On 11/8/07, David Artman <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Ugh... I ain't running another product-based design restriction IGDC. > Too many damned corner cases and alternative setups and scaling issues > and applicability issues (e.g. in an MC design restriction competition, > using Martian Coasters just as a 6x6 board with no consideration of > their colors or arrows or significant squares--ex: MegaVolcano could be > an "MC game," with such trivial/irrelevant usage of the MCs). > David, It's a shame you feel this way - a product based design restriction is the kind of restriction that LL is most likely to appreciate as it can emphasise the purchase of uh... product. I suspect that the better way to approach this in future is to direct the judging a bit more. Saying something like "THe purpose of this contest is to come up with games that encourage customers who have a single treehouse set to purchase a second, without requiring them to purchase a third." and then leave it up to the judges to factor that in. A game for which a single treehouse set is *clearly* sufficient would get a low ranking from me in such a situation, as would one where play was either impossible or impeded unless you had 3. To take your MC example, if you said something like "The purpose of this contest is to encourage people who have one or more treehouse sets to buy martian coasters, and not simply use a chessboard", I think that would be sufficient direction to the judges to decide. Perhaps even going so far as to say that the things to consider when judging are: 1) Is this a good, playable game? 2) does it encourage the purchase of $PRODUCT? (note that (1) will automatically take factors like rules diction into consideration - if I can't understand the rules, then I clearly cannot answer "yes" to that question) In other words, I hope this doesn't discourage you from taking on this great task, but that you reconsider *how* to run it in the future. Timothy