David Artman writes: > > From: Dale Sheldon <dales@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > > On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, David Artman wrote: > > >> pylo > subd > zamb > geom > peng > moon > mart > trip > > > > In that case, congratulations to Pylon and its designer! > > Oh, right! HOORAY for Doug Orleans! Thanks. To be honest I'm still in a bit of shock-- after the votes were posted I was pretty sure I hadn't won. Zamboni Wars and Geomancy both received 8 first-place votes, and Penguin Soccer received 9 (not counting the ballot where it was the only vote), whereas Pylon only received 4 and Subdivision only 3. Just goes to show you how unintuitive this preference voting thing can be, but it also shows how much better it is at expressing the will of the voters than simple plurality voting. Anyway, it's clear to me that this was a very close vote, and all of the top five games had strong support. (In fact, I did a quick pass through a bunch of other ranking algorithms and found several that gave the win to Penguin Soccer or Zamboni Wars. But I don't entirely trust the software-- VoteEngine from http://vote.sf.net/ --and I'm far from sure that the other algorithms properly handle partial ballots.) Thanks, David, for running the competition, and especially thanks for posting all the ballots, so we can see exactly how close it was. I'm looking forward to playing around with the numbers for some "what if" scenarios, like what if Ryan's class hadn't voted, or what if Andy had left his two unplayed games off the ballot instead of ranking them last... I plan to post my thoughts about the other games at some point, but I'll start with some thoughts about my own game, Pylon. First off, yes, David, you are correct about the rules: you can only move stacks onto other stacks, i.e. non-empty squares. I'll add that clarification to the rules on the Wiki. This mechanism, of steadily clearing off the board into clumps that score, comes from both Dvonn and Clans, the two games that directly inspired Pylon. I didn't think to credit IceTowers for the size-based stacking restriction; I just chose that because I find it clunky to have "hidden" pyramids in the middle of a stack when larger pyramids cover smaller ones. (The scoring based on the owner of the top piece comes straight from Dvonn-- note that the score is one per pyramid rather than one per pip like in IceTowers.) My main worry about Pylon is the occurrence of tie scores. In the dozen or so games I played or watched, only one resulted in a tie, but I wonder if more experienced players would be more likely to play to a tie. I had some ideas for tie-breaker rules, but they're inelegant, and might just lead to a strong first or second player advantage. Of course, Subdivision also has the same possibility of ties, but the scoring there is more granular (you can win by one point, whereas in Pylon you can only win by an even number of points) so that might reduce the chance of ties. On the other hand, Subdivision has more clarity, so it might be easier to see how to force a tie; in fact, if you start with symmetrical park placement, the second player can always force a tie with a mirroring strategy. (Fortunately, the online implementation at http://superdupergames.org/ has an option for random park placement, which I recommend.) About theme: obviously theme is not important to me in a simple game like Pylon, and I didn't even bother trying to come up with one (again, Dvonn was the primary inspiration, and the Gipf series is proudly themeless). But if someone can come up with a good idea for a theme, I'd be happy to tack it on. I tend not to like multi-player games with no luck, because they can break down into kingmaking or petty diplomacy. But I actually thought Subdivision played reasonably well as a multi-player game, and I don't see any obvious problems with extending Pylon to three or four players. Did anyone happen to try this? I should say that I'm actually pretty bad at Pylon (and Dvonn). Game playing and game design involve totally different skills! In particular, I have no clue what a good strategy is during the placement phase, and I just treat it as a way to generate a more or less random setup. I would love to hear if anyone has come up with some strategies (or tactics) to use during the placement phase. Alternately, I'd like to find a good fixed setup so that beginners can skip the placement phase, which can be pretty bewildering. (Same goes for Dvonn.) I'm looking forward to seeing the games in the next competition. Designers, get to work! --dougorleans@xxxxxxxxx