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How I invented games and why not Late arrivals & final whispers
How I invented games and why not Late arrivals & final whispers
| Late arrivals & final whispers |
So I had stopped inventing games. This very essay was intended to wrap it up: I did it then and then, and so and so. I was at a safe distance. Safe enough to tentavely get involed in the international abstract games community once again. So come April 2009 I found myself translating the rules of the games at Arty Sandler's fantastic games site iGGC to Dutch, to make it more accessible to Dutch players. Some eighty games. It was hard to not think about games. On the night of April the 6th, while translating the rules of an ancient Mongolian game called Jeson Mor, something happened. Jeson Mor has a curious theme: be the first to reach the middle square with one of your nine 'horses' (chess knights) and leave it. To leave it one must avoid being captured on that very square, that's what it's all about. It's the kind of game a computer program would play perfectly, but it survived because it's obviously fun for the young ones. What struck me was a certain futility in the theme. Why not put something on the middle square to grab and bring 'home', I thought. A 'grab-the-money-and-run' theme. To make a short story even shorter, my mind was wrapping itself around the idea of a more 'advanced' version of Jeson Mor. And it happened just the same way as it used to: the game began to 'autoshape' in my head. Not by deliberately thinking about it, but by passively letting it happen, in between and during the daily routine of translating, taking care of the animals and getting the groceries. It felt like swimming in familiar waters all the way, despite the unusual theme and the unusual mechanics that began to unfold.
In the days following its publication, two important modifications were suggested by members of the Forum. The first one, suggested by 'JDB' was a generalization of the shots at the keeper rule, so that it now holds for all shots of either side. The second one, suggested by Greg Magne solved an actual problem that had emerged by giving a new and perfect definition of obstruction. It shows once more that if the concept is sound, the rule will be there. Playtesting for a week or two at iGGameCenter revealed that the game's tactics satisfy its spirit. However, a not anticipated problem emerged, in terms of strategy. iGGC's Arty Sandler was the first to formulate it: "Get the ball (black can get to it first), bring it to the left or right backfield and build a 'narrow passage' along the b- or h-column where you keep the ball save from invasion by a knight's move. To get in, the opponent would need a Lion or an Elephant, and a lone invader runs the risk of being captured. Now here's the puzzle: move the whole narrow passage towards the opponent's side, taking the ball along, till you're close enough to the opponent's goal to make a break for it with a Lion and the ball. That's it in a nutshell. It's been coined catenaccio, and though it revealed no inconsistency in the rules, it wasn't the way the game wants to be played. It clearly needed a rule to limit the number of pieces and their distribution around the ball. Arty Sandler finally solved the problem with a rule against clustering. This was a sufficiently important change to qualify him as a co-inventor. HanniBal has been implemented on the Zillions machine in June 2009. HanniBal has been implemented at IGGameCenter in May 2010. Enschede, april 21, 2009 / june 1, 2010 christian freeling HanniBall © This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it YvY In October 2009 I started a new thread at the LG Hex/Havannah Forum, called YvY. It was a game, or rather the contours of a game that came to me the night before, while rethinking Superstar. Superstar is not a bad game, but it lacks structural simplicity. It had always been a nagging loose end. So when I suddenly saw the concept of a 'star' and a 'superstar' merge, and saw that I simultaneously could use the 'loop' as an absolute criterion to win, instead as an addition to the count, I realized I might have missed a game here. But I was too quick. I posted the immature rules the next morning in the thread at LG mentioned above, and also in a thread at the Arimaa Forum that has this essay and the claims therein as its subject. What happened next can be read in those threads, but among the various reactions, the comments of David J Bush, a top ranking Twixt player, stood out. In his quest to eliminate draws from the concept he not only suggested a switch from double cells to single cells along te edges, but also drew my attention to a flaw in the old version of Star and Superstar alike that I had failed to realize. Consider this:
The point being that the value zero and in Superstar's case negative values, are avoided by definition. This makes that attempting a new star or superstar isn't any more risky than the next move, thus essentially draining the games of some of the tension between the center and the edge. This must have occured to the inventor formerly known as Craige Schensted too, because in the new version of Star it has been ironed out. Superstar doesn't actually suffer from it because it doesn't have much of a center to begin with, and rigorous consistency would only complicate an already complicated count. So I'll leave it to its somewhat oblivious existence.
I'm not against the occasional draw: in Havannah they're so rare they're considered a bonus. But going though such lengths as to use a special board, should of course lead to the required result. And at this point a bump in he road occured in the emergence of 'bad sprouts' - vacant sprouts that were disadvantageous to occupy for both players. And sprout that cannot be claimed by either player would upset the odd/even division on which the elimination of draws was based. Fortunately, after having a long look at them - too long in fact before seeing the obvious - they turned out to be a mirage resulting from my own sloppy way of looking at the game. Consider this:
Very Go like, and the end of bad sprouts: at the end of a game ownership of any particular sprout should always be unambiguous. Life starts out neutral: If a group takes its first sprout, it takes one point from the opponent and adds one point to the moving player's total. But it also starts a new life group at the cost of two points, making the net result zero. Of course any connection it now makes to another life group will add two points to the connecting player's total. YvY is a strange mix of accumulating points under the constant threat of sudden death. This merger of a relative and an absolute goal makes it quite unique, with aspects of both Go and Havannah. Since David's contributions to the game were crucial, I'm quite happy to consider YvY a joint invention. And I truly intended it to be my last. But it wasn't. Query In the summer of 2010, while working on a chapter about grids in "The Evolution of Draughts Variants", Query happened. I was contemplating the relationship between the hexgrid and the square grid.
In (1) and (2) the diagonal grids are divided in a red and a blue half. Removing the blue half from each brings us to (3) and (4). In (3) we recognize the Alquerque board. Its twin (4) is the 'triangular' grid, albeit in a square jacket. But topologically (4) is equivalent to the hexgrid. That led to the question whether (3) would also fit a 'connection' theme. The most basic one in the hexgrid is Hex itself. Query is 'square Hex' with a twist.
Hexsymple
Symple Symple started with a mail from Benedikt Rosenau on October 1, 2010: You are among the most cluesome abstract gamers/designers I know. I have been thinking a lot about a certain class of games recently and I want to share my thoughts with you, hoping for feedback. There is the family that got started with Star, moved on to Superstar, *Star, and YvY. The games of this family share a pattern, namely: a) you score by taking certain fields and b) imposing a tax: the more groups one has in the end, the more is subtracted from the score. I have three issues with these games ... And next came the issues, none of which I read because my mind was occupied otherwise, so I replied: Thanks, but I'm not in the mood to wrap around connection games at the moment. ... Concerning Superstar and YvY, they don't matter all that much. A bit forced, both of them. I'm sure there's something better on the same general idea, but you'll have to find it without me :) But Benedikt insisted, and a week later: In other words, I am at the limit of design without heavy playtesting. I cannot achieve what I want. A telling experience. To which I replied: A generalized connection/counting game. I'll put it where I did put the idea of linear movement in Draughts, after inventing Bushka. Might take 15 years though :)
And something was still wrong, too, but I mailed Benedikt about what I'd seen: You asked for it, so don't complain if this works ;-) Take a hexhexboard, two players, first move swappable. On his turn a player has two options, and he may use either or both or neither. Def.: a group consists of one stone or two or more like colored connected stones. Option one: Put a stone on a vacant cell, thereby creating a new group. Option two: Grow every existing group by one stone. A stone connecting two groups is considered to have grown both, so a stone may not connect two groups if one of them has already grown in that particular turn. Option one, if used, precedes option two. The game ends when the board is full (a vacant cell will always be advantageous to at least one player). The count is the number of stones minus two points for every group. Hexhexboards have an odd number of cells, so the score cannot be equal. A first move in a corner is obviously worse than one in the center, hence a swap will have a balancing influence. First question obviously: is there something wrong? This was off the top of my head, and there was something wrong, still, but nothing that wouldn't show under scrutiny. Basically the game was there and Benedikt's reply showed amazement: Hi Christian, And a wow. You changed the multimove approach into something less fixed, with effects that can be "configured" during the game. A strange and fascinating race should ensue. Generally, I do not like games which have to be played until the last breath, but here it is different, and the multi-move makes it quick. - Option one, if used, precedes option two. I guess that just means: if you start a new group, you may not grow your other groups. Amazed, Benedikt That was a wrong guess, because in my vision the organism did still sprout and grow simultaneously, but it didn't take me long to see that reigning it in the way Benedikt had understood, would lead to what eventually turned out to be the central dilemma of the game. So credits to Benedikt for spotting the essence of the organism before I did. Was that all? Barring the observation that the organism could do its thing on almost any grid, and discovering that the square game might be the most suited, there was the swap. My initial reliance on it was based on a superficial glance and wishful thinking, but looking a bit closer soon revealed that a swap wouldn't work because there aren't 'bad cells' to open with. Benedikt made quite a point of illustrating a winning white strategy, but I didn't need that kind of proof. I waited for the solution to reveal itself in my favorite couple of minutes, between going to bed and falling asleep. And sure enough it did. Symple's move protocoll allows for a sophisticated balancing mechanism that works like a high resolution pie-rule and extends beyond the relative merits of one particular opening move or another. Moreover, it is applicable to any game that follows Symple's move protocol, Sygo being the prime example. About a year later, in december 2011, this unobtrusive mail by Luis Bolaños Mures, the inventor of Yodd and Xodd pointed to a problem: "One rules question, though: is passing allowed? I'm just asking because I've seen some passes played in the recorded games, even though the rules don't seem to allow it. Of course, if passing is allowed, trivial draws are possible, so I guess it isn't." Since the rules explicitly stated that passing was allowed and that successive passes ended the game, this is a very forgiving way of putting it. Yes, players could agree to a draw by passing with an equal count. That's not exactly in the game's spirit, but under tournament conditions it could become a problem. I hadn't even considered that because a Symple tournament seemed far from imminent, but there was this point regarding draws by mutual agreement. So I considered compulsory movement in the sense that a player must (instead of 'may') either place an isolated single, or grow all of his live groups. As it turned out, this minute change has deep consequences for the endgame. Whereas the main consideration regarding invasions used to be whether they could be advantageous, they now should be regarded in terms of whether they could be forced. If the board fills up, there may come a point where it has become impossible to grow because all a player's groups are fully enclosed. In that case, instead of simply leaving vacant territory held by the opponent to him, the player is now forced to invade, and be penalized for it. In other words, where Symple used to suffer from a a certain lack of drama, compulsory placement turns this around in a rather dramatic fashion, with a sharp increase of tension towards the endgame (in a balanced game). So where I had previously argued that Symple lacked the drama associated with the really great games, this minute change turns it into the great game it is! Penalty-4 game: Jos Dekker (ger) - christian freeling (nl) 0-1 Lhexus
With the Symple mechanism still floating in my mind, I visualized a kind of 'extended Hexade', saw the contours and smelled prey. So I replied, November 5, 11:11 pm: This touches a chord, somewhere deep in the reluctant brain, signalling something it can't resist. I'll see where it leads, if anywhere at all, so if this becomes the challenge, I'm in. If not I fear i'll have to see where it leads anyway. Only see some vague contours at the moment, but I can smell prey :) Being an old fox, I'll wait for it to come to me, instead of vice versa. And at 12:43 am I could post that Lhexus was born and that I'd like to compete, should the contest be held, and the theme be chosen. Charybdis
Charybdis Square
In Charybdis' wake came, not surprisingly, Charybdis Square, in two forms, no less. It has the same othelloanian character, but to prevent the game from becoming too much of what its name suggests, I restricted capture to the orthogonal directions. Sygo
Luis Bolaños Mures (spa) - christian freeling (nl) 1-0 Monkey Trap
Trounce
Initial considerations I started out by reversing the positive feedback of the Focus way of movement. In Focus, the higher a stack, the farther it moves. So I changed it from "a stack moves as far as it is high" to "a stack moves one square farther than the height of the stack it leaves behind". So a full stack would move one square, but the top man alone would move as far as the height of the original stack. But it wouldn't comply with anything I had in mind. I even went so far as to actually put a couple of checkers on a board, only to discover what I've always known: not only does it not help, it actually hinders the process of inventing. So I put away and went on thinking and doing everything else on the automatic pilot. I do not 'sit and think', I think all the time and forget all sorts of things all the time, putting pizza's in danger of incineration and the like, and it all became a palette in which several aspects of Focus and the 'explosion mechanism' used in Explocus, competed for attention. Explocus has an abundance of chain reactions that make it one of the most capricious games I know. Even more than Focus, it is driven by positive feedback. For starters it has Focus' way of movement. On top of that exploding squares may trigger other squares to reach 'capacity' and explode likewise in extended chain reactions. And on top of that, a man or column landing on an opponent's column instantly converts all the captured men to the moving player's color. Too much of a good thing for what I had in mind, and not a clear road to finitude either. Stones had to disappear by some capturing mechanism, so much seemed clear. Not the Focus mechanism though. Focus hardwires an artificial 'capacity' for the height of a stack. Anything surpassing it is removed from the bottom of the stack, whereby opponent's men are captured, and friendly men are added to a player's 'reserves', from which they may be re-entered ad infinitum. Yet the idea of 'capacity' felt appropriate, but in the more elegant form of the original 'explosion' mechanism, published in Games & Puzzles Magazine in the mid seventies, later to be put to a better use in Explocus and a far better use in Mu. I like that mechanism, but the merger with Focus' mixed stacks is problematic: you don't want to explode opponent's stones onto any squares, especially not on squares occupied by your own pieces. Simplicity unfolding At some point in the process the thought emerged to use 'capacity' to simply capture opponent's pieces. Not the position of the men in the stack would select them for capture, as in Focus, nor would the trapped men change to the moving player's color, as in Explocus. Instead, bringing a stack on or above a square's capacity would simply result in the capture of all opponent's men in the stack. At that point I felt I was closing in. That's a dangerous point because everything has to fit, and logic doesn't always hit the target. You need a bit of magic sometimes. The main thing that stuck was that the remainder after capture could be anything from a single man to a stack that was one less than the combined stack resulting in the capture. It would not necessarily bring down the stack below capacity. Moreover, moving a single colored stack onto a single colored friendly one, implicitly possible in the mechanism, would also lead to single colored stacks that were on or above capacity. They could not be considered 'stable' were bi-colored stacks were considered 'unstable', if only because this would require an extra rule. Explosions revisited Having single colored stacks explode fitted the 'instability' idea, required no division or revision regarding a stacks stability status and gave a very controlled positive feedback. Most of the time the capture of opponent's men would reduce the stacks so that explosions would be far less frequent than in Explocus, let alone chain reactions. In fact the implied reduction of positive feedback allowed me to return to the regular Focus movement instead of the reverse. Besides the fun of throwing large columns around, it allows for a far more elegant wording. Coming together Suddenly all parts came together in one organism. An 'entering stage' disappeared with it: moving or entering can be chosen at will throughout the game. And an endgame of one man against one man is a win for the player who has 'the move', that is: can move into diagonal opposition. 'Soft finitude' as intended. A very satisfactory finish. enschede, november 2009, edited november 2010, december 2010 christian freeling InSight
Jump Sturdy
The breakthrough came, no pun intended, when I found a novel way of using stacks of two men whereby a top one becomes a somewhat stronger piece - as long as it is on top. The result is a simple and streamlined game with 'soft finitude', that is: the game cannot end in a draw unless both players would consider that the goal. Grabber Grabber just so happened, the afternoon of sunday the 16th of January. I had no special reason to seek another game, but suddenly the idea behind the combinatorial game Clobber merged with the method of capture of Emergo and that basically was it.
The next day, when I found the initial position to be somewhat crammed and tainted by a somewhat cumbersome way to avoid symmetrical play by black, I decided to enlarge the board to 6x6 and allow for a variable initial postion by starting with a full board and having the players remove one friendly man on each of the first two turns. Grabber is one of the unintentional ones, and proved excellently fit for a stacking game contest that was held at the time of its invention. Cyclix
enschede, january 2011 christian freeling Pylix
After a week I decided to add the four 10x1 sidebars to the board, excluding them from the initial set-up, but including them in the playing area. It puts an end to attempts to immediately wall in a single on the edge completely. enschede, september 1th, 2011 And then I decided, as far as inventing games goes, to call it a day. Yes, I did that before, I know, and of course you never know, but I feel drained of ambition. It's hard to beat Symple and Sygo, and Pylyx doesn't seem to bad a game to finish with. enschede, december 1th, 2011 christian freeling |
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