New RB Rule Idea...

Eric Wallhagen | December 1, 2007
This idea is a variant on hidden, and I'm curious to hear other people's opinions of it. Essentially, like with a normal concert, you see your 5 cards, and your opponent's 5 cards below the stage. When they play to the board however, they show up on the board as a "?" and the card doesn't disappear from your opponent's pool of cards. So you know it's one of 5 cards, but you don't know which one it is. Obviously you'd be able to see your own cards as you play them, and watching what captures what you should be able to determine at least a few of your oponents plays before the game is done. Then at the end all cards are revealed.

It's kind of a trippy rule, but should be a lot of fun. Any comments?

Eric Wallhagen | December 1, 2007
Obviously, similar to Land Mines and Undo, this one would also have to be mutually exclusive with both hidden and undo. Maybe not necesarily hidden, but that just makes it a complete crap shoot.

Scott Hardie | December 1, 2007
I think that's a great idea, Eric! It's now on the list. Why would it need to be mutually exclusive with Undo?

Scott Hardie | December 1, 2007
We have another new rule in the game, suggested a few weeks ago by Russ: "Switch." You play using the five cards that your opponent brought to the game. It's especially weird playing Switch with the Each trade rule, as you'll find out firsthand if you dare. As with any Each concert, don't bring cards that you're not prepared to lose.

Of course, there's potential for abuse with Switch: Bring five weak cards to a high-level concert to force your opponent to lose. Rather than force user behavior, I'd prefer to let the honor system resolve this one: If you see someone screw an opponent this way, don't play them in a Switch concert in the future, or maybe any concert. If there's too much abuse, I'll make a change.

Amy Austin | December 2, 2007
Sounds cool... I was wondering what you'd call this, Eric -- I thought Reverse Hidden, Hidden Inverse, Double Hidden... but none seem to fit quite right, and all the other rules use only one word. So then I thought, what about just "Unknown" -- am I weird to be wondering on this??? (Switch sounds cool, too, btw...)

Eric Wallhagen | December 2, 2007
It would have to be mutually exclusive with undo, because you could drop a couple cards quickly with the undo in order to see which ones will capture it, and which ones won't. Similar to landmines, if you place a card hoping it'll capture an unknown, and it doesn't, you shouldn't get to take it again.

I like "Unknown" Amy. another thought I had was "Concealed"

I dunno, I defer to Scott for the naming of the rules =P

Steve West | December 2, 2007
I like Double Secret Probation.

Amy Austin | December 2, 2007
Mm hm.

Yes, Eric, I like Concealed even better. Secret is good... (I won't touch DSP ;-D). Anonymous is kind of funny, if not entirely accurate. Oooh... or how about "Cloaking" for the real ST geeks among us! ;-DDD ("Frodo" for the LOTR cloak of invisibility???) Ha! I'll stop now. ;-)

Tony Peters | December 2, 2007
point of order....Frodo had a "ring of invisibility" before he threw it in a volcano Harry Potter has the "Cloak of invisibility"....Like most men I like DSP

Amy Austin | December 2, 2007
Yeah... simple error, since I was on cloaking one moment and thinking about Harry Potter (whom I did not mention) and Frodo (whose name I chose over HP as a one-word option) the next. In the immortal words of Steve Martin... "Well, EX-CUUUUU-SE ME!!!"

Scott Hardie | December 2, 2007
In strategy gaming, it's called Fog of War. Perhaps ours would be called Fog of GWAR.

Tony Peters | December 2, 2007
or in keeping with the punniness of RB the Foghat of GWAR

Scott Hardie | December 2, 2007
It will be some time before anybody unlocks it, but there's now another new achievement at the bottom of the list. Call it a reward for getting that far in the game. I had intended to make it part of the game at launch, but it was too complicated, until programming Switch yesterday helped me solve it.

Aaron Shurtleff | December 4, 2007
Wow! Unless I'm crazy, I think you need to a win a match with the Achievement that is unlocked by getting a rock block, to see the new achievement! Since we only have one of those (Way to go, JoJo!), it will certainly be a while until we see this new rule.

I had a thought about a fun rule, but the more I thought about it, the more nearly impossible it would be to have work effectively with some other rules. My idea for a rule would be for all cards on the board to always be "live". If there is a card with (for example) an 8 showing, and you put a card next to it with a lower number, that card is taken by the card with the higher number, even though that card is already on the board. I think a rule like that would add to the strategy, since every card is capable of taking your card, no matter when it was played. The problem is I don't think this rule would play well with other rules, since there could be conflicting reasons why a card should flip. For example, in Plus, your 2,2 card could take two cards that both show 4, but under this rule, the fours would flip your 2, so there would be a probelm over which rule rules. If I could name such a rule, I would call it Endurance. What does the hard-core Rock Blockers think? Could something like this work, or am I crazy? Or is this one of the rules that already exists, but that I've yet to see? :)

Denise Sawicki | December 4, 2007
It sounds like that might be doable, if your card just gets flipped immediately upon playing next to any higher number. If you start combining other rules in order to decide when the card you just played gets flipped, I guess that could get confusing. In the situation you just named couldn't your card take the 2 cards that show 4 but your card also get flipped itself?... I dunno.

Another thing I thought of was a rule that reverses all other rules, so if your card normally would have taken another card, it will not, and if it normally would not have taken the card, it will. In that case, R1s are the best cards and R10s are the worst. There would probably have to be a rule stating that you need to bring a *minimum* of a certain total rank of cards to a concert, rather than a *maximum* rank... I guess if you truly reversed all rules then adding same, plus, and multiply will just make it harder for anyone to capture cards because you'd have to play something that has lower sides showing and *doesn't* add or multiply to the same value, etc.

Anyway my brain hasn't been working right for years so probably nothing I just said will make any sense to anyone... I don't know how to express myself better. I bet Scott already programmed something like this reversal of rules anyhow :-)

Eric Wallhagen | December 4, 2007
I like the reverse idea a lot Denise. That would certainly be feasible (I say putting words into Scott's mouth...) and would be a fun rule.

Aaron, unfortunately there is a real problem with your rule. Lets say I had a card stage left with a high number facing towards the middle, and you have a card at downstage with a high number facing towards the middle. If one of us were to play a small card (less than both) to the middle, which card would capture it? It is an intriguing concept, but there are too many conflicts I think to make it work.

Aaron Shurtleff | December 4, 2007
Hmm...yeah that is another problem. Maybe the highest card overall takes it..but that's probably more programming for Scott. Plus, what happens in the event of a tie? I was just thinking out loud. Maybe it could be a one time thing, like you could, at some point in the concert, instead of your turn, pick one card to, in effect, re-play, where it flips cards that are already placed next to it that it beats on one or more sides. It would extend the match by two turns, though... No, that won't work either, because then whoever goes first would get a HUGE advantage by placing their best card to center, and then flipping three or four other cards (depending on how the match goes)... I don't know.

Russ Wilhelm | December 7, 2007
I like Denise's idea of a rule for 1 being the high number and 10 being low. Seems simple, but playing a mental concert with it showed that our brains ( or maybe just mine) aren't quite set up to think that way.

Also, how about a "Subtract" rule to go along wiht the other math rules, as such: "When a card is played adjacent to others so that difference between at least two touching sides are equal (ie. 8 touches 7 and 2 touches 3), then it captures all such cards."

That leaves division (that's right, basic math, nothing that should require assistance from TI), but talk about a rare event, and then how far would you carry the fractions, drop the fractions, or would it have to divide into a whole number?

Eric Wallhagen | December 16, 2007
I'm gonna bounce this one, and add something which I'd been thinking about for a while.

The trade system (in my mind) should allow for off rank trades. Say for example, I happen to have a lot of higher rank cards, but am short on low rank cards. It'd be nice to pass off say a R6 for a couple R2s or R3s. A trade which someone loaded on small cards would be eager to take. The difficulty that arrises would be to prevent abuse... i.e. someone decides to quit the game, and trades all their cards to a friend for a R1. I sincerely doubt with the community that we have here that this would be an issue, but it's something to considder.

Addition:
I'm just full of random ideas at the moment, so here's another one to ponder... What about random turn order? So instead of being 1,2,1,2,1,2,1,2,1... it could be like... 2,1,1,2,1,2,2,1,1. Thus, It will be random a) who has the first turn, b) who has the last turn, and c) who gets 5 plays vs. 4 plays. Personally I feel that the defender with a lot of the optional rules turned on, gets a huge advantage out of the last play. This makes me slightly less inclined to challenge someone to say a global match, or a cascade match. If last turn were determined randomly, it would balance that out.

This has been another random idea from the mind of Wally... Enjoy.

Scott Hardie | December 18, 2007
I like the idea of off-rank trades, too, and I'd avoid the imbalance you mention by forcing the ranks to add up: For one R4, you can trade two R2s, or four R1s, or an R3 and an R1, etc. Eventually I'd like to make the trade system more robust so that you can attach messages and make offers like reverse trades, where you essentially tell a player "I want your Hendrix; you choose a card of mine to take in its place." You can do that now with the messaging system, but it's not the same.

Random order is intriguing, and for a concert with the Random rule it's a given. I think you've just come up with a good play rule. But on the other hand, don't you kind of like the reliability of knowing what the play order is going to be before you accept, when you put a card on the line? Me, I'd probably resent my opponent getting my card because of a lucky streak of good plays that I couldn't interrupt. On the other hand, it might be neat to play a match where one player makes five turns to set up the board and then the other player tries to break through their defenses with the other four turns.

Scott Hardie | December 18, 2007
Crap, I didn't answer Aaron's suggestion. This discussion was still sitting untouched in my Current Discussions list along with a bunch of others I let get away. :-(

Aaron, I think there are two ideas here. One rule would have low capture high, which is easy enough to work out with the code and would screw with other rules like Decades and Landmines, so I'll go for it when I get the time. The other rule would have a newly-played card be at risk of capture if it's lower on one side than a card next to it. That would be a lot harder to work out in the code, but if I can figure out a way to do it, I'll give it a shot. I guess it would require three conditions: Highest number capturing lowest number around the four sides wins the conflict, newly-played card wins a tie if there is one, and if a loop is created on the board it cancels itself out with no cards captured. Yes, good idea, but it's going to be a while before I go after that one in the code. :-D