On Jul 13, 2006, at 1:15 PM, Christopher Hickman wrote:
(I'm moving this discussion to the Something list, since it is only
peripherally related to Icehouse.)
Remember that Kory has also set up a Google Group for discussing
Paradigm. If people really want to discuss it in depth, that group is
probably the best place, though it will need some more members before
very much discussion will be able to happen.
Ok, I don't get it. It's a random guess? There doesn't seem to be
any
logic I can use to intuit the correct color. Am I just dense, or
do you
have to assume that the pattern is a coherent one and use an
"educated"
guess?
As you play, you'll start to see a pattern emerging. It will be
pretty random at first, so at first, whenever you get something
right, you'll probably want to keep your point and pass the turn on
to the next person. After you have an idea of the pattern, though,
you can start accumulating multiple points in a particular turn,
though it depends on how far you want to push your luck. Once you
have enough of the pattern revealed that you can figure out the whole
pattern, then you can probably win the game if it gets around to your
turn. So yes, you do have to assume that the pattern is coherent and
use an educated guess. In this way, it is like Zendo, where the
coherency of the pattern is crucial to the game. It is somewhat
similar to the Mondo part of Zendo; at the beginning, you might have
no idea, but as you play, and form theories, you'll start to get more
mondos right, until you have the rule. The thing is, in Zendo, coming
up with a coherent rule isn't all that difficult, but in Paradigm,
you need to come up with something that is visually coherent, which I
think is a little harder.
I think the best way to think about the pattern in Paradigm is to
think of it more like a Zendo rule. Actually try and state, in words,
what the pattern is. For instance, in one of the games that I played
(Kory Heath's Office Space) the pattern was...
(SPOILER WARNING - scroll down for rest of message)
... the pattern was that the rectangles were tiled with unique
pentominoes of 3 different colors such that no two pentominoes of the
same color were adjacent. I figured out that rule once about half of
the tiles in one of the rectangles were flipped, but then I still had
to figure out which pentominoes were where, which took a bit more
guesswork (if I had sat down to think about it, I probably could have
found the unique tiling that fit those criteria and matched what I
already had, but I didn't want to spend all the time to do that).