Reiner Knizia describes this game in his classic book, Dice Games Properly Explained. The game’s core mechanic is used in Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop as an example of a “negative feedback loop.” [Read more…]
Yut Nori (print & play)
Download a print & play version of Yut Nori.
Yut Nori is a Korean game that comes with Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop. It is an elegant circle & cross game (a class of racing games that take place on circular or cruciform-shaped tracks). The best known cross & circle is the traditional Indian game Pachisi and its modern derivatives (Ludo, Parcheesi, Trouble, Sorry!).
Yut traditionally uses tossed sticks to determine the number of spaces the pieces can move, but this version of the game substitutes coins for the sticks. This does change the game’s dynamics a bit. The outcomes of a fair coin flip are identical in likelihood, whereas tossing a Yut stick results in flat side up approximately 60% of the time.
The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game
Play The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game
For many years I struggled to teach my students how to make the leap from designing tabletop games to designing video games. In particular, students without a programming backgroun
d would consistently have problems defining a video game design as a series of concrete steps that do not leave gaping holes in the game algorithms.
Then one semester I taught my students flowcharting and had them create a flowchart that could play a simple game theory style game that I had designed. As if by magic, these students had no problem creating video game designs. Ever since that semester, I have always introduced students to video game design by starting with flowcharting. It has become my magical “turn you into a game designer” wand.
All this is covered in detail in Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop , but I wanted to share The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game, which is one of the tools I use to demonstrate how a video game’s “real time” action actually takes place over a series of discrete turns (what programmers call “ticks”). The game is also a useful example of what a digital prototype might entail (see The World Most Boring Excel Spreadsheet for a version of the game that runs inside of Excel).
The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game can be played as a turn-based strategy game (i.e., the player manually advances the turns by pressing a button) or as a real time strategy game (i.e., the turns advance automatically).
Conway’s Game of Life provides another example of how “real time” is in actuality very a series of very rapidly occurring turns. As with The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game, Conway’s Game of Life can have its “generations” (aka turns) advance either manually or automatically (using the “step” and “run” buttons, respectively).
ZZT, Town, & Twine
Sweeney’s ZZT
These days, Tim Sweeney and his company Epic Games are best known their Unreal and Gears of War franchises. But in the early 1990s Epic’s flagship game was a quirky ASCII adventure game called ZZT. [Read more…]
Print & Play Games
Print-and-play games are tabletop games, usually free, that can be downloaded, printed out, and played. At the time of this writing, there are 3,580 print-and-play games available on BoardGameGeek, with more being added every day. [Read more…]
Conway’s Game of Life
Generation: | Live cells:
Adapted from pmav.eu‘s implementation under an MIT license.
How to play
Conway’s Game of Life is a simulation of cells growing and dying in a petri dish. Living cells are represented by a filled in square on the grid above. Click on the squares you want to populate with cells. Alternatively, you can click the “Random” button to start with a random set of populated cells.
Click the “Step” button to have the cells advance to the next generation. A “generation” is a turn in the game. With each new turn, squares are filled and cleared to represent cells being born and dying. Life and death for a cell is determined by four simple rules that evaluates its neighbors (cells in the eight surrounding squares):
- Birth: An empty square with exactly three neighbors becomes populated with a cell.
- Survival: A cell with two or three neighbors lives on to the next turn.
- Death: A cell with fewer than two neighbors die from loneliness.
- Death: A cell with more than three neighbors dies from overcrowding.
Each turn, all the cells in the grid are updated simultaneously using those four rules.
Click the “Step” button several more times to advance the cells several more generations. Any cells that survive more than one generation will darken with age. Click the “Run” button to have the generations automatically advance. While the generations are automatically running, you can still click on the grid to add more cells.
Complex behaviors can arise despite the simplicity of the game’s rules. For example, there is a five-cell group called a “glider” (see image to the right) that repeats its shape, shifted one square on the diagonal, every fourth generation. This “movement” is what gives gliders their name. The glider shape can be manually setup prior to starting the game and running through its generations. But even when it is not specifically created by the player, glider shapes often arise unexpectedly as the game’s cells grow and die.
Click on “Stop” to pause the generation advancement and click on “Clear” to reset the grid. Manually add a glider to the grid and click on “Run” to watch it move on the screen.
About the game
Conway’s Game of Life is a “sandbox” game. A sandbox games emphasize play that centers on exploratory changes to the game state rather than a dogged pursuit of a victory condition. Conway’s Game of Life does not present the player any set goals, but that does not necessarily mean that it is an aimless pursuit. As you play with it, you may find yourself projecting goals onto it—for example, you might find yourself striving to developing patterns that never die off or become static.
Conway’s Game of Life is a particularly early (dating back to 1970) and influential example of emergence. Emergence grows out of game mechanics that are designed to be as responsive to one another as they are to the actions of the player. Generally speaking, emergent systems have a simple set of rules that interact in complex ways. Any game can have emergent qualities, but sandbox games have them almost by definition.
Agon (print & play)
Agon (also known as Queen’s Guard) is a tabletop game that is mentioned in passing in Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop. The game is notable for being the first known one to use hexagonal game spaces.
Vintage Arcade Games in Your Browser
Photo (cropped) by Greg Dunlap, cc-by-2.0.
The Internet Arcade is a collection of 2,666 (at the time of this writing) coin-activated arcade games from the 1970s and 1980s. The games are playable in your browser thanks to a JavaScript-based emulator, brought to you by Jason Scott. [Read more…]
The 100 Games That Everyone Should Play
In June 2013 ESI Design and Games For Change came up with an online crowd sourced list of the “100 Games Everyone Should Play.“ [Read more…]
3-to-15 (pencil & paper)
In Rules of Play, Salen & Zimmerman describe Marc LeBlanc’s 3-to-15 game. Its rules are:
Two players alternate turns.- A player’s turn consists of picking a number between 1 and 9.
- No number can be picked more than once.
- If any three of the numbers picked by a player add up to 15, the player wins the game.
3-to-15 shares the same underlying mechanics as Tic-Tac-Toe (per the image to the right), even though its written rules are entirely different. Try playing a few games of 3-to-15. Is it the same game as Tic-Tac-Toe, or do you think the differing ways the games are presented results in them being truly different games?