Subject: MN: Alternative Game Structures

From: "Dunx (Duncan Ellis)" <DELLIS@U...>
Date: 20 Jan 99 16:27:35 +0000

I've been having a few thoughts about other ways we could play Mornington 
Nomic, in particular about some Special Rulesets which strike at the core 
of the Game - how we move Pieces around. 

In the beginning, a fundamental decision was taken about the MC part of 
Mornington Nomic: that each player should have one piece, and that this 
Piece should follow the Lines on the Map (Y1W1, Proposal 009 - Keeping The 
Piece). Despite all the innovations with Actions, Tokens, Charge, and all 
the other gubbins that has accreted around the Game, this primary assertion 
has remained unchanged (reworded, perhaps, but not changed). 

So we have a game where one piece moves around the map in a manner not 
dissimilar to games such as Ludo or Monopoly (in may ways more interesting, 
to be sure, but not all that fundamentally different). 

I was wondering what the game would be like if we followed a different leg 
of the Trousers of Time. A couple of ideas for alternative models - 

1. "a bit like Go" - in Go, the player can place pieces ('stones') anywhere 
on the board, the aim being to form self-sufficient islands of these stones 
(termed 'armies') - any army which has no free space around it (breathing 
room, if you will) is removed from the board, those stones being considered 
to have been captured by your opponent. 

Go can be viewed as a model of the problem of lines of supply in a military 
campaign, where an army can only survive if it has some room around it. 
Could something like this be made to work on the Map? 

The big disadvantage with a Go-like game is that the current GSD format is 
inadequate - it would be very easy to end up with a list of all the stations 
on the Map. 

I also don't know what the object of the Game might be in this context. 
Building an arny surronding MC seems a little easy. 

2. "a bit like chess" - rather than just one piece, each Player is given 
several, which all start the Game on the Map. Different Pieces could have 
different powers (only knights could Strile, for example). The object of 
the Game becomes either to move your chief piece to MC, or to capture your 
opponents' chief pieces. 

3. leaving a trail - Moves are as currently, but each Move leaves a Piece 
at the previous location. There could be rules on line of sight between 
Pieces of the same Player, which could be disrupted by other Players' 
Pieces and such things as Blocks (I don't know where discontinuous moves 
such as Straddle or Wild fit in here). 

I suppose this could be a way of implementing the Go idea - each Move is 
persistent and when there is line of sight then those Pieces are part of 
the same army, but when a discontinuous Play breaks line of sight or it is 
disrupted by another Player's actions then a new Army is formed. 

What do people think? Any other ideas? 

Or is this just an example of the kind of thing that any moratorium is 
intended to prevent? 

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

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