On Nov 9, 2007, at 11:39 AM, kerry_and_ryan@xxxxxxx wrote:
Brian Campbell:
Now, I haven't
actually looked at the rules of whatever the game in question are (is
there an actual game, or is this all hypthetical? I haven't been
following the discussion closely enough to have picked that up),
but I
really think that if a game makes good use of two Treehouse stashes,
it should be allowed.
I'll offer up my own Ice Dao (http://home.att.net/~kerry_and_ryan/IceDao.html
) as a strawman. It's a two-player game where each player uses one
large, one medium and two smalls. The easiest way would be to have
all of a player's pieces be the same color, and that requires 2
Treehouse sets to get the requisite number of smalls (and that's how
the rules are written). But the game could easily be played with a
single Treehouse set as red&yellow versus blue&green.
As I think I've mentioned before, I wouldn't mind seeing such an
entry in this competition, but I would rate it at least a little
lower just because it isn't "solidly" a 2HOUSE game. I could see
other judges rating it as either perfectly 2HOUSE or perfectly
non-2HOUSE. It's a judgment call -- that's what judges are for.
Yeah, I think I'd rate this pretty low in a 2HOUSE-restricted
competition. I don't think I'd need it to be filtered for me; I can
make up my own mind about how well this fits the 2HOUSE design
restriction.
There are lots of games that can be played with Icehouse pieces that
don't really fit the set very well. Heck, even Martian Chess is really
one of the least Icehouse-y games I've played, and while I might say
it meets the requirements of a design restriction of using 4 monocrome
stashes, it really takes no advantage of the 4 monochrome stashes, nor
does it take advantage of the stacking, pointing, colors, or
distribution of the pieces. On the other hand, RAMbots makes lovely
use of 4 monochrome stashes, so would get a higher rating in such a
competition even if I liked Martian Chess better.
If just
reading the rules you think "meh, I can't see how that game would be
any good", well, that game probably needs some work. Of course,
judges
should always have at least read the rules of any game they rank, but
I don't think that playing a game should be a requirement for ranking
it.
I agree with this as well. Another criterion a judge might use
during this initial weeding-out is whether _that_particular_judge_
considers each game "a 2HOUSE game."
*nod*