cuisine. I have at last mostly settled on the general shape of the components and scoring system. In AoE, crops are represented on largish cards, and regions are represented by medium-sized chits. To mark a region as yours, wrap one of your rubber bands around the tabs on the chit. To grow a crop in a region, place the region chit on the crop card. Then place counters on the chit indicating the quantity of crop produced. There a few details to work out, but you get the general idea. The total quantity of crops you can grow determines your population. Population that isn't busy growing crops or preparing food contributes to technology development (like in Civ, where cities stand for non-farming population), but technology isn't the goal of the game - cuisine is. How do you score a cuisine?
In AoE, cuisine will be scored using a flavor system which will, very roughly, resemble the game Bazaar - foods will have flavors, cooking techniques will transform combinations of flavors, and combinations of flavors will be worth points. However, players will not be working with the same set of scoring combinations. Instead, there will be a smallish initial set of scoring combinations which everyone shares, and additional groups of combinations will appear on palate cards, which players collect. How do you get more palate cards? By spending cuisine points. Thus, tech development and cuisine development are distinct. (I had originally imagined players spending cuisine points on tech development, which doesn't really make sense.)
*werð is a new game concept which I started working on with fiddledragon this week. It, too, is a game with broad, historical scope - in this case, historical-linguistic scope. (Yes, that is the Proto-Indo-European root meaning "word".) When I explained the idea to foxfour last night on IM, I had worked out a model, but I hadn't figured out who the players were, what they were trying to accomplish, or how. Now I have.
Players each represent a major language family (or, in a game with few players, several). The object of the game is to have the most words. Larger and more technologically advanced groups have larger vocabularies, but mainly you want a lot of languages in your family, because they each count separately. On the other hand, having a lot of small languages leaves you vulnerable to conquest (which results in creoles) or assimilation by larger groups.
Populations (of speakers of mutually intelligible dialects) are represented by discs - one disc per population, in various sizes. The sizes are terms of the Fibonacci sequence, so when a population splits, it splits into groups of the next two smaller sizes. Ideally, the discs would be clear, colored plastic, and the board would be white, so that creoles could be represented by stacked discs and would be an appropriate intermediate color. For each population, the relative size of its trade economy and military forces are also tracked.
Players act by, among other things, playing event cards on their own and each others' populations, causing them to grow, develop, and split. Large militaries may conquer their neighbors, resulting in creoles, which score partial points for both players. Small, poor populations may be assimilated by a dominant economy, in which case they vanish entirely. There will definitely be a nasty hose card called "Great Vowel Shift" - but what should it do? I am very much looking forward to playing this game.
Advanced Civilization has already been developed by Avalon Hill, so I don't have to. However, as much as SWIL loves to play Civ, we don't play that often because we're widely distributed and don't always have big, solid blocks of free time available. Why don't we play by email? Answer: because the in-person interaction is why we love Civ in the first place, but, setting that aside, we'd need some way to share or exchange the game state online, starting with the board.
Yes, that is a giant HTML , decorated with some very elementary CSS. Yes, I typed most of it by hand (okay, I used copy/paste for the repeated elements). Yes, I am crazy. Who wants to play?
Age of Eats is my working title for a game in the same broad thematic universe as Civ, in that each player follows a civilization from the dawn of history through thousands of years of development. However, Age of Eats is primarily focused on cuisine. I have at last mostly settled on the general shape of the components and scoring system. In AoE, crops are represented on largish cards, and regions are represented by medium-sized chits. To mark a region as yours, wrap one of your rubber bands around the tabs on the chit. To grow a crop in a region, place the region chit on the crop card. Then place counters on the chit indicating the quantity of crop produced. There a few details to work out, but you get the general idea. The total quantity of crops you can grow determines your population. Population that isn't busy growing crops or preparing food contributes to technology development (like in Civ, where cities stand for non-farming population), but technology isn't the goal of the game - cuisine is. How do you score a cuisine?
In AoE, cuisine will be scored using a flavor system which will, very roughly, resemble the game Bazaar - foods will have flavors, cooking techniques will transform combinations of flavors, and combinations of flavors will be worth points. However, players will not be working with the same set of scoring combinations. Instead, there will be a smallish initial set of scoring combinations which everyone shares, and additional groups of combinations will appear on palate cards, which players collect. How do you get more palate cards? By spending cuisine points. Thus, tech development and cuisine development are distinct. (I had originally imagined players spending cuisine points on tech development, which doesn't really make sense.)
*werð is a new game concept which I started working on with fiddledragon this week. It, too, is a game with broad, historical scope - in this case, historical-linguistic scope. (Yes, that is the Proto-Indo-European root meaning "word".) When I explained the idea to foxfour last night on IM, I had worked out a model, but I hadn't figured out who the players were, what they were trying to accomplish, or how. Now I have.
Players each represent a major language family (or, in a game with few players, several). The object of the game is to have the most words. Larger and more technologically advanced groups have larger vocabularies, but mainly you want a lot of languages in your family, because they each count separately. On the other hand, having a lot of small languages leaves you vulnerable to conquest (which results in creoles) or assimilation by larger groups.
Populations (of speakers of mutually intelligible dialects) are represented by discs - one disc per population, in various sizes. The sizes are terms of the Fibonacci sequence, so when a population splits, it splits into groups of the next two smaller sizes. Ideally, the discs would be clear, colored plastic, and the board would be white, so that creoles could be represented by stacked discs and would be an appropriate intermediate color. For each population, the relative size of its trade economy and military forces are also tracked.
Players act by, among other things, playing event cards on their own and each others' populations, causing them to grow, develop, and split. Large militaries may conquer their neighbors, resulting in creoles, which score partial points for both players. Small, poor populations may be assimilated by a dominant economy, in which case they vanish entirely. There will definitely be a nasty hose card called "Great Vowel Shift" - but what should it do? I am very much looking forward to playing this game.