Subject: Re: MN: Year 2, Week 26: Proposals

From: "Dunx (Duncan Ellis)" <DELLIS@U...>
Date: 20 Oct 98 16:53:48 +0100

The Week's Proposals included: 
> Proposal 526 - Lounging Around [Multiple] 
Nicely worded thing. One question: 

> 1. The Lounges [Enactment] 
> 
> Each non-Discussion Lounge may have a Game being played within it; 
Just one Game per lounge? I suppose that's fair enough in general, but 
might make tournament play difficult to organise should we ever have 
eight players entering (well, you never know...) 

> Proposal 527 - Oh, What's the Point? [Repeal] 
Fair enough - it does rather seem to have lost its relevance (especially 
since Kudos steadily decreases over time). 

> Proposal 528 - All the Right Moves [Multiple] 
Mine, all mine!! 

Responding to miki's remark... 

>> "Moves, Plays and Turns shall be defined as follows in combination with 
>> those definitions already extant: 
>Perhaps a bullet detailing the Action part of the Turn is required for 
>completeness. 

Hmm... perhaps, but nothing like that is used in the anywhere in the ruleset 
at the moment and if it were it would be fairly unambiguous to say 'the 
Actions'. 

Back to my own comments - 
> Proposal 531 - Purple Patch [multiple] 
miKi's already pointed out the typo, so I'll just mention my own misgivings 
about this one. 

> * Puce : Wild (may be used in place of any other plastic token, the user 
> specifying which tokens are being replaced in the comments at the end of
eir 
> turn) 
First of all, Puce may be used in lieu of another plastic token *anywhere*: 
does that include token stacks? If so, then that is way, way too powerful. 
You could dump four Puces, call them Blacks, and call it a Kafka Sinkhole. 
Or dump a few Puces and complete any Plastic-only token stack. 

It would also be *very* hard to administer - the statement of what a Puce 
is being used as is lost whilst the Token Stack lives on. In other games 
with wild things (blanks in Scrabble, wild cards in canasta) there is some 
definite context to remind what a wild was placed as. 

So - I think it would be reasonable to say that Puce is always Puce on a 
Token Stack, or that it permanently transmutes into the named Token colour, 
or even to ban Puces on Token Stacks entirely. 

Secondly, I think that wild tokens (at least in their current form) would 
make the game too easy. One of the main skills of MN as it stands is 
gathering the right tokens for the job. I wouldn't claim that gathering 
Puces is necessarily easy (Silvers are quite hard to come by after all) 
but the focus changes. 

Also (to bring up how other games work once again) the number of wilds is 
usually restricted in some way - only two blanks exist in Scrabble; in 
Canasta less than half of a group of melded cards can be wild. Games of 
pure skill (such as chess, to which I like to think we at least aspire) 
has only one 'wild' at all (pawn promotion) and that is very hard to 
obtain. 

In aummary, I think it's an interesting idea, but flawed in its current 
form. 

> Proposal 533 - Last One to Amersham is a Cissy [enactment] 
This is ace! I was thinking of high charges *restricting* LV, but this is 
much, much more fun. 

Top marks to the Proposer - if I could vote FOR it twice, I would. 

-- 
Dunx 
IRL: Duncan Ellis, Senior Software Engineer, Business Modelers, Oracle 
<I work for Oracle, I don't speak for them>

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From: kenningd@w...
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 17:21:38 +0100

>miKi's already pointed out the typo,

Urk. thanks miKi.

>does that include token stacks?

Urk. Damn. I didn't even think of that. Very good point.

>is being used as is lost whilst the Token Stack lives on.

Yes, I totally agree.

>Puces is necessarily easy (Silvers are quite hard to come by after all) 

Well, if a gold is worth four blues, and a gold is also worth two silvers,
then.... oh, I don't know, but I think this bit of the proposal is sound
because the cost of puces is very high -- acquiring silvers is quite difficult
enough to make it hard for anyone to get too many puces, especially considering
you might need those silvers for other things.

>usually restricted in some way....

another fair point.

>In aummary, I think it's an interesting idea, but flawed in its current 

Well, to be honest, the Puce Token type is a bit of a Millenium Dome -- I
thought it would be a nice thing to have but didn't have a clue what to do with
it once we'd got it, so it ends up being filled with a hare-brained pile
of nonsense...

So, if I put in something about Puces always being Puces on token stacks and
made a limit on how many can be in play at a time, would people be interested?

>Top marks to the Proposer - if I could vote FOR it twice, I would. 

Cheers. Nice to know I can get *some* things right.

dave

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From: Kevan Davis <kdavis@i...>
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:44:46 +0100 (BST)

>eight players entering (well, you never know...) 

All Tournament Games bar the final are played over private email, though,
to spare the mailing list from excessive traffic. Arguably many mailing
lists might be preferable, but it'd be far too fiddly and pointless to
create half a dozen extra Lounges which we won't need again until the
next Tournament. Tish.

Kevan

--
kdavis@i... - http://www.innotts.co.uk/~elusive/kevan - UIN: 5998366
"I used to dream and I used to vow. I wouldn't dream of it now."
-- Morrissey, "Glamorous Glue"

---

From: "Dunx (Duncan Ellis)" <DELLIS@U...>
Date: 22 Oct 98 15:37:12 +0100

>create half a dozen extra Lounges which we won't need again until the 

Good point - foolish of me. 

I just hope such games are not lost to posterity, that's all.