Subject: Horizontal complexity

From: "Snow" <snowl@s...>
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2000 20:14:16 +0100

I've just been thinking about the current ruleset; trying to get a
general overview of the objectives and how it works. I discovered that
there isn't any general description of what you have to do to win
(other than get 3 golds and go to MC). I can't decide whether this is
good or bad, but it did raise some other points while I was thinking.

1) One of the main problems with the current ruleset is that it has an
awful lot of "horizontal complexity" and not much "vertical
complexity". By which I mean there are a lot of different things in
the game, but most of them are only small, underused, even
half-finished things.

Charge is the canonical example of this. It's a great idea, but once
the general concept of how a player's charge varies was worked out
nothing was done with it. It's just a number one has to calculate
during ones turn.

2) The object of the game is really "get 3 golds", not "land on MC".
In itself this is acceptable though not really desirable. But bellow
the gold level the game becomes unfocused, which implies to me that we
have a game centred around getting golds not landing on MC. That
probably doesn't make sense, but I think how to put it clearer right
now.

-- Snow
I invented chronological order.