Pizza

[jack]

Tonight, at post-geek-pizza we played croquet at Relativity. This is very good, and must be encouraged at all opportunities. I didn't manage any spectacular shots, and muffed a couple, but am generally getting comfortable with the idea of what I'm capable of doing, what strategies are most machiavellian, and generally being an non-embarassing if not good player. Though we must also practice on full size lawn pre-winkers :)

Then we played penultima. We're in a definite penultima phase, I'm sure some people must be bored. But both of tonight's games went fairly well, if slightly long. They both reached brief endgames, where people had nearly figured out some pieces, and knew something about more, and were just about able to execute one or two move ahead plans, though in the end both ended with fortunate chance, working out how a fairly powerful piece moved, or moving a king into a bad position.

I'm sure penultima needs modding somehow, but I'm not quite sure how.

* Spectators may not want to concentrate on entire game, but chat also. Suggestion: people can explain a rule to another spectator who wants to watch, and then not have to pay attention if they don't want to.
* The endgame often gets bogged down when people are drunk and tired and trying and failing to think of plans.
* There's a spectrum of rules from those worked out soon to those which (while preferrably still useful) are still keeping you guessing at the end. I think an ideal game would have a spread, and we currently edge toward the more complex end.
* But it's quite well balanced, I think. If you *stated* rules at the start, it'd be like learning chess all over again and require too much thought. Here you often work out rules toward the end, enough to have some strategy, but not enough to be sure.
* We (mainly Ian) are experimenting with rules that get pieces out and active, without excessive jumping, but that discourage randomly bombing into the enemy bank ranks or asking "Can this piece move onto the enemy king" every turn. An early couple of these turned out not so well, but in general we've been having interesting ideas

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I much prefer Penultima to Mao. Some things which might be reasons why I like it more:

• You can talk. Granted the spectators still have to pay attention but in practice while any of your pieces are still in play I think there's an incentive to watch to see how they get used.


• All the players have the same information. Being on the wrong side of the information differential in Mao can be very frustrating.


• Moreover, the discovery process is less costly in Penultima, as well as being an equal cost on both players.

[naath.livejournal.com]

You get to mak up rules without having to first guess what evil thing Ian has done *this* time. ;-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

LOL. Yeah. You can fight that if you get in early, with rules that handicap more complex rules. Eg. "If your rule makes people pick up lots of cards you have to pick up lots of cards too" or "You have to explain what you should do in that situation if you give someone a card"[1] or "You have to do something which is easy for foos and hard for mathmos to guess" :)

[1] Though Emperor had a rule like that designed to be helpful to beginner mao players, but annoying it didn't seem to apply to itself, so I went through several successively more detailed explanations of my rules until I was explicit enough to satisfy it.

Some people really hate mao, and I don't blame them, though I enjoy it myself.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, those make sense. Perhaps Mao can be more varied than penultima, depending on what rules are chosen, so a lot of silly "say foo when bar" rules make a social game and a lot of "card X becomes card f(X)" rules makes it even more like doing an example sheet than penultima :)

[dragonwoodshed.livejournal.com]

Ohmigod that sounds like hard work. Mind you I'm pretty good at chess, so blindfold chess with made-up rules could be intriguing. Any chance of working a gun loaded with only one bullet into the equation?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Penultima? Hard work? Well, somewhat. But you sound more horrified than I think is justified for someone who can play chess, I'm not sure if I've given the impression it's scarier than it is.

It's not so bad, because the bar isn't as high; you're not trying to play as well as you would at chess (I can play chess, but aren't notably good), just to figure out rules and chip away at your opponent until you can do a winning move.

Rules could in theory be anything, including "Start a game of mao and loser is shot" but there are social conventions such as:

* if you break the law, you're responsible
* use randomness in moderation
* sudden-death rules are annoying
* break paradigms one at a time

That would make the Russian Chess Roulette a possibly unpopular rule to start with :)