NaGaDeMon 2013 Day 22

Yesterday we played a 3 player game of Moar Moai. With only 6 fish per player the fish ran out too fast. I have to figure out a happy medium (we are working with a very narrow range, since 8 is too many and 6 is too few). Perhaps I will tweak the equation so that I don't have to go to 7 (7 is a messy number since the fish should be divided in half and placed in two zones).

I am sort of getting worried about finding a dominant strategy in this game. It seems as if the person with the most people always wins, and if that is the case, then this game is a very boring one. I need to figure out if there are other viable strategies.

Also, I have been working a little on Roguelike, but it keeps making me play game after game of UnNethack. Perhaps I will be able to focus more on it over the thanksgiving break.

By the way. I really like chess variants. Some of them end up being pretty small (the last one I played was that you could capture your own pieces and that pawns could move backward as well as forward (but still only attack forward)), but some of them are huge (the biggest change I can recall was one where if you captured a piece your piece would defect to the opponents team (kings were immune to this). This was a really different game because you had to always weigh the value of your capturing piece against their piece, and most exchanges like that were not worth it (for instance, killing a knight with a knight was basically throwing away your knight, and killing a queen with a knight was throwing away your knight to downgrade their queen to a knight)). It is a fun thing to just come up with some arbitrary rule change and see how the game plays out.

Recently I have been considering a stupid chess variant: Table Top Strategy Chess. You have to have tape measures and straight edges and your pieces can move only certain distances, but they can move freely in 360 degrees of direction. There is no way I would do it, but it was a fun thought experiment.


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