Deterministic endings

I played a few more games of Moar Moai over the weekend. I like the way that things work in the beginning of the game, and I like the way that the recent changes change the ending of the multiplayer game. The two player game still has some tricky bits to work out. The main problem is that the ending can be deterministic. Alison and I thought out some fixes for that which include:

  1. Making an 'interest level' for the explorers and every time that you pass their interest goes down by a random amount. When it reaches 0 the game ends immediately. (This would allow a player that has fewer artifacts to possibly end the game before the player with more artifacts is done playing)
  2. Deal a card from the deck out every so often to shake things up
    a. After every pass would be too often: you couldn't determine for sure where the explorer would end even with quite a few artifacts.
    b. After every turn would be even worse: you might never get anywhere, and if you did get somewhere you would probably overshoot.
    c. After every two turns would probably be fine: it would simulate a third player (though a random third player).
    d. Randomized: Yo Dawg, I herd you like randomness, so I put randomizers in your randomizers so you can randomize when you are randomizing.
  3. Build a deck of cards (10 large?) and shuffle all but one of them. The last one is the 'it's over' card. Reveal some of them (five), and allow players to pay tokens to use the cards (perhaps the lowest one would cost the least and higher ones would cost more.) Players may pass to discard the top card. slide the cards down and reveal new ones as the old ones are used up. Once a player is winning, that player may purchase the end the game card if they have enough tokens and the card is revealed. If the end of the game card is ever discarded then the game ends immediately.

I have also been working on the Dancingness of the Dancing Robots. I have cool looking tentacles already, and I should soon be able to get my chassis and arms swapped out.

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