Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

Re: [Icehouse] Number of players / Game popularity

  • FromKory Heath <kory@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • DateFri, 20 Feb 2009 19:03:45 -0800

On Feb 19, 2009, at 10:39 AM, David L. Willson wrote:
Any player with a guessing stone may guess ~every~ time a koan is completed.

Guessing priority begins with the player who built the koan. That player may take one guess, if he has a guessing stone, or pass. Then each other player, in turn order, may spend a guessing stone. The player who built the koan gets a second opportunity to guess, then all the other players, in turn order, until all players pass. At that point, the "turn" moves to the next player in turn order who begins creating their koan.

Good suggestion. Over the years, other people have suggested (and played) this variant, or other similar ones. There are definitely groups out there who play with some version of this.

I believe that (as David Artman suggests) it hurts the game if people aren't allowed to guess multiple times in a row, because that will too often punish people for making great (but not quite correct) guesses. So this variant is probably better if each player is allowed to take multiple guesses in a row before passing the guess along. Similarly, with the other auction mechanisms suggested, it would probably be better if the player who wins the auction (in whatever sense) gets to take multiple guesses in a row before the guessing passes to someone else.

Even without allowing multiple guesses in a row, the big problem with all of these suggestions is that they slow down the game. You probably have to institute an aggressive timer rule - like people have 5-10 seconds to come up with a guess, etc.

Turnless Zendo (aka Speed Zendo) may be a better solution to all of these problems. I've played various versions of it, and I like it.

http://www.icehousegames.org/wiki/index.php?title=Speed_Zendo

(I just went and updated that page with our latest ruleset.)

-- Kory